Dissertation Defense: Cary Speck

Cary Speck
Dissertation Defense: Thursday December 12, 2024 at 2:00pm 

Title: Gold Hands and Green Thumbs: Conspicuous production, food activism, and gendered labor in postsocialist Czechia

Abstract: 
This dissertation explores how feminized, socially reproductive labor is channeled into and molded by non-governmental food activism in Czechia, including community gardening initiatives and rehabilitative food service programs.  This patchwork ethnography of three Czech food projects—Prazelenina, Kokoza, and Jako Doma–traces the gender politics of non-governmental organizations in postsocialist Central Europe as well as the ways in which ostalgie, social entrepreneurship, and nativist populism have structured women’s participation in the labor market and the public sphere.  In doing so, this study illustrates how the subjects within these food-focused NGO’s understand themselves vis-à-vis each other, the state, and the socialist past as well as how these institutions utilize the labor of different categories of women to diverging, sometimes contradictory ends.  I argue that these organizations all rely on the flexible labor of under-employed mothers, migrants, and/or formerly unhoused women to sustain themselves in an increasingly neoliberal political landscape. Concurrently, the resurgence of Czech nationalism, anti-migrant populism, and economic volatility accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed these social enterprises to channel the labor of variably-marginalized women into under-compensated carework evoking traditionally feminized forms of domestic labor—including cooking, gardening, and early childhood education.  

In all cases, I argue these NGO’s strategically deploy women’s labor in different modes of what I term ‘conspicuous production’. That is: these organizations manage and valorize women’s nonprofit participation in thrifty, traditional, and/or domestic foodways circumventing strictly capitalist modes of consumption in an attempt to garner cultural and political capital. In doing so, these NGO's leverage the perceived social and cultural value of women's self-regulating, not-for-profit carework to legitimize their enterprises to various stakeholders and to contest industrial food systems deemed unsustainable, exploitative, or politically suspect.  However, while some organizations frame this socially beneficial labor as an entrepreneurial means of integrating marginalized groups into Czech society and providing them a foothold in the market economy, others frame this employment as a way to raise awareness about the intrinsic inequality of capitalism itself. This divergence points to the ambiguous legacies of postsocialist transformation in Czechia and ongoing contestations regarding the normative reproduction of the nation and the broader purpose of civil society in a moment of acute austerity, precarity, and reinvigorated nativism.