This essay considers how the narrated experiences of immigrant workers in the United States could help promote organized labor’s participation in a transnational movement to democratize globalization processes. I draw on interviews with immigrant meatpackers working for the Tyson Corporation, who since the late 1990s have mounted an impressive and unusual effort to democratize their workplace and union as well as to improve worker safety and dignity. Although the union has elaborated an effective discourse concerning injustice in the workplace and the need for action to remedy these problems, it has not developed any comparable interpretation of workers’ migration experiences. Workers’ migration narratives often reinforce the liberal assumptions guiding the union’s campaigns as well as the U.S. labor movement in general. They occasionally intimate, however, how migration processes can aid in the formation of counter-hegemonic subjectivities, developing these workers’ practical orientations toward resisting mistreatment both individually and in solidarity with others. Thus, creating more institutionalized spaces for workers to communicate about their migration experiences not only could help unions achieve their organizational goals—it also could help shift the political orientation of the labor movement toward a more transnational, social-democratic approach to regulating immigration and capitalist production alike.

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This essay explores the mutual reinforcements between socioeconomic precarity and right-wing populism, and then envisions a politics that contests Trumpism through workers’ organizations that create alternatives to predominant patterns of subject formation through work. I first revisit my recent critique of precarity, which initiates a new method of critical theory informed by Paulo Freire’s political pedagogy of popular education. Reading migrant day laborers’ commentaries on their work experiences alongside critical accounts of today’s general work culture, this “critical-popular” procedure yields a conception of precarity with two defining characteristics. First, precarity is socially bivalent: it singles out specific groups for especially harsh treatment even as it pervades society. Second, precarity constitutes subjects through contradictory experiences of time in everyday work-life, exacerbated by insoluble dilemmas of moral responsibility. Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo’s conception of “political literacy” and Bridget Anderson’s notion of “migrantizing the citizen,” in turn, help us understand how precaritization blocks workers from developing the critical dispositions toward time needed for democratic citizenship. This analysis then makes it possible to elucidate, in dialogue with Daniel Martinez-HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, how precaritized worker-citizenship facilitates the cross-class and multiracial appeal of Trumpism’s white supremacist discourse of national economic decline and resurgence, while normalizing the temporal affects of shock and violence characteristic of Trumpism, as theorized by Lia Haro and Romand Coles. Day laborers’ worker centers, I argue, refunction precaritized time, regenerate political literacy, and migrantize the citizen. A large-scale alternative to right-wing populism thus could emerge if the worker center network were expanded throughout the economy.

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This article explores the implications of Rancièrean theory for a radical politics of migrant equality through an interpretation of a documentary film produced by migrants in Portland, Oregon. Refusing to be defined by their social role as “workers,” the day laborers in Jornaleros execute musical, poetic, and artistic interventions that reorder the “distribution of the sensible.” They also deploy language in emancipatory ways consonant with Rancière's notion of “literarity.” The documentary thus instantiates the “verification” of intellectual equality that is crucial to Rancière's notion of emancipatory education and that, Samuel Chambers argues, should become the focus of critical theory. However, Jornaleros also poses a contrasting model of radical education, drawing on Freirean popular education principles. Even as they exemplify Rancièrean egalitarian practices, the film's worker-activist-artists thus model strategies for adding substantive depth, interactive vigor, temporal extension, and political heft to projects of radical emancipation and exercises in critical theory.

This article presents political sex scandals as a critical site for understanding contemporary formations of masculinity under conditions of neoliberalism. While media coverage of sex scandals typically revolves around a spectacularized failure of a particular man to live up to an idealized image of masculinity, we contend that sex scandals represent momentary ruptures that lay bare historically specific contradictions of neoliberal masculine subjectivities. These inconsistencies reiterate abiding contradictions in dominant constructions of modern masculinity even as they assume unprecedented forms in today's technoculture. To make this case, we examine several modern political sex scandals, including those involving Elliot Spitzer, Bob Filner, and Anthony Weiner.

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