The Spaces Between Us: Overworked

irina at work Irina: We’ve always felt we should do a work about being overworked. Why do so many women feel overworked all the time? Ingrid Hoofd might say that Irina makes her feel overworked as I ask her do things for me (example - her nice work on this text for you to see on-line) usually without giving her much time. So do we make each other feel overwhelmed? Do you think e-mail and other electronic communication devices make us even more overworked? How to manage, to save each other, to make space and time for: What?

Let’s analyze for a while in what contexts we have discussed it:

  1. Academia, full-time work, making money. This is absolutely different in different countries, universities, companies. But most of the time the more ‘prestigious’ the place is, the more it is competitive, the less you see women in positions of power. We discussed the whole structure and how to avoid it. You’ve managed to avoid it - I’ve learned a lot from it. At the same time, how much can we hope to be ‘outside’ politically, professionally, ethically? As white women, for example, as educated white women - how much does it make sense to pretend subaltern? Probably, it’s also about individual strengths and situations - many do splendid job outside academia, outside corporate ladder.
  2. Ambition - our own work, work we put on ourselves. I remember still Lou-Andreas Salome writing (in German, originally), in her memoirs, about her work, all life, and then someone wrote that on her death bed she said: “What have I done my entire life?” - “Worked, and worked”. I should get the exact quotation - I have it at home. I actually learned a lot from her, this Russian - German woman, this incredible thinker and risky thinker.
  3. So this work we put on ourselves - how much it is still related to men and how much to ourselves? What I am saying: How to get free from constant comparisons we go for between ourselves and the world / language we are born into? Does it put pressure on ourselves? I don’t really have any answers, though obviously our discussions and relation helped me a lot to think through that. And not least my collaborations with artists - since often ambition in art is so different from the one in theory.