Abstract

While conventional wisdom posits a definition of capital grounded in processes of abstraction that efface the particularities of laboring bodies, the history of capitalism betrays a social reality wherein the valorizing of capital necessitates the continual deployment of race-making and gendering technologies to maximize profits and safeguard exploitative conditions of production. Through a reading of Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, this essay examines the foundational relationship that exists between capital accumulation and the social production of difference. In her novel, Viramontes expressly condemns the racist and sexist predatory operations of capital on the laboring body, deliberately foregrounding the significance of racial and gender divisions to capitalist accumulation. Under the Feet of Jesus juxtaposes the concrete social particularities of the laboring body to the abstracting and objectifying forces of the capital relation, thus exposing the intrinsic racial and gender inequalities that constitute the foundations for capitalist profit-making.

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