Work and Contemporary Literature - Behind Our Backs with Amy De'Ath

Join senior seminar and graduate class “Work and Contemporary Literature” for three discussions on new books about work. Authors will join virtually.

Amy De’Ath, Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University, will discuss Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford University Press, 2026).

In this daring study, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs." Challenging the symptomatic interpretive methods of Western Marxism, De'Ath argues that value-critical accounts of Marx's work enable a feminist reading method that understands how value dissimulates itself from the social forms it generates, obscuring their historical content.

Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil, Marie Annharte Baker, Alli Warren, and Hannah Black, Behind Our Backs explains how these examples of feminized ingenuity reveal capital to be the expression of a social relation that must take form—an abstract logic realized every day, and one whose gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic writing. Feminized poetry, De'Ath demonstrates, is both a central archive and theoretical powerhouse for the critique of capitalist political economy.

This mini-series is organized by the Department of English and co-sponsored by the Dresher Center; the Department of American Studies; and the Language, Literacy, and Culture program.