One place where I have felt my gift-work supported, and been able to support others' gift-work, is my local Buy Nothing Facebook group. I expect other commenters may also be familiar with this concept, but they are localized Facebook groups where people offer and ask for things and sometimes services. The main rule for such groups is that everything offered must be completely free. I've been really touched by how much members go above and beyond to make sure that everyone can receive gifts they could use, such as offering to drop off gifts for me when I lost my ride a few times. It has made me feel so much more connected to my neighborhood, and I even have tentative plans to meet up with some members once the pandemic allows. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the membership is overwhelmingly female.
Male coded gift work: moving furniture! Two examples from my dad: one is felling/clearing trees. He usually asks his son-in-laws to help him clear trees from the street when they’re too big for him to tackle alone.
Another unique example of of male-coded gift work is grilling. For 10 years my dad (who is not emotionally demonstrative at all) used to grill an extra hamburger on Saturday night for our elderly, homebound neighbor. He would proceed to make a plate up for her and deliver it the few steps to her house. We lived in financially fine area so it was definitely an act of friendship and love and not sheer material necessity. She responded by knitting us little white winter mittens. I think by the time we left, my mom had tons of mittens she had knitted for us.
I have loved Hyde's book, The Gift, for years. What I take from it are the Trickster (which I associate with the Holy Spirit -- in my southeastern area, the rabbit), the wonderful idea of a two-tier economy (guaranteed income that covers the most basic essentials, plus market economy) -- amplified in the book Communitas), that a less visible gift economy is always in operation, and that valuing the gift economy can hinder "success" in the market economy.
More to the point of this article -- when I look back on my years as the primary caregiver for my life partner, I realize more and more how all care of other people is an art -- truly, a sacred art. Certainly being her caregiver took precedence over my career as a visual artist, and I only regret that I didn't give ongoing care of our 44-year relationship much more of my creative energy BEFORE she needed my full time care.
Where do you support other people’s gift-work in your community?
I donate primarily to church-based organizations, including a church that feeds the homeless and hungry.
I donated funds to a church organization for clergy experiencing financial hardship, deacons who were never paid for their service to the church. They are in their 50s-60s and because of the pandemic, might have lost employment.
An important connection to women and the clergy is that this order of deacons in earlier periods was the only available to women, and the fund that I give money to was begun in order to support them in their old age, women who had never married but who served the church in caring for the poor, the sick and the needy.
I don't know what the demographics look like now, because both women and men serve as deacons, but it's something I think about, women and unpaid church service, even when they are clergy.
I've participated for several years in a thriving gift-work subculture: those who write and read fanfiction. In this particular world of gift-work (also heavily female-dominated), attention and appreciation are the currencies: I work hard on creating something I love, and you respond with appreciative comments, "kudos" (like Twitter likes), and the time taken to read it. Friendship can also be the gift given in exchange for the work of writing - if you like something I write, we might discuss it together and find that we have other things in common! It's been deeply rewarding to participate in this gift-economy. Money for writing is great, even essential, but there are things it's harder to get when your audience is paying customers rather than appreciative acquaintances.
Plenty of women who write fanfiction also write professionally in some capacity, and engaging in this gift-economy is a way to take some of the pressure off their own writing that is generated by the need to earn money from it. For some, it's a space to explore ideas that might be too weird to sell; for others, it's a chance to directly access the joy of an appreciative readership. Fanfiction gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons (some of which are completely justified) but it is also a world where people often expend a lot of labor-energy simply for love of creation, love of the source material, and love of the community of other fans who share that love. For a lot of people, it's the only place they see gift-work in action.
There's also an ongoing, intensifying debate within the fanfiction community as to whether or not we can or should monetize this work we do. It's increasingly common to see fanfiction writers link to a Kofi or Cashapp account in their profiles and encourage people to "tip" them, or for writers to offer commissions where they write a story based on a prompt of your choice for a fee. Of course, much of fanfiction can't be monetized due to intellectual property laws, but people now pay money for fanart on a regular basis without much interference from these IP laws, which makes many fandom writers wonder why people can't do the same for their work. Others argue in favor of a monetized fandom culture because everyone is struggling to make ends meet, and why not turn what you already love to do into your side hustle? Still others feel like the rewards of the gift-economy simply do not repay them adequately for the value of what they give. (I think a feeling like this is part of why some people support "wages for housework".) I have sympathy for all of these arguments, especially the need to make more money, but I think a fully monetized fandom would lose something valuable. It's interesting to read this week's newsletter in light of this ongoing debate and my own concerns about how money seems to be our primary or only unit of value these days.
Love this question. As a writer of fiction, I find that so much about the pursuit of craft is “gift-work” in two senses. It develops the gifts already given to you, and it can be a gift to readers who respond to that development and its fruits. The same goes for other kinds of literature—poetry is maybe the exemplar here, as work done for sheer love of sound and sense (if it is done well). By extension, this is also true for many art forms, regardless of whether the artist receives financial rewards—by the by, I also appreciate Hyde’s exposition of the arts as gift-work.
And I’ve experienced this dynamic in my work with a literary magazine, too— it’s a joy to do, while at the same time it’s a second-order pursuit that would itself not be possible without many, many artists and writers and editors willing to share their talents and gifts and their fruits on a volunteer basis, again for sheer love of the work and desire to communicate with others.
(Tangential question: do we still consider writing as male-coded, as in Virginia Woolf’s time she certainly seemed to feel it was (though I have my resistances to this idea), or maybe (as I dearly hope) could we consider writing one of the few pursuits that’s truly uncoded?)
Anyway, I’ve seen both men and women participating in a variety of neighborly and communally oriented gift-works ranging from home repair to classroom renovation to meal trains, to event planning to long-term educational planning and more. Maybe this is more properly termed volunteerism than what Hyde means by gift-work, which is properly an end in itself as well as something that sparks or inspires or somehow perpetuates the cycle of giving—though, often, these forms also participate in that generative logic. And, definitely, others’ participation in the gift-work of care has supported not only my own ability to continue writing but also my ability to continue offering care work of my own to my family when perseverance feels so exhausting as to be impossible. I think we can’t overestimate just how much cooperation between likeminded families in these matters can make the difficult or dull aspects of daily life feel not only bearable but worthwhile.
Small scale farming. Farmers these days are women and men, but the immediate association to the work is male.
Small farmers do not raise heritage breed animals, in an organic or grass-fed fashion, because it is more profitable. They do it to offer healthy, fresh food to their families and local community, to honor their ancestors, and to honor animals and the land. Many of them view it primarily as gift-work because the financial rewards are so small.
Locally or home-grown vegetables are often consumed by family and friends because people would rather buy cheap produce from the super market. Selling produce at a farmers market might be profitable in certain areas of the country, but in many parts it's not. It's a labor of love, not profit.
Trying to find an example of typically-male-coded activities that would match Hyde's description... Maybe DM'ing D&D or similar imaginative world-building games week after week for a group of friends?
Also, other (typically male-coded?) activities which are frequently result in GIVING away what is produced are:
* Free open-source software. (There is. amazing. stuff. you can get for free. Operating Systems. A plethora of apps and applications. Resources for learning to program.. whole textbooks or tutorials that are effectively entire textbooks. Computer games... seems to be a market with an overabundance of people who want to work in it.)
* Coaching kids' teams! (My first thought was of math teams and robotics teams. But like... hellllo... sports teams exist, lol!)
Of those last two, I'm thinking the first doesn't match with what Hyde was describing very well, but the second does.
("male-coded" is an expression I'm not used to using... so unfamiliarity makes me hesitant...)
I’m so glad to have found you and your work via the NYT op-ed last week. In 2000, I completed a doctoral dissertation in Ethical Theory arguing that our typical conceptual frameworks for understanding the moral structure of intimacy (primarily contractual, but also communitarianism and the feminist theory of care ethics) fail to capture the dynamic, which is essentially one of gift. But how to accommodate gift — particularly the gift of self — in a conceptual framework that “codifies” ongoing relationship? I’ll spare you the rest...but suffice to say that, having suspended my research for a couple decades of trying to apply it to the raising of multiple teenagers, I’ve been scanning the horizon for a point of resonance in hopes of re-entry. I’m fascinated by what I’ve found here. Looking forward to more!
Rather than move gift work into the marketplace, it's better to move business into the world of gift work -- what Benjamin Zander calls "the vision world" in contrast to "the measurement world." This is the "B corporation" idea and the basic Christian idea, as I understand it, of doing all work for the glory of God, following Jesus whether CEO or front-line employee or in between. Time in the measurement world is what I experience as "thin time." I doubt that any moments spent that way become eternal. Time in the vision world is thick time, with at least the possibility of creating eternal moments. God has given us a choice of worlds, and Jesus, among other things, shows us how to live in thick, eternal time. I like to watch the first part of Zander's video periodically to remind me of the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZIC2f0fMKY
Is this a huge challenge for me? To allow God to free me from near total imprisonment in my cautious, vigilant, ambitious, security-obsessed life in the measurement world? Oh yes!
Maybe I'm relying too much on George MacDonald and Anthony Trollope here, but isn't the clergyman typically "showered" because he is an out-of-towner? He arrives from seminary or another parish with no local connections and, honestly, a small income. The congregation shows material generosity/hospitality to welcome him (and his family, if he has one) and let him know he will be cared for by way of neighborly benefits to make up for a smaller salary, lack of property holdings, etc. You shower the curate but not the bishop.
One place where I have felt my gift-work supported, and been able to support others' gift-work, is my local Buy Nothing Facebook group. I expect other commenters may also be familiar with this concept, but they are localized Facebook groups where people offer and ask for things and sometimes services. The main rule for such groups is that everything offered must be completely free. I've been really touched by how much members go above and beyond to make sure that everyone can receive gifts they could use, such as offering to drop off gifts for me when I lost my ride a few times. It has made me feel so much more connected to my neighborhood, and I even have tentative plans to meet up with some members once the pandemic allows. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the membership is overwhelmingly female.
Male coded gift work: moving furniture! Two examples from my dad: one is felling/clearing trees. He usually asks his son-in-laws to help him clear trees from the street when they’re too big for him to tackle alone.
Another unique example of of male-coded gift work is grilling. For 10 years my dad (who is not emotionally demonstrative at all) used to grill an extra hamburger on Saturday night for our elderly, homebound neighbor. He would proceed to make a plate up for her and deliver it the few steps to her house. We lived in financially fine area so it was definitely an act of friendship and love and not sheer material necessity. She responded by knitting us little white winter mittens. I think by the time we left, my mom had tons of mittens she had knitted for us.
I have loved Hyde's book, The Gift, for years. What I take from it are the Trickster (which I associate with the Holy Spirit -- in my southeastern area, the rabbit), the wonderful idea of a two-tier economy (guaranteed income that covers the most basic essentials, plus market economy) -- amplified in the book Communitas), that a less visible gift economy is always in operation, and that valuing the gift economy can hinder "success" in the market economy.
More to the point of this article -- when I look back on my years as the primary caregiver for my life partner, I realize more and more how all care of other people is an art -- truly, a sacred art. Certainly being her caregiver took precedence over my career as a visual artist, and I only regret that I didn't give ongoing care of our 44-year relationship much more of my creative energy BEFORE she needed my full time care.
Where do you support other people’s gift-work in your community?
I donate primarily to church-based organizations, including a church that feeds the homeless and hungry.
I donated funds to a church organization for clergy experiencing financial hardship, deacons who were never paid for their service to the church. They are in their 50s-60s and because of the pandemic, might have lost employment.
An important connection to women and the clergy is that this order of deacons in earlier periods was the only available to women, and the fund that I give money to was begun in order to support them in their old age, women who had never married but who served the church in caring for the poor, the sick and the needy.
I don't know what the demographics look like now, because both women and men serve as deacons, but it's something I think about, women and unpaid church service, even when they are clergy.
I've participated for several years in a thriving gift-work subculture: those who write and read fanfiction. In this particular world of gift-work (also heavily female-dominated), attention and appreciation are the currencies: I work hard on creating something I love, and you respond with appreciative comments, "kudos" (like Twitter likes), and the time taken to read it. Friendship can also be the gift given in exchange for the work of writing - if you like something I write, we might discuss it together and find that we have other things in common! It's been deeply rewarding to participate in this gift-economy. Money for writing is great, even essential, but there are things it's harder to get when your audience is paying customers rather than appreciative acquaintances.
Plenty of women who write fanfiction also write professionally in some capacity, and engaging in this gift-economy is a way to take some of the pressure off their own writing that is generated by the need to earn money from it. For some, it's a space to explore ideas that might be too weird to sell; for others, it's a chance to directly access the joy of an appreciative readership. Fanfiction gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons (some of which are completely justified) but it is also a world where people often expend a lot of labor-energy simply for love of creation, love of the source material, and love of the community of other fans who share that love. For a lot of people, it's the only place they see gift-work in action.
There's also an ongoing, intensifying debate within the fanfiction community as to whether or not we can or should monetize this work we do. It's increasingly common to see fanfiction writers link to a Kofi or Cashapp account in their profiles and encourage people to "tip" them, or for writers to offer commissions where they write a story based on a prompt of your choice for a fee. Of course, much of fanfiction can't be monetized due to intellectual property laws, but people now pay money for fanart on a regular basis without much interference from these IP laws, which makes many fandom writers wonder why people can't do the same for their work. Others argue in favor of a monetized fandom culture because everyone is struggling to make ends meet, and why not turn what you already love to do into your side hustle? Still others feel like the rewards of the gift-economy simply do not repay them adequately for the value of what they give. (I think a feeling like this is part of why some people support "wages for housework".) I have sympathy for all of these arguments, especially the need to make more money, but I think a fully monetized fandom would lose something valuable. It's interesting to read this week's newsletter in light of this ongoing debate and my own concerns about how money seems to be our primary or only unit of value these days.
Love this question. As a writer of fiction, I find that so much about the pursuit of craft is “gift-work” in two senses. It develops the gifts already given to you, and it can be a gift to readers who respond to that development and its fruits. The same goes for other kinds of literature—poetry is maybe the exemplar here, as work done for sheer love of sound and sense (if it is done well). By extension, this is also true for many art forms, regardless of whether the artist receives financial rewards—by the by, I also appreciate Hyde’s exposition of the arts as gift-work.
And I’ve experienced this dynamic in my work with a literary magazine, too— it’s a joy to do, while at the same time it’s a second-order pursuit that would itself not be possible without many, many artists and writers and editors willing to share their talents and gifts and their fruits on a volunteer basis, again for sheer love of the work and desire to communicate with others.
(Tangential question: do we still consider writing as male-coded, as in Virginia Woolf’s time she certainly seemed to feel it was (though I have my resistances to this idea), or maybe (as I dearly hope) could we consider writing one of the few pursuits that’s truly uncoded?)
Anyway, I’ve seen both men and women participating in a variety of neighborly and communally oriented gift-works ranging from home repair to classroom renovation to meal trains, to event planning to long-term educational planning and more. Maybe this is more properly termed volunteerism than what Hyde means by gift-work, which is properly an end in itself as well as something that sparks or inspires or somehow perpetuates the cycle of giving—though, often, these forms also participate in that generative logic. And, definitely, others’ participation in the gift-work of care has supported not only my own ability to continue writing but also my ability to continue offering care work of my own to my family when perseverance feels so exhausting as to be impossible. I think we can’t overestimate just how much cooperation between likeminded families in these matters can make the difficult or dull aspects of daily life feel not only bearable but worthwhile.
Small scale farming. Farmers these days are women and men, but the immediate association to the work is male.
Small farmers do not raise heritage breed animals, in an organic or grass-fed fashion, because it is more profitable. They do it to offer healthy, fresh food to their families and local community, to honor their ancestors, and to honor animals and the land. Many of them view it primarily as gift-work because the financial rewards are so small.
Locally or home-grown vegetables are often consumed by family and friends because people would rather buy cheap produce from the super market. Selling produce at a farmers market might be profitable in certain areas of the country, but in many parts it's not. It's a labor of love, not profit.
Trying to find an example of typically-male-coded activities that would match Hyde's description... Maybe DM'ing D&D or similar imaginative world-building games week after week for a group of friends?
Also, other (typically male-coded?) activities which are frequently result in GIVING away what is produced are:
* Free open-source software. (There is. amazing. stuff. you can get for free. Operating Systems. A plethora of apps and applications. Resources for learning to program.. whole textbooks or tutorials that are effectively entire textbooks. Computer games... seems to be a market with an overabundance of people who want to work in it.)
* Coaching kids' teams! (My first thought was of math teams and robotics teams. But like... hellllo... sports teams exist, lol!)
Of those last two, I'm thinking the first doesn't match with what Hyde was describing very well, but the second does.
("male-coded" is an expression I'm not used to using... so unfamiliarity makes me hesitant...)
I’m so glad to have found you and your work via the NYT op-ed last week. In 2000, I completed a doctoral dissertation in Ethical Theory arguing that our typical conceptual frameworks for understanding the moral structure of intimacy (primarily contractual, but also communitarianism and the feminist theory of care ethics) fail to capture the dynamic, which is essentially one of gift. But how to accommodate gift — particularly the gift of self — in a conceptual framework that “codifies” ongoing relationship? I’ll spare you the rest...but suffice to say that, having suspended my research for a couple decades of trying to apply it to the raising of multiple teenagers, I’ve been scanning the horizon for a point of resonance in hopes of re-entry. I’m fascinated by what I’ve found here. Looking forward to more!
Rather than move gift work into the marketplace, it's better to move business into the world of gift work -- what Benjamin Zander calls "the vision world" in contrast to "the measurement world." This is the "B corporation" idea and the basic Christian idea, as I understand it, of doing all work for the glory of God, following Jesus whether CEO or front-line employee or in between. Time in the measurement world is what I experience as "thin time." I doubt that any moments spent that way become eternal. Time in the vision world is thick time, with at least the possibility of creating eternal moments. God has given us a choice of worlds, and Jesus, among other things, shows us how to live in thick, eternal time. I like to watch the first part of Zander's video periodically to remind me of the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZIC2f0fMKY
Is this a huge challenge for me? To allow God to free me from near total imprisonment in my cautious, vigilant, ambitious, security-obsessed life in the measurement world? Oh yes!
Maybe I'm relying too much on George MacDonald and Anthony Trollope here, but isn't the clergyman typically "showered" because he is an out-of-towner? He arrives from seminary or another parish with no local connections and, honestly, a small income. The congregation shows material generosity/hospitality to welcome him (and his family, if he has one) and let him know he will be cared for by way of neighborly benefits to make up for a smaller salary, lack of property holdings, etc. You shower the curate but not the bishop.