On April 14, the University of Iowa Press is set to publish Candice Wuehle’s novel Ultranatural. Today, we’re pleased to share the book’s epigraph, which combines two unlikely texts:
The more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker.
—Karl Marx
Bitch, you’re gonna work.
—“I Got It (U Take It),” I Got It (U Take It)
This is what Wuehle had to say about the epigraph’s origins.
In 2008, I moved to Athens, Ohio—a college town at the foothills of Appalachia, on the edge of West Virginia, deep in a land formation informally referred to as “a cauldron”—with no job. It was 2008, and I did it for a guy. It was 2008, and I didn’t have a job. It was 2008, and Tyra Banks was teaching young women how to “smize,” Gossip Girl had turned teenage ultra privilege into an aspiration, Britney Spears was beginning the long spectacle of her comeback. It was 2008, and the financial crisis was rearranging the economy in ways that left me and, I’ve come to understand only much later, many other young women with the conviction that their bodies, personalities, and ambitions might themselves have to function as a kind of currency.
As I leafed through job ads (in print, ink on my fingers), the only consistent work I saw for a young woman who did not yet have an undergraduate degree (so, me) was a strip club in West Virginia looking for performers. Oddly, amateur night paid extra. It was not lost on me that this was the only job I’d ever seen where lack of experience was a plus. I wasn’t yet able to articulate what I was seeing or why the fact that the moment was soundtracked by Britney Spears’ comeback single, “Womanizer,” felt so uncanny.
I wouldn’t figure out how to explain this for another twelve years, when I’d write Ultranatural, my homage to Britney and girlhood under economic crisis. The novel’s epigraphs place Karl Marx alongside a pop anthem reminiscent of Britney’s “Work Bitch” to frame the book’s central question: what happens when a woman’s body, voice, and interior life become sites of extraction? From the beginning of her career, Spears’ was both the product and the laborer—the voice, the spectacle, the brand, and the worker responsible for sustaining it. In retrospect the parallels between the pop star’s breakdown and the financial crisis feel difficult to ignore. Both exposed the same underlying mechanism: a system that depends on endless production while denying the human cost of that production.