Founded by Victoria Horne and Kirsten Lloyd in 2014, the Reading Group was then hosted by Collective Gallery in partnership with the School of History of Art at The University of Edinburgh. We met every two months. For more information see Collective.
A term that emerged in feminist thinking in the second half of the 20th century, ‘social reproduction’ described the complex work (exceeding but incorporating what is traditionally understood by ‘child-rearing’) that women have been typically expected to embrace as life. Precisely because this work has been presented as life, it has been excluded from analyses of productive labour (work perceived to properly belong to the economy) as much as from the system of wages which is the main source of income in the capitalist mode of production, largely still underwritten by patriarchal values. Despite feminist art historians and artists’ groundbreaking work since the 1970s, we still lack an understanding of how ‘social reproduction’, defined as above, has been negotiated in art, curating and the art field at large.
Yet there are also other developments of interest to the reading group. The re-organisation of capitalist production in recent decades has troubled traditional distinctions. Theorist Kathi Weeks has argued that: ‘not only is reproductive labour more clearly productive today, as evidenced by its many waged forms, but productive labour is increasingly reproductive in the sense that it often creates not only strictly economic goods and services but also social landscapes, communicative contexts, and cultural forms.’ It is therefore important to seek out instances – in theory, practice and social praxis- where social reproduction acquires a broader meaning. The reading group will therefore work to bring together material that a) continues and enriches the feminist thinking on social reproduction, b) permits an expanded understanding of what social reproduction encompasses in the 21st century.
PHASE 1 2014 – 2016
Berwick Street Film Collective. Nightcleaners, 1972. (# 5 selected by Kirsten Lloyd)
Edelman, Lee. ‘The Future Is Kid Stu ’. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 1–31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. (#3 selected by Glyn Davies and Fiona Anderson)
Eisenstein, Hester. ‘The Sweatshop Feminists’. Jacobin, 17 June 2015. http://jacobinmag. com/2015/06/kristof-globalization-development-third-world/. (#7 selected by Victoria Horne)
Federici, Silvia. ‘The Great Witch-Hunt in Europe’. In Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 163–218. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2014. (#3 selected by Georgia Horgan)
Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Power of Women Collective; Falling Wall Press, 1975. (#1 selected by Kirsten Lloyd and Victoria Horne)
Hartmann, Heidi I. ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’. Capital & Class 3, no. 2 (1979): 1–33. (#2 selected by Victoria Horne)
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, and Anne Machung. The Second Shift. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. (#8 selected by Harry Weeks)
Matrix, ed. Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. London: Pluto Press, 1984. (#6 selected by Frances Stacey and held at Wiki House with architect Akiko Kobayashi)
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2016. (#9 selected by Catherine Spencer)
Nussbaum, Martha C. ‘“Whether from Reason or Prejudice”: Taking Money for Bodily Services’. The Journal of Legal Studies 27, no. S2 (1998): 693–723. (#7 selected by Petra Bauer and Frances Stacey)
Pajnik, Mojca. ‘Prostitution Just Another Type of Work’. In CODE:RED, 2011. (#7 selected by Petra Bauer)
Rowbotham, Sheila. ‘Jolting Memory: Nightcleaners Recalled’. In PLAN ROSEBUD: ON IMAGES, SITES AND POLITICS OF MEMORY, edited by Maria Ruido. Santiago de Compostela: CGAC, n.d. (#5)
Spade, Dean, and Craig Willse. ‘Marriage Will Never Set Us Free’. Organizing Upgrade, 6 September 2013. http://www.organizingupgrade.com/index.php/modules-menu/beyond- capitalism/item/1002-marriage-will-never-set-us-free. (#3 selected by Glyn Davies and Fiona Anderson)
Tamboukou, Maria. Sewing, Fighting and Writing: Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture. Radical Cultural Studies. London; New York: Rowman & Little eld International, 2016. (#7 selected by Victoria Horne)
Weeks, Kathi. ‘“Hours for What We Will”: Work, Family, and the Demand for Shorter Hours’. In The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries, 151–74. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. (#3 selected by Jenny Richards)
Young, Iris. ‘Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the Dual Systems Theory’. In Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, edited by Lydia Sargent, 43–69. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1981. (#2 selected by Victoria Horne)
PHASE 2 2017 –
1 Fucking as Work
On Wednesday 10 May, the group met to discuss a selection of texts from the 1970s compiled by Laura Guy: Silvia Federici’s early writing found meaning within a constellation of work emerging internationally from a group connected with the Wages for Housework movement. Alongside Federici’s short essay ‘Sexuality is Work’ (1975), we will read ‘Fucking is Work’ (c. 1975) by the Wages Due Collective Toronto/ Ellen Agger et al and a selection of manifestos reflecting on sex work in the 1970s, including statements by San Francisco Wages for Housework; The English Collective of Prostitutes; Wages Due Lesbians, London and Toronto and an anonymous group of sex workers in Brooklyn, New York.
‘Sexuality as Work’ or ‘Why Sexuality Is Work’ (1975) was originally written by Federici as a presentation made to the second international Wages for Housework conference held in Toronto in January 1975. Wages Due Lesbians Toronto formed out of the Wages for Housework Campaign in Canada in the early 1970s. Concerned with connecting the material struggles surrounding lesbian and heterosexual women’s lives, the group organised around a range of connected issues including housework, wage, the family and child custody, and sexuality. Wages Due Lesbians had close links with sex workers aligned with the Wages for Housework struggle, linking experiences of lesbian-identity and prostitution through harassment, the necessity of financial independence and the way in which both revealed fucking as work.
Texts
Federici, Silvia. ‘On Sexuality as Work (1975)’. The Commoner 15, no. Winter (2012): 88–94. The Wages Due Collective, Toronto. ‘Fucking Is Work’, c 1975.
Selection of manifestos relating to sex work, c. 1970s
Rousseau, Christina. ‘Wages Due Lesbians: Visibility and Feminist Organizing in 1970s Canada’. Gender, Work & Organization 22, no. 4 (2015): 364–74.
2 Reform and Revolution
Harry Weeks selected texts that address the question of ‘reform or revolution’, which was raised during the group Fucking as Work in relation to the dual discourse of rights and structural critique occurring in the work of Wages Due Lesbians.
In Rosa Luxemburg’s 1908 book Social Reform or Revolution she states: “At first view the title of this work may be found surprising. Can the Social-Democracy be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.”
Whilst Luxemburg was speaking very specifically about the Marxism of the Social Democratic Party in Germany around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, the question is equally significant to feminism, and particularly the issue of social reproduction. Wages for Housework, for instance, was a reformist demand with a revolutionary underpinning. Rather than set Luxemburg’s text, however, Harry Weeks elected two texts which raise the question of reform and revolution in feminist contexts.
Texts
Federici, Silvia. ‘The Unfnished Feminist Revolution’. The Commoner 15 (2012): 185–197. hooks, bell. ‘Feminist Revolution: Development Through Struggle’. In Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, 157–63. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984. Additional Reading
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution & The Mass Strike. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2008
3 Black Macho
Michelle Wallace’s book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman selected by James Bell to be read alongside Audre Lorde’s ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’.
From the 1990 introduction by Michelle Wallace says: “When I first re-read the book in preparation for writing this, my immediate gut response was to destroy the book so that no one would ever read it again. How many black women writers, in the twentieth, nineteenth, or even eighteenth centuries have thought and done precisely this?
I wanted to destroy the book because my desire for something more from life than my marginal status as a black woman writer could ever o er was so palpable in its pages. In obsessively repeating the stereotypes of black women and black men, I wanted to burst free of them forever. However, this has only been slightly more possible for me than it was for Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Charlotte Forten. But perhaps if we can begin to claim our own words and our own feelings within the public sphere, we will seize the means of reproducing our own history, and freedom will become a possibility in a sense that it never has been before.”
Texts
Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. London: Verso, 2015.
Lorde, Audre. ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007.
