Our introductory article explores social reproduction as a key term in expanding the purview of art history in relation to the social urgencies of the early twenty-first century and feminist struggles. Providing a context for the approaches to social reproduction and art in the specific journal issue, our analysis makes a case for a methodological shift that would see feminist art history coming closer to a history of labour. But this, we argue, implies interrogating what enters the category ‘labour’ as such. The article opens with an examination of capitalism in relation to crisis and goes on to look at a) social reproduction in an expanded (art) field; b) the violence of reproduction; c) the feminist commons/the social reproduction commons.
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Special Issue Contents:
Lara Perry, ‘The Artist’s Household: On Gender and the Division of Artistic and Domestic Labour in Nineteenth-Century London’
Manon Gaudet, ”Under Trying Domestic Circumstances’: Reproducing Settler Identity and Resisting Indigenous Dispossession in Twentieth-Century Saskatchewan’
Marina Vishmidt, ‘The Two Reproductions in (Feminist) Art and Theory since the 1970s’
Victoria Horne, ‘Losing Ground?: A Note on Feminism, Cultural Activism and Urban Space’
Elisa Adami & Alex Fletcher, ‘‘To Think the Home in Terms of the Factory’: Social Reproduction, Postproduction and Home Movies in Godard and Miéville’
Beth Capper, ‘Domestic Unrest: Social Reproduction and the Temporalities of Struggle in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames’
Larne Abse-Gogarty, ‘‘Usefulness’ in Contemporary Art and Politics’
Elke Krasny, ‘Exposed: The Politics of Infrastructure in VALIE EXPORT’s Transparent Space’
Dani Child, Helena Reckitt and Jenny Richards, ‘Labours of Love: A Conversation on Art, Gender and Social Reproduction’