Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework

Abstract

This article develops an account of demand-making and provides a novel framework for evaluating the demands and strategies of social movements. It explores three features of demands, arguing that they disclose social conditions, create constituencies, and set the horizons of the world that social movements seek to build. It does so by considering two feminist demands: the demand for wages for housework and for the socialization of housework. By revisiting revolutionary feminism in the 1970s, it contrasts two strategic perspectives articulated in debates about housework: what Selma James called the “perspective of winning” and what I call the “perspective of investment,” a strategy for change that sees short-term reforms as investments in long-term transformations. In light of this, I endorse the demand to socialize housework as apt for the contemporary care economy and show how my account of demand-making contributes to the political theory of social movements by clarifying movement demands for “non-reformist reforms,” such as defund the police.

‘a revolt within a revolt’: feminist political ideas in Chile’s social uprising

“…A movement based on demand-making can not only push for reform and immediate change (e.g., wages for houseworkers) but can also set direction for further—even revolutionary—transformation. Contrary to accounts of prefigurative politics that focus on building communities and movements that reflect the politics they want to see in the future, as a way shaping their means (Lin et al , 2016; Ishkanian and Peña Saavedra, 2019; Monticelli, 2021), Forrester (2022, p. 12) argues that ‘what the perspective of investment offers is a way of identifying which demands—or which dissenting practices broadly understood—yield dividends and direct change toward the desired future world’. This approach to understanding social movements demands engagement with an idea of system-changing reform that can unravel the system itself and its internal hierarchies.…”

“…Following Katrina Forrester’s article ‘Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework’ (2022), I work with her conceptualisation of ‘perspective of investment’ to theorise the idea of feminist revolt in this article. Through the analysis of the Wages for Housework campaign, Forrester ( ibid .)…”

“…The conjunction of demand-making (Forrester, 2022) and concept-building for a framing of feminist revolt implies a temporality of the practice of transformation (or reform) that revolutionary feminists have discussed before. For example, Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie in Abolition, Feminism, Now (2022) establish a genealogy of abolitionist feminism.…”

“…The ability of organisations such as C8M in previous years to propose and promote the possibility of expanding one’s imagination for organising against neoliberalism—through concept-building such as autonomy and horizontalidad —permitted feminism to be more than a marginal group within the popular revolt; rather it became a force that could reshape the ways in which the overall social uprising developed. In regard to Forrester’s (2022) theorisation of demand-making, feminist ways of organising became a perspective on investment which the wider body of protestors during the uprising used to advance the demand of ending neoliberalism in Chile.…”

“For free and useless studies”: Critical reflections on the end of work and study

“…His point stands that the burdens of necessity can be and are shifted onto others and those others are predominately immigrants, women and men of visible color. Unfortunately, he does not seem to acknowledge or engage the range of WfH debates which include critiques of the sexual, racial and immigrant division of domestic and reproductive labor, unwaged and waged, or what WfH activists referred to as “public reproductive work” (Forrester, 2022: 3).…”