CLASS DESCRIPTION

In the current political landscape – characterized by raising nationalism, discriminatory politics towards migrants, ecological crisis, unequal distribution of labor, ever new forms of dispossession – it is urgent to redefine ‘home’ as something other than a space contained between walls, and to reaffirm – as bell hooks proposed – that the homeplace has long stood as “a site of resistance and liberation struggle”.

Join Giulia Palladini for a lecture that explores the idea of ‘domestics’: challenging the disparagement characterizing the domestic sphere, historically associated with a gendered and racialized division of labor, and grounded in a series of artificial dichotomies – i.e. private/public, local/global, production/reproduction, untamed creativity/everyday banality. We will explore how the set of activities associated with organizing, maintaining and inhabiting a house constitute a category in its own right, and that, as much as the organizing, maintaining and inhabiting a polis, this category is not a given, but is a field of struggle and imagination.

This lecture will enter students into a discourse with a rich genealogy of feminist thought and praxis, pulling from the work of essential feminist thinkers like Silvia Federici, Audre Lorde, Carla Lonzi, Sophie Lewis, Conceição Evaristo, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Bobby Baker, Chiara Fumai. We will also weave in examples of groundbreaking political activism, from the legendary Wages for Housework campaign (1972) to contemporary activism organized by domestic workers such as the Madrid-based collective Territorio Doméstico.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Giulia Palladini is a writer, educator and curator currently based in Mexico City. For the past fifteen years, she has taught and developed critical and creative projects around theatre and contemporary art in both academia and the art world on an international level. She was research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Senior Lecturer in Performance at the University of Roehampton in London. She presented her work in various formats in numerous art institutions, such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City and the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, and collaborated as dramaturg with artists like Mapa Teatro, Sara Leghissa and Tara Fatehi. As a curator, she has conceived a number of projects fostering a dialogue between artistic practice and critical reflection, such as Feminismos Antipatriarcales and Poetic Disobedience (UK 2021), Antidotes: thinking live arts in the political landscape (Mexico, 2024) and Rumbos de vida (Italy, 2024). She is the author of The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (2017) and editor (with Marco Pustianaz) of Lexicon for an Affective Archive (2017), alongside a number of essays, translated in various languages.

INSTAGRAM: @red__giulia
FACEBOOK: @giulia.palladini.75

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This is a recording of a live session hosted by The Feminist Lecture Program in June 2025. The reading list for the class can be found alongside this rental.

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