Indomitable and Undomesticated: A Feminist Reclamation of the Domestic

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.

We are committed to making our sessions as accessible as possible. If you are unable to pay the full amount for this class, please reach out to us via email at [email protected] and we will provide you with a discount code.