Public Workshop

with Silvia Federici

On the development of domestic work and the capitalist gender division

Friday, Mai 23, 2014, 3:30 p.m. – 8 p.m.

Please register: leitung@shedhalle.ch

“They say it is love, we say it is unwaged work. 

They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.”

Thus begins a text by Silvia Federici (Wages Against Housework, Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975) which was part of a larger campaign demanding “wages for housework.” The goal of the campaign was to expose the supposed “self-evidence” of work carried out at home or in private (raising children, washing clothes, emotional devotion, cleaning, cooking, and sex) and to first even recognize it as work. The demand for pay did not aim at establishing and institutionalizing the situation of the housewife, but rather, ultimately sought a general refusal of housework, a questioning of the gender-based division of labor, and an overthrowing of society. The realization that gender is something constructed, quasi “acquired,” as well as the expansion of what is understood as housework, from the kitchen to the bedroom, points to queer politics.

In the framework of a workshop with Silvia Federici, we will discuss „Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and primitive accumulation“, which has been published in German in 2012, and it´s urgent actuality.