| Description: |
Author and feminist activist Silvia Federici will be at Goldsmiths, University of London, to speak on topics covered in her new book,
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle , which collects
forty years of research and theorizing on the nature of housework, social
reproduction, and women’s struggles on this terrain—to escape it, to better
its conditions, to reconstruct it in ways that provide an alternative to
capitalist relations. Indeed, as Federici reveals, behind the capitalist
organization of work and the contradictions inherent in “alienated labor”
is an explosive ground zero for revolutionary practice upon which are
decided the daily realities of our collective reproduction. Beginning with
Federici’s organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the
essays collected here unravel the power and politics of wide but related
issues including the international restructuring of reproductive work and
its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work
and sex work, the crisis of elder care, the development of affective labor,
and the politics of the commons. Federici is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant. In 1972, she
was cofounder of the International Feminist Collective, which launched the
Wages for Housework campaign internationally. With other members of Wages
for Housework, like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, and with
feminist authors like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Federici has been
instrumental in developing the concept of "reproduction" as a key to class
relations of exploitation and domination in local and global contexts, and
as central to forms of autonomy and the commons. She is the author of
Caliban
and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was
active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti-death penalty
movement. She is one of the cofounders of the Committee for Academic
Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the
struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural
adjustment of African economies and education systems. From 1987 to 2005,
she also taught international studies, women’s studies, and political
philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY.
Her decades of research and political organizing accompanies a long list of
publications on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education,
culture, international politics, and more recently on the worldwide
struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction
of the commons. Her steadfast commitment to these issues resounds in her
focus on autonomy and her emphasis on the power of what she calls
self-reproducing movements as a challenge to capitalism through the
construction of new social relations.
(See event web page) |
