Anarcha, feminism, autonomy and every day liberation

Workshop Notes for Subplot (28 August 2005)

Unpaid Labour

• What kinds of unpaid labour do we engage in (or are meant to engage in)?
  
  • Cleaning
  • Having kids, taking care of them, educating them, etc.
  • Psychological services
  • Being pleasant
  • Pretending that menstruation doesn’t affect us (part of being pleasant)
  • Being beautiful (shopping, consuming beauty products and fashion, ,
  • Sexual services - includes the provision of sex, being available, being attractive, courtship and mating games
  • Provision of comfort and reassurance
• Why do we do unpaid labour? (its easier, its gratifying, no-one else will do it / it needs to be done)
• How does it affect our autonomy?
• Can we have autonomy when we can’t access free time and/or can’t access the right to refuse to work in our “free” time
• Are there ways that we could stop or avoid doing unpaid labour
  
  • Is simply refusing possible?
• What are the traditional/ perceived consequences of refusing to engage in unpaid labour?
  
  • Being a ‘bad’ woman / mother / wife
• How does the struggle for equality affect us in doing unpaid labour?
• (Do we even struggle for equality? How about a struggle for autonomy and self-definition?)
• How does unpaid labour interact with class? Is it a class phenomenon, or simply more damaging to the working class? How does capitalism benefit from all this unpaid labour that we do?
• How do roles direct us toward doing unpaid labour, and who benefits?
• Do you get stuck working in your role, but outside your ‘area of responsibility’ (e.g. Playing mother to your boss)?

Autonomy

• What is autonomy?
• How do we “get” autonomy?
• Is autonomy the same as anarchism? What’s the difference?
• What, if anything, does anarchism hold for women (as women)?
• Is (political and personal) autonomy (from capitalism, from patriarchy, from hierarchy) possible?
• What roles are we engaged in? How do roles constrain us and prevent our autonomy? Are there roles that women especially play?

Anarcha / anarchism

• Can we define anarcha-feminism? (is it a ‘movement’, a philosophy, an attitude, or a resort to banding together against hostile elements?)
• At what point do we cease to engage in “the broader movement” which never really included or represented us in the first place?

So with St Barnabas church being razed to the ground recently, we thought it would be a great idea to publish pix of some graffiti that our fine heroine Batgirl imposed upon them almost exactly one year ago.

Remember kids, Jezus woz a zombie!