#domesticwork

[getae-radfem]

[18mr]

LOVE LETTERS TO MOVEMENT LEADERS: AI-JEN POO

Dear Ai-Jen Poo,

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and I’m dedicating this letter to you – and all the domestic workers caring for our families and others every day.

Like me, you first dipped your feet in organizing while you were a student. While attending Columbia in the late 90s, you organized with CAAAV, an organization serving Asian and Asian American communities in New York.

As many good organizers know, our job is building relationships and trust. While at CAAAV, you reached out to immigrant women service workers and noticed domestic workers kept showing up. You said, “We were just starting to see the abuses facing domestic workers. And once you started to see it, you couldn’t not see it.”

You and I both see the personal as political. You could not allow the exploitation of domestic workers, who are our mothers, sisters and aunties, continue. The injustice gripped you so hard that you spent hours every week walking between commuter railway stops, the kid’s section of bookstores, and playgrounds speaking to domestic workers, sharing about your lives, and building a collective.

You knew and valued the power of our communities. It could have been so easy to walk away, to “move on” with your life and climb the socioeconomic ladder that society affords to women like us – second generation, native English speakers, with college educations.

But you and I are committed to the struggle. You have shown me how to be unapologetic about my convictions and to expect that I will achieve what I have set out to do. For the last two decades you have relentlessly pushed for the rights of domestic workers and have won time and time again.

Your leadership showed us that domestic work deserves dignity and our mothers, aunties and sisters can demand respect as care workers.

WE DON’T EVEN THINK OF [DOMESTIC WORK] AS REAL WORK, AND I THINK A LOT OF THAT HAS TO DO WITH ITS ASSOCIATION WITH WOMEN. AND A LOT OF THE STRENGTH THAT IS REQUIRED TO DO CARE WORK HAS BEEN TOTALLY … MINIMIZED AND INVISIBILIZED” - AI-JEN POO

As an Asian American woman, I often think about how the women in family have shaped who I am today. I grew up with my po-po, maternal grandmother. My family took care of her as she cared for us. She taught me that women are strong as hell.

You’ve spoken at length at how care work is feminized and unvalued, but it is essential to our lives. I see how this is also reflected in my work in community organizing. When the work is rooted in building relationships and trust, we ignore how hard people, and specifically Asian American women, Black women and other women of color, work so that we live in a world where we feel safe.

The value of organizing is dismissed because it threatens the status quo. Your work has always centered women at the margins. Institutions are scared that they will lose their power because women might finally get the support and credit they deserve.

Your new organization, Supermajority, co-led with Alicia Garza and Cecile Richards, will leave the patriarchy quaking in its boots. Its mission of training and organizing at least 2 million women ahead of the 2020 elections will force the political establishment to pay attention to our communities. I can’t wait for you to get it started!

This is all to say, thank you Ai-Jen. Thank you for leading the charge for a world where our work is fairly compensated. Thank you for being uncompromising in your convictions and proud of your identity. You give me hope I can do the same.

– Laura Li, 18MillionRising.org

This Love Letters to Movement Leaders series is a part of a collection of love letters that will be released throughout 2019.

[elcenzontle-blog]

El #antes y el #durante pinta de reja #domesticwork Parte 1. (en San Nicolás de los Garza) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnaUNgnP6yt/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[micmol]

Saturday morning home work: declogging the kitchen sinks pipes. Yuck! 🤢 . #ihatethat #kitchen #domesticwork #domestic #underthesink (at Mantua, Italy) https://www.instagram.com/p/CAzpir-n6k-/?igshid=dys289k6lugv

[djjfell]

💧Laundry Day🤲🏼 #washingmachine #vintageappliances #bicyclebrand #chores #domesticwork #domesticlabor #lostintime #antiques #antiquewasher #antiquewringer #mangler #rurex #rurexposures #rurexploration #foundobjects #takenothingbutphotos #history (at Carroll, Maryland) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt_fY4NAunk/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=18b02t0smf054

[cubitt-18-19]

Cooperative Lunches

seasonal regular event around food community, sharing space and knowledge

Sun 25 Nov | 1pm  Cooperative Lunch w/ The Voice of Domestic Workers

Cooperative Lunches will be a new regular event series at Cubitt, an event around food, community, sharing space and knowledge. The first Cooperative Lunch will be hosted by The Voice of Domestic Workers, a migrant domestic worker union in residence at Cubitt until December 2019.

[cubitt-18-19]

For 15 months the gallery will be shared with The Voice of Domestic Workers who will have access to the space to support their ongoing work and collaborations with artists, designers, cultural workers and activists. 

A self-organised network and campaigning group calling for justice and rights for Britain's sixteen thousand migrant domestic workers. The Voice of Domestic Workers provide educational and community activities for domestic workers - including English language lessons, drama and art classes, and employment advice, and mount rescues for domestic workers stuck with abusive employers.​Their work seeks to end discrimination and protect migrant domestic workers living in the UK by providing or assisting in the provision of education, training, healthcare and legal advice.

Follow their work on www.thevoiceofdomesticworkers.com @thevoiceofdws

[nataschathinksgender-blog]

Maternal Care - Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art by Liss

Let me start this off by saying that, honestly, I have in no way any connection to feelings of motherhood or being a mother-artist as I don’t have any children and do not consider myself an artist. That being said I find the interpretation of Ukeles’s art done by Andrea Liss extremely fascinating. The way in which Ukeles exhibits the interdependencies between class-gender-power-control in her Maintenance art performance events is very impressive and powerful.

Especially the way she openly and explicitly lets motherhood inform her art was and still is very revolutionary. The fact that, even though her mentor told her to choose either mother or artist, she did not submit to patriarchal assumptions of being a mother meaning assuming exclusively the role of mother.

(By the way, this further binary put on her and women in general (mother or artist; paid labour or domestic labour) is so overused and I just wish that we could be done with it already. Can’t we just make it clear to everyone that domestic labour is work and maybe (definitely) deserves to be paid? Why does capitalism have to be like that cat? Or more like why do we still allow it?)

I know that Ukeles work discussed in Liss’s text is located predominately in the late 60s/ early 70s but even today mothers who ‘have the audacity’ to work are heavily criticised for not taking care of their children whereas fathers are praised for spending any time with their children at all. This opens up a whole nother can of implications. A) it places any and every responsibility of childcare on mothers (however, when talking about abortion rights men suddenly should have a say in the matter) and B) it is another way of reinforcing heteronormativity as a family with two mothers then would have no one able to work and the mothers both doing domestic work. Furthermore, it disregards single parents as they most likely have to do all the domestic and paid work.

A quote of Ukeles which really resonates with me is “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” To me, in its beautiful simplicity, it perfectly summarises the way in which revolutions or changes in general always focus on the big things with no regard for the mundane which is going to continue on the way it has always been unless it is specifically addressed. Furthermore, it illustrates the way in which people who think of themselves as ‘better’ have no concept of the maintenance work it takes to keep society going.

Another aspect which seems so simple yet revolutionary is that art can be found in ‘non-art’. In the end, art is only what is defined as ‘art’ and if you define something as art it then simply is/becomes art. This idea in itself is incredibly liberating and empowering as Ukeles’s art of maternal care demonstrates. The power can simply come from becoming visible. In presenting domestic work as a ‘matter-of-fact’ testimony Ukeles makes a claim for domestic work’s place in society. Sara Ruddick ideas of rethinking the maternal can be found within Ukeles art. As stated above mothering is and should be considered work!

To close this off I would like to just state that I have no idea what Ruddick or Liss meant when talking about gender-full and gender-free mothering. I totally support that mothering as domestic care work can be done by all humans disregarding their gender but I do not get how it can be both at the same time. If anyone of you has an idea feel free to share, I’d be interested in your opinions

tl;dr: Taking care of children and a household is work and should be recognised as such. Furthermore, society should not link all these ridiculous ideas of who can do care work to genders and should actively work against institutions (such as the pay gap) which reinforce these gendered ideas. Art is what is defined as art you have power, use it!