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Wages for Housework Means Wages Against Heterosexuality": on the Archives of Black Women for Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians

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Wages for Housework Means Wages Against Heterosexuality "Wages for housework means wages against heterosexuality": On the Archives of Black Women for Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians Beth Capper, Arlen Austin GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 24, Number 4, October 2018, pp. 445-466 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/706693 Access provided by Brown University (30 Oct 2018 17:50 GMT) “WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK MEANS WAGES AGAINST HETEROSEXUALITY”: On the Archives of Black Women for Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians Beth Capper and Arlen Austin In “Capitalism and the Struggle against Sexual Work,” the Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici (2017a: 144) asserts an analogous relation between lesbian visibility and the strike on reproductive labor, contending that “coming out is like going on strike.” Delivered at a Wages for Housework conference in Toronto in 1975, Federici’s comments emerged alongside her better-known essay “On Sexual- ity as Work” (2017b), which explores heterosexuality as a form of socially neces- sary labor inclusive of sex, care work, and emotional management.1 “Capitalism and the Struggle against Sexual Work,” by contrast, positions lesbian sexuality as simultaneously “a direct attack on the work-sexual discipline imposed on women in capitalist society” and a placeholder for “a redefinition of what our sexuality should be” (Federici 2017a: 146). Federici’s celebration of lesbianism as a form of work refusal might, then, seem to call for a politics of lesbian separatism as an antidote to the sexual division of labor. Such a reading, however, misses how in this text the homo/hetero binary is recast as both an instrument and an effect of capitalist divisions of labor — divisions that lesbian separatism only serves to reconsolidate. Moreover, Federici is clear that lesbianism does not signal “the end of work”; rather, it is a historically specific strategy of refusal under present condi- tions of sexual labor and sexual relation. By approaching “coming out” in terms of a strike on (hetero)sexual labor, Federici therefore reconfigures lesbian struggle GLQ 24:4 DOI 10.1215/10642684-6957772 © 2018 by Duke University Press 446 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES as a starting point for an anticapitalist commoning project that all women have an interest in defending. Federici’s anticapitalist treatment of lesbian sexuality broaches the relation we chart in this article between the politics of housework and the provocation of a “queer commons” that this special issue foregrounds. Most directly, her asser- tion that lesbianism could be understood as a form of housework refusal situates reproductive labor both as the common ground of feminist struggle and as a pivotal terrain that must be collectivized through this struggle. This is a position she later echoed in her contention that any vision of the commons must recognize “repro- ductive labor as an important sphere of human activity . to be revolutionized . revisited and revalorised” in order to understand how anticapitalist movements and social forms might sustain themselves (Federici 2012b: 145). At the same time, “Capitalism and the Struggle against Sexual Work” and its emphasis on lesbian- ism as a means towards this collective vision of reproduction illuminates the less remarked upon importance of queer sexualities to the Wages for Housework (WfH) movement’s broader conception of social reproduction struggles. Instead of seeking to further entrench the housewife in the heteronormative household by reward- ing her with a wage (a common misconception about the movement), WfH instead sought to refuse and destroy this household as a central unit of capitalism’s social reproduction, and along with it the figure of the housewife.2 Indeed, while the WfH movement broadly retained the “housewife” as a figure of negative identification, Federici (2012a: 9) emphasizes that “we fought for wages for housework not for housewives.” Rather than a stable location, the house was understood, on the one hand, as a political-economic modality that regulated racialized, gendered, and sexual labor across multiple sites that included, but was not confined to, the het- eronormative familial household and, on the other, as a mutable and contested form that, if imagined collectively, might yield an altogether different organization of sexuality and social reproduction. This effort to revalorize reproductive labor as the ground of anticapitalist struggle under the banner of a “reproductive commons,” however, has also come under scrutiny from theorists and activists who argue that such discourses inevit- ably reinvest in a normative reproductive order. Melinda Cooper (quoted in Marble 2018), for example, has voiced concerns about “a revalorization of women’s caring role as distributed nurturers of the left and mothers of the common.” Likewise, Angela Mitropoulos (2016: 178) has suggested that any conception of the house- hold, even a revitalized or radicalized one, threatens to remain entangled with “the reproduction of family, race, and nation” that has long structured the orga- nization of the household and its constitutive boundaries. These concerns signal “WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK MEANS WAGES AGAINST HETEROSEXUALITY” 447 potential tensions between certain discourses of the commons and queer critique, given that queer critique is arguably one name for a mode of theorizing that inter- rogates the differential forms of incorporation and exclusion that produce any com- mons. According to Mitropoulos (quoted in O’Brien 2017: 89), one aim of queer critique is to make space for “uncommon forms” of life and “unconditional (rather than universal) reasons for care or welfare.” Similarly, Kevin Floyd (2009: 9) has argued that in recent years queer studies has been increasingly motivated by a maneuver of “simultaneous expansion and internal complexification,” refusing to “isolate sexuality from other horizons of knowledge” while acknowledging the lim- its of the critical imperatives that undergird its own theory of the social. In other words, even as queer studies has expanded the terms and figures of queer polit- ical struggle, this “generalizing impulse” (indeed, what we perhaps might call a commoning impulse) has often been paired with a necessarily vigilant attention to those forms of life that fall away from — and constitute an irreducible remainder to — articulations of the general or the common (ibid.).3 As such, historical and contemporary arguments for a figure of the common potentially sit in tension with queer critique’s interrogation of the violence of “common measure” (Mitropoulos, quoted in O’Brien 2017: 85). Returning to the archives of the WfH movement, we explore the tensions between the common and the uncommon that come to the fore when nonhetero- normative sexualities and socialities are centered in struggles over reproduction and when struggles over social reproduction are centered in demands for sexual liberation. In particular, we consider the activist histories of two autonomous fac- tions within the WfH campaign: the Canadian/UK group Wages Due Lesbians (WDL) and the US/UK-based Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWfWfH). Reconsidering the WfH movement from the vantage point of these groups and their intellectual production is, perhaps, already to register the internal conflicts and divisions that contoured the WfH movement in ways that pressure the call for a commons grounded in housework as a unified and unifying site of struggle. Yet we also contend that positioning these groups as mere correctives to the broader WfH campaign has the effect of asserting a clear origin story of the movement, stabilizing the meaning of WfH in a particular geographic and historical context rather than as a perspective that shifted and evolved over time. Through a critical reorientation of the texts and figures placed at the center of the movement’s analy- sis, we hope to reorient the theoretical claims and questions derived from a reading of this archive. These groups can be situated in a broader history of feminist, gay and lesbian, and left activism from the late 1960s to the 1980s that articulated the 448 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES demand for an entwined vision of redistributive justice and sexual liberation. These demands were confronted by a coalition of neoliberal and neoconservative forces that reconfigured the state’s regulation of social reproduction by further entrenching the racialized, gendered, and sexual form of the nuclear household as “the foundation of social and economic order” (Cooper 2017: 49). Crucially, at this same moment, movements for welfare rights and reproductive justice were also mobilized as ciphers for what the ecologist Garrett Hardin described in 1968 as “the tragedy of the commons.” While the discourse of the commons as a form of collective property under threat of enclosure has a multipronged history, Har- din’s account of a tragic commons linked the welfare state’s imagined support of “unmanaged” (nonwhite) reproduction to a neo-Malthusian discourse of “overpop- ulation.” This argument was pivotal to the articulation of what Rob Nixon (2012: 593) calls “a neoliberal rescue narrative, whereby privatization . is deemed necessary for averting tragedy.” Within this historical conjuncture, BWfWfH and WDL’s vision of a “reproductive commons” issued the demand for an alternative, collective, organization of reproduction that would not replicate existing sexual and racial divisions
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