Confronting ‘The Household’
BY KIRAN GREWAL, CLARE HEMMINGS, LETICIA SABSAY AND ALYOSXA TUDOR
We are a group of feminist academics and activists, fed up with the ways in which ‘the household’ has so quickly become normalised as part of the discourse about Covid-19. The four initial blog pieces that kick off this series come out of conversations amongst us about what falls outside and inside ‘the household’ and why we need to be wary of its heteronormative, nation-based, race, class and gender privileged logic. How is it possible that safety continues to be imagined within a family frame that bears so little relationship to the majority experience of labour, migration, displacement, homelessness, and poverty? How does ‘the household’ serve racist, nationalist, sexist and homophobic agendas? We want to carve out a space to respond to the horrors or pleasures of ‘the household’ starting from our own experiences of migration or temporal drag, across, beyond and against borders, and from perspectives that challenge the violence of safety that ‘starts at home’, and/or intervene in it.
We’re grappling with these issues personally, politically and intellectually, and want these interventions to be part of an ongoing series for the Feminist Review blog. If you have something to say about ‘the household’, have images, poetry, a rant, manifesto or essay that intervenes, please write to us to share your ideas: k.grewal (at) gold.ac.uk or l.sabsay (at) lse.ac.uk