About the event
More smiles, more money.”—Silvia Federici, “Wages against Housework,” 1974
Marginalized strands of the second-wave feminist movement, such as the International Wages for Housework Campaign—which included the Wages Due Lesbians and Black Women for Wages for Housework—advocated for salaried domestic labor. These feminist groups formed in the 1970s to raise awareness of how housework and childcare are the basis of all social reproduction and industrial work. Their demands were, however, often sidelined by mainstream feminist goals like equal opportunity in the labor market. These groups were not only discussion clubs or thought experiments, but real activist efforts whose demands were often expressed through protest songs.
Artist Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn will discuss her current research on the music these women’s groups created to articulate their frustrations through embodied collective experience. She will be joined in conversation by Amalle Dublon, a PhD candidate at Duke University whose research focuses on sound, aurality, and reproduction in all its valences.
