ABSTRACT
This essay offers a feminist analysis of Occupy Wall Street as a site of public, collectivized, politicized domestic labor. Feminists have long struggled to make women’s unpaid or underpaid housework – cooking, cleaning, and care work – visible as work. Building on Marxist frameworks, they have identified the largely unwaged labor involved in reproducing human beings as the necessary basis for capitalist modes of production. Appreciating and denaturalizing domestic labor, they have also sought to de-gender it – not only to distribute it equally between women and men, but also to question its coding as “feminine” and, accordingly, as low-status.
Many writers have observed that OWS demanded true democracy while also seeking to model it. They have, however, focused primarily on the modeling of horizontality, decision-making by consensus, etc., rather than the organization of domestic labor. Drawing on interviews with seven members of the Kitchen Working Group, this essay investigates whether the two-month occupation of Zuccotti Park reinvented domestic labor along feminist lines, and considers whether it made a difference that the “hidden” work of reproducing bodies was exposed to the public eye.
