Promethean Labors and Domestic Realism

Carol A. Stabile, Feminism and the Technological Fix (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 12.

Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 147.

Nancy Fraser, The Fortunes of Feminism: From Women’s Liberation to Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2013), 9.

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams use this term to describe a form common sense which is out of joint with the mechanisms of contemporary power, and a leftist politics that ‘involves the fetishisation of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds’. See Inventing the Future (London: Verso, 2015), 3.

Ibid., 40.

Ibid., 46.

I am thinking particularly here about the partial resurgence of a broadly socialist left—including Podemos in Spain, Corbyn’s Labour Party in the UK, Mélenchon’s candidacy in the recent French presidential elections, and the surprising popularity of Sanders in the US.

Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 359.

Alexander R. Galloway, “Brometheanism”, Culture and Communication (2017), ➝.

Peter Wolfendale, “Promtheanism and Rationalism”, Academia.edu (2016), ➝.

See Laboria Cuboniks, “Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation,” in Dea Ex Machina, ed. Armen Avanessian and Helen Hester (Berlin: Merve, 2015).

Alberto Toscano, “The Prejudice Against Prometheus,” STIR (2011), ➝.

Ray Brassier, “Prometheanism and Its Critics,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 470.

This would include not only xenofeminism, but a host of other technofeminist and posthumanist positions, such as recent interventions by Paul B. Preciado and Alexis Shotwell. Ibid., 478.

Ibid., Galloway.

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 170–171.

Alberto Toscano, “A Plea for Prometheus,” Critical Horizons 10, no. 2 (2009): 255.

Ibid., Galloway.

Ibid., Toscano (2009), 254–255.

Ray Brassier, “Prometheanism and Real Abstraction,” in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, and James Trafford (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 77.

Ibid., Brassier (2014), 485.

Camille Barbagallo and Silvia Federici, “Introduction,” The Commoner 15 (2012): 2, ➝.

Ibid., 470.

Ibid., Toscano (2009), 255.

Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 222.

Ibid., 240.

Ellen Lupton, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines for Home to Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 15.

Ibid., Davis, 240.

Ibid., Firestone, 194.

Ibid., Davis, 237.

This is slightly different from the ideas of feminists such as those who were involved in campaigns for Wages for Housework in the 1970s, and who viewed ‘the struggle of welfare mothers, led by African American women inspired by the Civil Rights Movement’ for a guaranteed annual income precisely as a demand for wages—wages “from the state for the work of raising their children.” See Silvia Federici, “Introduction,” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 7. As Antonella Corsani astutely points out, however, those models in which the UBI is presented merely as a form of wage may be somewhat unambitious in that they remain “inscribed within a logic of monetary ‘recognition’ of the productivity of life for and within capital.” In other words, they posit “a limit to capitalist exploitation but {do} not allow other becomings.” See Antonella Corsani, “Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism,” SubStance 36, no. 1 (2007): 127.

Ibid., Davis, 223.

Ibid., Corsani, 124.

Ibid., 125.

Dolores Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution: History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighbourhoods and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 184.

Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework,” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 21.

Ibid., Hayden, 294.

Ibid., 10.

Ibid., 71.

Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna 1919- 1934 (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999), 2.

Ibid., 50.

In 1914, for example, the New York Feminist Alliance proposed the building of a Feminist Apartment House in which ‘All corners would be rounded, all bathtubs would be built in, all windows would pivot, all beds would fold in to the walls, and all hardware would be dull finished’ in order to reduce the labor of dusting, polishing, and so on. Ibid., Hayden, 200.

Ibid., 167.

Ibid., 48.

Ibid., 188, 183.

Ibid., 210.

Nina Power, “Toward a Cybernetic Communism: The Technology of the Anti-Family”, in The Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone, ed. Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford. (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2010), 155.

Ibid., Davis, 229. Lupton, and others, would likely flag up some of the tasks that certainly have changed in response to domestic technology, whilst also pointing out that, quantitively speaking, the time spent in housework has not shifted as much as one might hope. Partly this has been a result of rising standards and other social changes, though certainly research and development addressing the possible automation of traditional household chores has not progressed at the same pace as that directed towards other forms of work.

Ibid., Firestone, 207.

Ibid., 210.