CHAPTER NINE

LEAVING HOME: STORIES OF FEMINISATION,

WORK AND NON-WORK
ANGELA DIMITRAKAKI

Art Mobility / Labour Mobility / Gendered Labour

In December 2008, at the onset of what was to be a protracted global
financial crisis, Greece was swept by riots triggered by the police murder
of a 15-year old boy in Athens.1 That same month the female secretary of
the Union of Housekeepres and Cleaners of Attica (the greater populated
region around densely-populated Athens) became the victim of a horrific
acid attack, “of archaic and sexist connotations”, by two or four men as a
response to her political action.2 Born in 1964 in Bulgaria, where she also
got her university degree in History, Konstantina Kuneva moved to Greece
in 2001, where she was to be an economic migrant. The assault on a
migrant union leader as a result of her refusing to accept her “position”,
opting instead to speak out (the attackers symbolically perhaps also forced
acid down her throat) and radicalise other workers, mostly women,
attracted comparatively little international attention. In Greece, where the
financial crisis engendered unprecedently sharp social divisions,
worsening at the time of writing (2013), the case of Kuneva quickly
acquired symbolic status.3 The woman migrant, whose university educa-
tion could not protect her from being demoted to a working-class subject
in the European labour market, became the poster girl of the struggle
against an emergent neo-fascist regime targeting migrant workers at large.
In short, this is a neo-fascist regime implicated in the multi-layered,
biopolitical attack of capital on labour and its principal function is the
victimisation and disempowerment of a transnational labour body locked
into literally obscene labour relations. Being a global project, the attack of
capital on labour appears particularly successful when it finds an
expression at the level of the local, of the national, and, if certain
conditions are met, of the fascisistic. What Kuneva’s story of leaving
home suggests is that the status of diminished citizen rights, or what has
been dubbed the feminisation of citizenship, is in fact interwoven with the
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so-called feminisation of labour. Kuneva’s story is unusual, but not

exceptional, in the global race for devaluing labour with the least possible
resistance, a race where women’s “natural” qualities (endurance, patience,
submissiveness, unconditional commitment) are to be counted on and
exploited to the full. It is a story from the real world rather than the art
world. Yet another story that circulated in the international press also in
2008 compels a rethinking of whether a contemporary feminist politics,
even if located in the artworld, ought to be differentiating between the
two.
In March 2008 Italian artist Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, also
known as Pippa Bacca, began the collaborative project Brides on Tour
with fellow woman artist Silvia Moro.4 The two artists set out to travel
east, dressed in white wedding gowns: they would hitch-hike through
Northern Italy, part of the Balkans, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, arriving
finally to Egypt. The materiality of the journey conveyed an implicit
ideological message (in addition to the explicit one connected with art as
peace pilgrimage): that women art workers had equal access to global
space as a site of (artistic) labour. That the journey commenced on 8
March, or “international woman’s day”, stressed further the possibility of
new, and happy, beginnings allegedly associated with the symbol of the
wedding gowns and the ritual of marriage. On April 11, 2008 this
collaborative artwork, premised on the artists’ mobility and realisable
through the participation of drivers most of whom would be men (it is
mostly men who drive trucks on motorways), came to a halt when Di
Marineo was found raped and strangled in Turkey. The “incident”
happened not too far from cosmopolitan Istanbul and near town Gezbe,
and the perpetrator was a male driver who had picked up the (woman)
artist, as reported by numerous news agencies citing Di Marineo’s sister:
“Her travels were for an artistic performance and to give a message of
peace and of trust, but not everyone deserves trust”.5 Commenting on the
gendered exchange informing “trust”, in this case, was not something that
the media was prepared to do. Such a reading was attempted a couple of
years later by Kurdish female documentary filmmaker, Bingöl Elmas,
who, dressed in black, continued from where the Italian artist had been
brutally murdered to the Syrian border, only to affirm the transnational
journey as an acutely gendered terrain of production. Elmas’s film My
Letter to Pipa (2010, 60 min), funded by European organisations, was
described by Elmas as very hard to make.6 Crucially, the global terrain as
a site of labour was in need of positive feminisation.
 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation 149

Having written elsewhere in greater detail about the gendered politics

of travel, when the latter is a form of artistic labour of great import in the
age of global capital, here I merely wish to claim a connection between the
cases of Kuneva and di Marineo.7 It is a connection that puts a question
mark on recent discourses concerning a re-invigorated and necessary
cosmopolitanism as a demand raised in global capital’s accelerated
modernity. The critique of contemporary art’s ethnographic turn, as put
forward by Hal Foster and Miwon Kwon in the mid to late 1990s,
eventually began being displaced by efforts to chart a critical
cosmopolitanism as a major objective of contemporary art.8 This objective
began being considered when the voices advocating an imagined state of a
universal citizenship grew louder. Theorists such as Nikos Papastergiadis
(Australia) and Marsha Meskimmon (Britain) reclaimed a positively
inflected cosmopolitanism, this time to be articulated “in the real
conditions of existence” (Papastergiadis) and revealing its subject as
“grounded, materially specific and relational” (Meskimmon). 9 But as
Kuneva’s, di Marineo’s and Elmas’s testing of the ground illustrates,
women’s project of leaving home remains fraught with risk. A positively
inflected cosmopolitanism in indeed unthinkable when not premised on a
positive feminisation of the gendered global ground where mobility is
actualised. Di Marineo’s rape and murder during her journey was not a
case of a temporarily defeated cosmopolitanism, a momentary disruption
of an otherwise smooth enactment of a global citizenship pursued through
art mobility. Rather, it was a work accident that re-asserts art making as
historically, rather than essentially, gendered labour.
Kuneva’s and di Marineo’s work accidents are steeped in patriarchal
ideology. In traditional patriarchal parlance, Kuneva and di Marineo were
“asking for it”. By being proactive rather than subservient, by claiming
their right to work within the new conditions defining work (from being a
cleaner to being an artist) in the risk-fraught globalisation on the ground
rather than as a cyber-real, disembodied transnationalism, they exposed
themselves to danger. Worse, the inverted picture provided by the same
logic—within, for example, the value system of liberal feminism—would
have us look at cases of heroic, exceptional individuals who happened to
be women, rather than seek to understand how gendered conditions of
production have shaped the terms of subordination and its negation. Yet
for a materialist feminist history of art (which I see as a politically
meaningful response to the historical specificity of global capital) 10 the
issue is precisely that Kuneva and di Marineo are connected as women
workers introduced into, and active in, the same historical moment. To
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flag up this issue suggests that feminism in art can no longer be about
assisting the careers of women in the art world but about identifying,
comprehending and transforming gendered positions implicated in the
global organisation of production. Overall, production, and work at large,
are now understood as feminised, when “feminisation” delivers principally
negative effects on the workers. A ubiquitous term in the era of global
capital, “feminisation” prompts a consideration of at least what the term
“gendered position” draws into focus and what understandings might
ensue as a result. Moreover, the feminisation of citizenship is interwoven
with the transformation of the labour market overall, seen to rely on
mobile, flexibilised, service-oriented or, more generally, “immaterial”
labour. The unstable, insecure, often seasonal, low-paid work charac-
terised as precarious labour now features regularly in anti-capitalist
thinking, both within and beyond the art world. Yet precarity is of
particular relevance to those involved in the art sector where 9 to 5
schedules are considered anathema to creativity and where “passion for
what you do” is translated into unpaid, voluntary labour fuelling the
industry of internships and the institution of “work experience”. In these
conditions, it is particularly hard to organise and take collective action
against exploitation. Importantly, the term “feminisation of labour” entails
also the expectation that labour becomes individuated, that it is somehow
hidden and made invisible (much like housework) within a system of
production that nevertheless relies on it.
The feminisation of labour is then associated not just with an
organisation of production but with a subject formed around a “core” of
production relations. As Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter stressed in 2009
“in its most ambitious formulation, it [the question of precarity] would
encompass not only the condition of precarious workers but a more
general existential state, understood at once as a source of political
subjection, of economic exploitation and of opportunities to be grasped”,
further noting that “related to this was [is] the question of the gendered
nature of precarious work”. 11 Associated with a historically dictated
condition of being, the subject of such production relations was
apprehended by social theorists Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris
Papadopoulos in terms of “embodied capitalism, a concept leading to
considering the possibilities of deterritorialisation and exodus beyond the
concept of immaterial labour” (my emphasis).12 The crucial point made by
these authors is that bodies at present produce an excess (primarily, of
socially directed action) not captured by productivity. And this leads them
to conceive of “a new model of subjectivity [...]”,13 which is not limited to
 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation 151

what is useful to production, nor to forms of organised exploitation

associated with it.
Contemporary materialist feminism, largely visible outside the art
history of the contemporary, both stresses the centrality of work for
feminist politics today and guards against the gendered blindspots and
amnesia often underlying theorisations of immaterial labour. Feminist
scholar and activist Silvia Federici, associated with the legacy of
Autonomist Marxism, has repeatedly questioned the assertion that through
immaterial labour “capitalism is not only leading us beyond labor, but it is
creating the conditions for the ‘commonization’ of our work experience,
where the divisions are beginning to crumble.”14 Federici argues instead
that this affirmation of precarious labour represents the interests of a
privileged group of male workers in cognitive capitalism. Significantly,
feminist studies of globalisation have stressed how “global indebtedness,
structural adjustment policies, and the hegemony of neoliberal
development strategies have directly intensified women’s triple roles in
production, reproduction, and community management.”15 (my emphasis)
“Community management”, or the prospect of transnational community
building, is indeed a useful term when thinking about what Kuneva’s and
di Marineo’s work shared.
Yet, at present, a feminist art history implementing a transversal
examination of gendered labour—that is, an enquiry into what connects a
migrant female cleaner and a woman artist—exists primarily in the realm
of fantasy. The deferred realisation of such a research project renders
invisible the practices of refusal that women enact vis-à-vis reproductive
work and their flight from domestic space overall. This imaginary (at
present!) research project would set different objectives to those of the
Autonomist tradition, as recently examined by Kathi Weeks who argues
that women’s emancipation from domestic slavery should have never
meant women’s “slavery to an assembly line”.16 I refer to Weeks’ critique
in order to highlight the emergence of a discourse in materialist feminist
research against the glorification of work. True, at present feminist
research on production should not accept unproblematically the
idealisation of paid work for women, when exit routes from capitalism’s
wage and mortgage slavery machine are claimed as forms of ideological
emancipation for both women and men. Yet although this perspective
merits attention especially in the context of a feminist art history, where
art has often been seen as play or non-alienated labour, the nebulous
conditions of production in contemporary capitalism suggest—to me at
least—that feminist research cannot afford to dismiss the aspiration of
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elucidating the shifting conditions of gendered labour—including what

goes on in art. Here, despite feminist art history’s close attention to the
private and public dimensions of women’s lives and work, we note that no
feminist study of contemporary women artists (by which I mean artists
coming of age after 1989) has systematically considered how their labour
may in fact constitute practices of refusal, which may nevertheless be
imbricated in relations instituted through capital.
What I wish then to stress is that for a feminist art history in the early
twenty-first century, the “gendering of work”, a major concern in feminist
analyses of globalisation in the past ten years, must be as important as the
gendering of signifying practices was in the feminist art history of the late
twentieth century—for example, in the 1970s and 1980s.17 A concept such
as “embodied capitalism” can be helpful insofar as it permits us to think
about a co-articulation of external and internal sites defined by capital’s
global drive (precisely as a master-narrative) and resistance to it. In the
remaining part of this chapter, I will look at a very narrow selection of
examples where women’s work generates art forms that accommodate
feminised sites of resistance. I am purposefully deploying the term
“feminised” here—in order to reclaim “feminisation” from its negative
registering as a process of gradual, or even acute, disempowerment or loss
of rights and status. What art, or art-inspired, practices can offer at this
juncture is an effort to identify reclaimed spaces where feminisation may
be associated with emancipation and alternatives to the passive acceptance
of a patriarchal-capitalist status quo. Below I identify two such spaces—
the street and the classroom—where feminist politics turns art and
activism into a dialectic between work and non-work.

Feminising the Street

What I wish to call “feminising the street”—including the square, for
that matter—is a distinct direction in contemporary anti-capitalist politics,
evident in the work of artists such as Marcelo Exposito (Spain/Argentina)
and Moira Zoitl (Austria) to that of collectives such as Precarias a la
deriva (Spain) and Mujeres Públicas (Argentina). The difference between
Exposito and Zoitl, on the one hand, and Precarias a la deriva and Mujeres
Públicas on the other, is that the first two partake of a politics of
knowledge relying heavily on documentation whereas the latter two (the
two collectives) take the street as the actual theatre of operations,
explicitly prioritising activism over the representation of action. Exposito,
 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation 153

working with Nuria Vila, has registered the actual use of codes of
femininity by protesters in demonstrations staging anti-capitalist action. In
works such as “Tactical Frivolity + Rhythms of Resistance” (2007)
Exposito and Vila have drawn connections between the Suffragette body
and the theatrical-political deployment of sensual (and often pink-coded)
excess associated with the stereotype of an unhinged femininity. In
projects such as “Exchange Square” (2002-2009) Zoilt has registered
Asian domestic workers’ struggles to bring forth a public existence (as
opposed to their housebound invisibility). Precarias a la deriva, a
collective formed at the aftermath of industrial action in Madrid, articulate
a very complex politics by queering—or possibly feminising—the male-
articulated, earlier Situationist project in the temporality of the
contemporary. 18
In 2003 Mujeres Públicas formed in Buenos Aires, two years after the
collapse of Argentina’s economy that resulted in many taking to the streets
in protest. Hard perhaps to imagine at the time, street protest cultures
generated during national economy meltdowns (as witnessed in Argentina)
or otherwise connected with economic inequality (such as the
transnational, ongoing Occupy movement) were to become a hallmark of
early twenty-first-century crisis capitalism. The impact of such turmoil on
art and feminist activism is only beginning to raise lines of enquiry in art
history. Mujeres Públicas admit that forming a collective was also
intended to challenge the view, often encountered in progressive contexts
as well, “that feminism is not politics”.19 But the question of course was,
and is: what kind of politics can feminism be when seeking to re-define (as
it must) the regime of politics? In their first formal introduction to the
collective’s activities in English in the London-based intermational
feminist art journal n.paradoxa, Mujeres Públicas acknowledged also an
interrupted feminist art politics from the 1960s onwards in Argentina,
though they appear very conscious of the new circumstances to which they
respond.20 Picking up the thread of past feminist work does not just mean
entering, but rather re-inventing, a feminist continuum, and it is in this
context where a positive re-scripting of feminisation can tactically occur.
In 2008 Mujeres Públicas participated in the feminist symposium
Privilege Walk and the roving anti-capitalist European Social Forum, both
in Malmö, giving as the collective’s raison d’ être a feeling of “discor-
dance” with un unfolding social reality. Arguing “we went out to the
streets to destroy”, and self-identifiying as “women” and “lesbians”, they
also declared “we went out in the streets to construct”. And yet,
acknowledging the contradictions facing their practice (crossing art and
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activism), they stated a preference: “Mujeres Públicas is defined as a

feminist (not a lesbian) group, because we understand that feminism
implies the defense of the rights of all women without making any
distinctions”.21 The above offers the key operating principle of a new form
of feminist art activism: subject-positions are not invoked to safeguard
difference and articulate singularity but to justify the social demand for
solidarity, of acting with others (lesbians and heterosexual women) to
transform a social subject that exists despite its heterogeneity.22 Mujeres
Públicas enter, or exit into, the street as a space already claimed by the
heterogeneity of contemporary protest cultures.
Despite however their open self-identification as feminists, Mujeres
Públicas share, with much anti-capitalist theory, a suspicion towards
practices and contexts of institutional representation. In the Malmö text,
they reject the museum (where feminist art historians have focused their
energies in order to enable women artists’ access to it) as the “space of the
legitimated word”, “the nameable” and “the showable”. De-legitimation of
the obvious—often engaging tactics of parody where a concept is re-
signified against its dominant meaning—has been central to the
collective’s art activism. Most of the collective’s work takes the form of
provocative text and drawings entering the street space as posters or
confrontational and unsolicited dialogical situations—when, for example,
they burst into a public gathering, asking people what they think about
heterosexuality. In their work method, the act of asking questions is a
consciousness-raising activity prioritising risky confrontation over the safe
distance that didacticism, imbricated with the authority of the teacher or
the vanguard artist, connotes. In describing their very presence in the street
as a means of “questioning bourgeois morals”, they explicitly characterise
such morals as experiments on how to keep “us away from the street”. In
the Malmö essay, who this “us” refers to is left purposefully vague: it can
refer to the domestication of women but also to all those who succumb to
domestication as an effect of technologies creating ultimately private—if
interactive—individuals. The collective has made much use of the concept
of colonisation, drawn in this case from the continent’s history. Their
critique of western feminism is really an attack on academic feminism’s
alliance with post-structuralism and the denial of “truth politics”—an
alliance seen to sabotage the feminist cause in the Argentinian social
context defined by the truths of, first, dictatorial rule and, a bit later,
economic terror.
Yet Mujeres Públicas also associate “colonisation” with the role of
ideology in the re/production of a feminine subject characterised by
 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation 155

passivity. “Colonised Women” (2004) consisted of publicly placed posters

presenting instances of women’s bodies and minds occupied by patriarchal
religion. A year later, the poster “Home Work” (2005) brought to the
street the issue of women’s support of capitalist economy as unpaid and
super-exploited home workers. Like most of the group’s posters, this one
also made use of an accessible image-text style, combining figurative
cartoon-like illustrations and short textual descriptions to offer a
cumulative “visual effect” of a more ethereal economic reality: if time is
money, here’s the time that women spend serving others for free. In 2009
Mujeres Públicas wrote—collaboratively—the book Choose your own dis-
adventure: The incredible and sad story of any one of us, as a different
format for exposing how women’s lives are typically produced through
consecutive pseudo-choices (“available” only to that one gender). 23 The
narrative satirised the postmodern literary trope of the reader being invited
to choose her own turn of events/fiction/ending. The Spanish text narrated
and interwove the lives of the collective’s five original members (since
2009 only the three core members remain in the group) in an effort to
expose the myth of individual achievements, failures and “life & career”
choices. The implicit assertion that ideology, as internalised values,
produces gendered biopolitical effects that in turn crystallise as subject
positions is really what defines the work that Mujeres Públicas perform in
public. Indeed, Mujeres Públicas consider the diverse life experiences,
skills and expertise brought by different members key to their
identification with autonomous social action rather than autonomous art—
describing themselves as a “feminist group” operating in the terrain of
“visual activism”. The public is always invited to take ownership of the
work and “re-edit it”, as a strategy that has created “an important
distribution and re-appropriation network […] in different provinces of the
country and throughout other countries of Latin America”. 24 The
collective’s debut global art-world appearance comes only in 2012, on an
invitation from Cuba’s Havana Biennial. The decision to accept the
invitation came after much discussion, in the knowledge of the specific
biennial’s alternative character but also out of the need to look outward
and expand the sites of struggle.25
Crucially, the acceptance by Mujeres Públicas that creative work may
not be a source of income, so prevalent in a Post-Fordist regime of
generalised production, is in this instance an enabling factor for sustaining
a relationship between art and activism, as activities roughly
corresponding and yet irreducible to the sites of work and non-work.
Mujeres Públicas’ project of transforming public consciousness while
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seeking to maintain a distance from the art market and the exhibition
circuit as distribution mechanisms (with a price to pay) implies the
deployment of different criteria for evaluating a successful feminist
practice: here “feminist practice” marks a space of doing between life and
work, being limited to neither. On the other hand, the collective appears
aware that in its specific urban reality, many women, whom Mujeres
Públicas wish to address, remain domesticated. Subjugated to the
persistently undervalued work of care and reproduction, these women may
be crossing the urban space where Mujeres Públicas place their action but
may be less inclined to occupy it politically, as feminists. The relationship
between private and public, a cardinal issue of second-wave feminism, can
be seen to underlie Mujeres Públicas’ project of feminising the street, its
centrality apparently unchallenged by the shift of focus from finding a
language of representation to activating participation. Are Mujeres
Públicas in the street as the site of women’s symbolic labour time-outside-
the-home? Or are they there because like all activists, and unlike
advertisers and IKEA designers, they have no access to the still private
space where women are drawn to “become women” through the
invisibility of their labour? Whereas posing, and answering, difficult
questions has been a staple of a developing feminist intellect (not least in
more analytical and deconstructive moments of feminist art history),
Mujeres Públicas’ commitment to art as activism begins from the opposite
direction: in effect, the question “how we can appropriate “feminisation”
for a range of politically positive meanings?” arises as an outcome rather
than a precondition of their practice.

Feminising the Classroom

Swedish collective MFK, or Malmö Free University for Women,
existed from 2006 to 2011 and was described by its two founding
members, artists Lisa Nyberg and Johanna Gustavsson, as “an ongoing
participatory art project and a feminist organisation for critical knowledge
production”.26 In 2011 MFK published Do the right thing!, a bi-lingual
(Swedish-English) manual explaining their practice and aspirations.
Above all, the manual conveys the experience of experimenting with what
feminist labour as grassroots action might mean today. MFK was an
implicit acknowledgement that education (that is, its absence or co-
optation into a broadly antifeminist culture) is at the heart of women’s
oppression globally and an explicit acknowledgement of the “academi-
 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation 157

sation” of feminist knowledge (a premise they share with Mujeres

Públicas) and of the “industrialisation” of education advanced in neo-
liberal Europe.
MFK started with no funding, by establishing a nomadic counter-
institution free to congregate wherever it was possible; moved on to a joint
bank account, applied and received grants and, crucially, accepted full
responsibility for the “failure” to ultimately sustain a steady stream of
public funding. Their work was often dismissed by funding bodies on the
grounds that it was not “enough art/culture oriented,” and “not
democratic”, implementing instead “different forms of separatism”. 27
MFK was able to accommodate its two founders’ widely divergent
approaches to economic survival, with one of the two artists (Johanna)
enhancing her personal links to the art world while the other (Lisa)
returning to a day-job—a return deemed necessary for sustaining her
ideological independence. What I wish to note here is that the attempt to
protect the collective, community-building project from folding forced an
acceptance of precarious work conditions elsewhere.
The pervasive ideology of project ownership, or artistic authorship—
that is, initiating one’s own “work” rather than appearing as a follower of
another artist’s initiative—made it hard to draw closer fellow artists. MFK
saw the art institution as a “resource” which had to enable both the
collective’s political intervention but, crucially, also MFK's visibility
within “art history”. And finally, MFK focused on “strategic separatism”,
“intersectionality”, “collective dependency” and “utopia”—concepts said
to inform both the ways in which the collective sought to collaborate with
others and its philosophy of radical pedagogy. This alternative art-making
prioritised duration, interdisciplinarity (in this case, of feminist and
politically engaged research) and the commitment to generating feminist
responses to contemporary problems—MFK’s workshop “Culture, Labour
and Neoliberalism—How do we respond?” (9-10 May 2007) is an
indicative example.
In practical terms, MFK have stressed that “it wasn’t until we got a
place of our own that we realised how important it was to have a physical
place for work”.28 A physical space permitted MFK to borrow technical
equipment when needed, to receive donated books and journals. Their
pedagogical practice has been very coherent and involved “learning by
doing”, sharing ideas and rejecting competition, “mak[ing] what you can
from what you have” rather than waiting for funding to arrive, refusing to
promote consensus but embrace conflict instead, a commitment to
experimentation with different formats for activating a learning process,
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and the implementation of a “yes-policy (always say yes to submitted

proposals) but where “a yes is followed by a how?”29 The publication of a
“manual”, where self-reflection and analysis, organised into discrete
chapters each of which concludes with bullet points offering structured
advice based on the collective’s experience, is in its own right an answer
to this “how?”.
In a paper delivered at the University of Gothenburg titled “Essentially
Experimental?”, MFK described “intersectionalty as a theoretical tool to
formulate critical knowledge production and strategic separatism as a way
to practice intersectionality”.30 Soon enough, and as a response to external
enquiries concerning the right to participate in MFK activities, the MFK
“all women welcome” policy was re-scripted: first, as “open to anyone
who identifies as woman”, and soon after as “for and by any persons who
now or at some point identify as a woman”.31 Practising other forms of
separatism, and most notably class separatism, threw up similar kind of
issues, as the MFK class sub-group pondered over imaginary scenarios
where a choice would have to be made between admitting a working-class
man or a middle-class woman to the collective. In essence, what the
pedagogy espoused by MFK marked was its distance from entrenched
“progressive” political correctness as the cornerstone and smokescreen of
exclusion encountered in the capitalist “knowledge factory”.32
It is indeed hard to articulate an ideological context for MFK’s
strategic separatism, apart from reiterating the Swedish state’s partial
success at implementing gender equality or ameliorating class and racial
forms of inequality (as the Stockholm riots of May 2013 were to aptly
demonstrate). 33 On the one hand, MFK’s holding on to the identity
“woman” made apparent the will to keep women central to a problematic
addressing an aggressive, viral contemporary capitalism. Yet separatism
entailed also in this case a strong pull towards identity and despite the
impulse to actively queer processes of self-identification as “woman” and
to encourage self-identification (and, by implication, the positive
feminisation of a student body), it is questionable whether MFK managed
to avoid the pitfalls of identity politics. Re-scripting the definition
“woman” to foster inclusivity could expand indefinitely in a social context
of liberal politics (such as Sweden), but as the MFK class group dilemmas
made apparent, it was unimaginable that participation could be scripted
along the lines of “open to anyone who feels or has felt working-class”. In
this imaginary scenario, a solidarity based on someone’s material
conditions and poverty would have been seriously challenged by the
presence of those whose class privilege was an outcome of making other
 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation 159

people poor primarily through labour relations. This means that in striving
for solidarity through a feminisation of learners’ identity, as a pedagogical
project in its own right, MFK overlooked the connection between
difference, power and exploitation. Overall, it is easier to advocate “new
and unholy alliances” (between women and feminised subjects) by
practicing a pragmatism that seeks to challenge access to privilege rather
than undo relations of economic exploitation embedded in how we work.
Therefore questions concerning the limits of projects of feminisation
remain, or are indeed complicated by class politics.

On Feminisation, Work and Non-Work

The stories of Mujeres Públicas and MFK differ significantly fro m
those of Kuneva and di Marineo, though in reality, all four narratives
presented here involve women seeking to generate, and implement, radical
ideas and ignite the desire for protest, action and freedom in other women.
The gendered experiences of “doing” followed in this chapter are about
how women make things happen outside the home—and how, in the last
instance, such actions are either about more women claiming their right to
exist, as productive subjects, outside the home or else address the
conditions these women themselves encountered in leaving home.
The dilemmas faced by Mujeres Públicas and MFK suggest that a
feminisation of the street and of the classroom—of women’s action outside
the home and where politics is shaped and acted out—is fraught with
contradictions and difficult choices, which cannot be smoothed out
through an appeal to collectivism or what Federici addressed as a (false)
process towards “the commonization of work”. As we saw, in the realm of
art committed to radical politics by example (by how and where the artists
act), the main dilemma faced is whether to opt for situating such action in
a grey zone between work and non-work—since the artists receive wages
from other forms of labour. As long as austerity policies are the dish of the
day served transnationally, we can only expect a greater degree of
acceptance of the fact that our most genuinely productive energies will
remain formally outside remunerated labour. What then it means to be an
artist in these conditions, when “artist” has been a professionalised identity
for so long, is worth rethinking—beyond the terms “day job” and “my
passion”.
Has radical art become a route for affirming the ideology that sustains
a move towards more unpaid productivity, and is feminism in the arts
160 Chapter Nine

implicated in this? Or is the work as non-work undertaken by Mujeres

Públicas and MFK a textbook illustration of Tsianos and Papadopoulos’s
argument that “a new model of subjectivity [...]” is being engendered: one
“which is neither effect of production nor is it identical with the conditions
of its [work’s] exploitation”? Should we see in this radical art—
questioning the artist as professional but also questioning the amateur
culture that has in the past typically assimilated and neutralised women’s
creativity—a rehearsal for how we can overcome the regime of work as
the very framework of our productivity? If so, does feminism have
something to suggest here? Is crafting a collectively articulated space of
non-work a practice of refusal of both capital-controlled labour and the
invisibility of housework? Although answers to these questions are not
immediately available, we can begin by reminding ourselves that women
have a long history of doing hidden work, or work that is not recognised as
such at all but is nevertheless vital to the reproduction of capitalism. Yet
the projects of positive feminisation flagged up here can also be seen as
platforms where critical forms of visibility are pursued. Yet the visibility
sought is not—when achieved—conferred to the artist but to issues as well
as to the subjects on whose side the artist enacts her political positioning.
In a contemporary context, projects of positive feminisation entail an
activist dimension that is not necessarily compatible with access to the
identity of the professional artist and the choices this identity is typically
premised on. The precarious relations of Mujeres Públicas and MFK with
the art institution, where professional identities are arbitrated, emanate
from an ambivalence vis-à-vis the latter. Yet, following Federici, this can
hardly be received as an instance of capitalism “moving us beyond
labour”. Artistic labour continues to be ratified as such in specific and
institutionally delimited sites, if it is to be remunerated. How then the
demand for securing the right to work (i.e. make a living) as feminist
artists is to be reconciled with the demand to safeguard the desired
autonomy of feminist interventions is hardly answerable at present, in a
global context where the very definition of production, and its connection
with traditional models of either work or non-work, are subject to
redefinition. Looking at how feminist politics intersects with the spheres
of art, community building and activism can at least suggest an expanded
terrain of material and ideological investments in pushing against old
boundaries but also evaluating, politically, the ones that take their place.
 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation 161

Notes
1
On the events and their international visibility see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
2008_Greek_riots. Accessed 27 June 2013.
2
See Chris Walsh, “Women on the Left: Konstantina Kuneva”, International
Socialist Group (Scotland), 12 February 2013, http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/
index.php/2013/02/women-on-the-left-konstantina-kuneva/. Accessed 27 June
2013.
3
See Effie Avdela et al, Επισφαλής εργασία, ‘γυναικεία εργασία’: Παρέμβαση με
αφορμή την Κωνστανίνα Κούνεβα [Precarious Work, ‘Women’s Work’: An
Intervention on account of Konstantina Kuneva] (Athens: Nefeli, 2009). In 2014
Kuneva was among the non-party members running with Greek left party SYRIZA
in the May elections to the European Union parliament.
4
For a discussion of this project see “Brides on Tour by Silvia Moro and Pippa
Bacca” (© 2007. Museum of Contemporary Art Republic of Srpska) at
http://msurs.org/en/index.php?sid=content&cid=27. Accessed 1 August 2012. On
this site the itinerary given is: “ITALY • 2008, 8 MARCH: Leaving from Byblos
art Gallery, Verona, Italy. Meeting with Francesco Giusti, photographer • Venice ,
9 MARCH • Nova Gorica/Gorizia (10- 12 MARCH) SLOVENIA (12 MARCH) •
Ljubljana CROATIA • Zagabria BOSNIA (13-16 MARCH) • Banja Luka •
Sarajevo BULGARIA (17-19 MARCH) • Sofia TURKEY (20-25 MARCH / 26-29
MARCH) • Istanbul • Ankara SYRIA (30-31 MARCH) • Damascus LEBANON -
(1-4 APRIL) meeting with photographer JORDAN - (9-15 APRIL) EGYPT (21
APRIL) • Cairo RETURN by air or ship”.
5
Quotation from “Missing Italian Woman Artist Found Dead in Turkey”,
Associated Press, 12 April 2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/
0,2933,350970,00.html. Accessed 10 April 2009.
6
A. Saglam, “Continuing the Journey of Peace Bride Pippa Bacca”, Hürriyet Daily
News, Istanbul (February 18, 2010), http://www.asminfilm.com/Basin-
detay.aspx?cid=25. Accessed 10 June 2011.
7
See Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A
Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). A
more detailed discussion of Mujeres Públicas and MFK, discussed in this essay,
can be found in the concluding chapter of the book, where however the link to
practices of feminisation is not pursued.
8
I am referring to Foster’s essay “The Artist as Ethnographer” in his Return of the
Real, 1996; and Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another, 2004. There have been
many criticisms of cosmopolitanism as a viable position in the age of capitalist
globalisation. See for example Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtis, eds., The
Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London and New York:
Routledge, 1996). Numerous re-appraisals of cosmopolitanism have taken place
beyond the confines of art in the past decade. See J. Nederveen Pieterse,
“Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda”, Development and Change
37/ 6 (November 2006): 1247-57.
162 Chapter Nine

9
See Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity
Press 2012) and Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan
Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2010).
10
See Angela Dimitrakaki, “Gendering the Multitude: Feminist Politics,
Globalization and Art History”, in Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric
Experience, eds. Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2013).
11
Ibid.
12
Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos, “Who’s Afraid of Immaterial
Workers? Embodied Capitalism, Precarity, Imperceptibility” (2006), http://preclab.
net/text/06-TsianosPapadopoulos.pdf. Accessed 18 October 2011.
13
Tsianos and Papadopoulos, “Who’s Afraid of Immaterial Workers?”.
14
Silvia Federici, “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint”, Variant 37
(Spring/Summer 2010): 23.
15
Richa Nagar, Victoria Lawson, Linda McDowell, and Susan Hanson, “Locating
Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization”,
Economic Geography 78/3 (July 2002): 257-284. Here 262.
16
Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics
and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University, 2011): 124.
17
Nagar et al., “Locating Globalization”, 271.
18
See Precarias a la deriva, “Adrift through the Circuits of Feminized Precarious
Work” (April 2004), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/precarias1/en. Accessed 27
June 2013.
19
Mujeres Públicas in electronic interview with the author, 7 December 2011.
20
See María Laura Rosa, “Our Bodies, Our History: Mujeres Públicas’ Activism in
the City of Buenos Aires”, n.paradoxa 30 (July 2012): 5-11.
21
Quotes taken from “Paper read at the European Social Forum, Malmö and
Privilege Walk Symposium, organised by the Malmö, Sweden 2008 YES!
Association and Lilith Performance Studio”, http://www.mujerespublicas.com.ar/.
Accessed 23 June 2011.
22
One example were the papers presented at the Common Differences symposium
held in Tallinn in May 2010 and especially Katja Kobolt’s paper “Feminist
Curatorial Practices and Feminist Canon-Building Strategies as Political Actions.”
Kobolt was co-director and programmer of the City of Women Festival in
Ljubljana and is currently co-coordinator of the Cross Border Experience project at
the Peace Institute Ljubljana. On the symposium see http://common-
differences.artun.ee. Accessed 8 December 2011.
23
An engaging review of the book appeared on the blog “Just Seeds: Artists’ Co-
operative”, bringing together artists from North America and Mexico. Just Seeds
stresses the significance of a feminist art collective appropriating the novel motif to
produce a consciousness-raising narrative.
See http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/02/choose_your_own_dis_adventure.html.
Accessed 8 December 2011.
24
“Choose Your Own Dis-Adventure”.
 Leaving Home: Stories of Feminisation 163

25
This issue is discussed in more detail in Rosa, “Our Bodies, Our History:
Mujeres Públicas’ Activism in the City of Buenos Aires”, published when the
Havana Biennial was already over.
26
See http://mfkuniversitet.blogspot.gr/. Accessed 27 June 2013.
27
MFK, Do the right thing!, A manual from MFK (Malmö 2011): 22.
28
Ibid., 10.
29
Ibid., 14.
30
Ibid., 41.
31
Ibid., 33-34.
32
See Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate
University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press,
2000). A more Deleuzian approach, drawing a connection between the university
and the art world, is assumed by Gerald Raunig in his recent Factories of
Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (New York: Semiotext(e), 2013).
33
See “2013 Stockholm Riots”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Stockholm_
riots. Accessed 27 June 2013.