Art Metropole

05 Sep. 2017

EMILIA-AMALIA Session XI: Wages for Housework—The Canadian Context

Facilitated by Helena Reckitt, with special guest Christina Rousseau. Presented in collaboration with the Blackwood Gallery in tandem with the exhibition “Habits of Care”

Time

6 - 9pm

Art Metropole is pleased to host EMILIA-AMALIA’s upcoming session focusing on the global campaign Wages for Housework. This transversal movement highlighted the capitalist appropriation of unpaid domestic labour, and demanded its remuneration by the state. The session highlights Wages for Housework’s actions in and around Toronto and Montreal in the 1970s and 1980s, which included the Women’s Liberation Bookmobile, the paper “The Autonomy of Black Lesbian Women,” by Wilmette Brown of Black Women for Wages for Housework, and the manifesto “Fucking is Work,” by Wages Due Lesbians. These activities aimed to meet the intersecting needs of lesbian feminists, migrant workers, domestic labourers, and Black and working class women.

Following the format of the Feminist Duration Reading Group in London, which Reckitt initiated in 2015 to bring to light feminisms from outside the Anglo-American canon, this session will centre on an out-loud reading activity. The meeting aims to open up discussions on how feminism operates transnationally, the politics of undervalued care work and what it means to “take care.” No pre-reading or preparation is required. This session is part of an ongoing exchange of ideas, activities and texts between EMILIA-AMALIA in Toronto and the Feminist Duration Reading Group in London.

To participate in this session, please RSVP to info@emilia-amalia.com. For the Facebook event, click here.

EMILIA–AMALIA is an exploratory working group that employs practices of citation, annotation, and autobiography as modes of activating feminist art, writing and research practices. Through readings, screenings, discussions, and writing activities, the group will investigate historical and intergenerational feminisms, as well as relationships of mentorship, collaboration, and indebtedness between artists, writers, thinkers, curators, and practitioners. In tracing these lines, the group aims to elucidate the histories of feminism that have been obscured and overlooked in the narratives of 1970s, or “second-wave” feminism that we have inherited.

EMILIA–AMALIA critically examines how we fit in with these past iterations, and also, how we might update and extend them so that they can respond to contemporary questions. Motivated by a desire to think through these questions collaboratively, each monthly meeting is structured around a text, a conversation, and a writing activity.

EMILIA–AMALIA is an open group that invites all levels of engagement. We are all experts. No one is an expert. Expertise is not expected.

EMILIA–AMALIA is initiated by Cecilia Berkovic, Yaniya Lee, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, Leila Timmins, and cheyanne turions.

emilia-amalia.com

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