On Domestic Fantasies and Anti-work Politics: A Feminist History of Complicating Automation

Abstract:In this article we place the discussions of automation in post-work imaginaries within and alongside feminist critiques and understandings of domestic technology. Structured in three parts, the first surveys debates on the future of work, showing how feminist materialist critiques of technology would lend themselves to an anti-work rather than post-work politics. The second focuses on both historical and contemporary feminist critiques of domestic automation to situate the post-work condition in this longer lineage. In the final section, we sketch the contours of a distinctly feminist anti-work imaginary drawing on Dolores Hayden’s work on collective domestic settlements and Rachel Maine’s work on amateur uses and repurposing of obsolete technologies in the name of a politics of pleasure.