#domesticwork

Dear Ai-Jen Poo,

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and I’m dedicating this letter to you – and all the domestic workers caring for our families and others every day.

Like me, you first dipped your feet in organizing while you were a student. While attending Columbia in the late 90s, you organized with CAAAV, an organization serving Asian and Asian American communities in New York.

As many good organizers know, our job is building relationships and trust. While at CAAAV, you reached out to immigrant women service workers and noticed domestic workers kept showing up. You said, “We were just starting to see the abuses facing domestic workers. And once you started to see it, you couldn’t not see it.”

You and I both see the personal as political. You could not allow the exploitation of domestic workers, who are our mothers, sisters and aunties, continue. The injustice gripped you so hard that you spent hours every week walking between commuter railway stops, the kid’s section of bookstores, and playgrounds speaking to domestic workers, sharing about your lives, and building a collective.

seasonal regular event around food community, sharing space and knowledge

For 15 months the gallery will be shared with The Voice of Domestic Workers who will have access to the space to support their ongoing work and collaborations with artists, designers, cultural workers and activists. 

A self-organised network and campaigning group calling for justice and rights for Britain's sixteen thousand migrant domestic workers. The Voice of Domestic Workers provide educational and community activities for domestic workers - including English language lessons, drama and art classes, and employment advice, and mount rescues for domestic workers stuck with abusive employers.​Their work seeks to end discrimination and protect migrant domestic workers living in the UK by providing or assisting in the provision of education, training, healthcare and legal advice.

Let me start this off by saying that, honestly, I have in no way any connection to feelings of motherhood or being a mother-artist as I don’t have any children and do not consider myself an artist. That being said I find the interpretation of Ukeles’s art done by Andrea Liss extremely fascinating. The way in which Ukeles exhibits the interdependencies between class-gender-power-control in her Maintenance art performance events is very impressive and powerful.

Especially the way she openly and explicitly lets motherhood inform her art was and still is very revolutionary. The fact that, even though her mentor told her to choose either mother or artist, she did not submit to patriarchal assumptions of being a mother meaning assuming exclusively the role of mother.

(By the way, this further binary put on her and women in general (mother or artist; paid labour or domestic labour) is so overused and I just wish that we could be done with it already. Can’t we just make it clear to everyone that domestic labour is work and maybe (definitely) deserves to be paid? Why does capitalism have to be like that cat? Or more like why do we still allow it?)

I know that Ukeles work discussed in Liss’s text is located predominately in the late 60s/ early 70s but even today mothers who ‘have the audacity’ to work are heavily criticised for not taking care of their children whereas fathers are praised for spending any time with their children at all. This opens up a whole nother can of implications. A) it places any and every responsibility of childcare on mothers (however, when talking about abortion rights men suddenly should have a say in the matter) and B) it is another way of reinforcing heteronormativity as a family with two mothers then would have no one able to work and the mothers both doing domestic work. Furthermore, it disregards single parents as they most likely have to do all the domestic and paid work.

A quote of Ukeles which really resonates with me is “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” To me, in its beautiful simplicity, it perfectly summarises the way in which revolutions or changes in general always focus on the big things with no regard for the mundane which is going to continue on the way it has always been unless it is specifically addressed. Furthermore, it illustrates the way in which people who think of themselves as ‘better’ have no concept of the maintenance work it takes to keep society going.

Another aspect which seems so simple yet revolutionary is that art can be found in ‘non-art’. In the end, art is only what is defined as ‘art’ and if you define something as art it then simply is/becomes art. This idea in itself is incredibly liberating and empowering as Ukeles’s art of maternal care demonstrates. The power can simply come from becoming visible. In presenting domestic work as a ‘matter-of-fact’ testimony Ukeles makes a claim for domestic work’s place in society. Sara Ruddick ideas of rethinking the maternal can be found within Ukeles art. As stated above mothering is and should be considered work!

To close this off I would like to just state that I have no idea what Ruddick or Liss meant when talking about gender-full and gender-free mothering. I totally support that mothering as domestic care work can be done by all humans disregarding their gender but I do not get how it can be both at the same time. If anyone of you has an idea feel free to share, I’d be interested in your opinions