We invite you to the next meeting of the theoretical section of the Women's Literature Scientific Circle.

As part of the newly established section, we want to focus on materialist feminism, which mainly derives from Marxist tradition. The theories we will examine are interested in historical and contemporary ways of organizing reproductive labor and the transformations of gendered division of labor.
We will take a look at the influential Theory of Social Reproduction in its various – including local – variants. We are also interested in collective forms of resistance and feminist repositories of alternatives: we will address the recent resurgence of family criticism in the texts of Sophie Lewis, Alva Gotby, Helen Hester, and Melinda Cooper, as well as other theoretical proposals by Kathi Weeks, Heather Berg, and Ewa Majewska. We will intertwine contemporary theories with twentieth-century texts: Luce Irigaray, Shulamith Firestone, or texts related to the Wages for Housework campaign.
We want to start with a joint reading of this groundbreaking text for 21st-century feminism, in which Federici proposes a revision of the Marxist genesis of capitalism – tracing historical shifts in social structure (rather than demographic changes caused by the Black Death, the beginning of colonial expansion, enclosure processes), from which she derives an alternative genealogy of capitalist modernity.
For the third meeting, please read the third chapter (“The Great Caliban. The Struggle Against the Rebel Body”) and half of the fourth chapter (up to the end of the subsection Witch-Junting, Woman-Hunting, and the Accumulation of Labor”). For access to the book, please send a message to our email: literaturykobiet.kn@uw.edu.pl.
See you!