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‘They call it love’ with Alva Gotby and the Wages for Housework Collection
June 3, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm BST
Join us for an afternoon workshop where we will hear about Alva Gotby’s new book They Call It Love alongside material from MayDay Rooms’ Wages for Housework collection.
They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. In this groundbreaking book, Alva Gotby calls this work ’emotional reproduction’, unveiling its inherently political nature. It not only ensures people’s well-being but creates sentimental attachments to social hierarchy and the status quo.
Gotby draws on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, to demonstrate that emotion is a key element of capitalist reproduction and to improve the way we relate to one another will require a radical restructuring of society.
The Wages for Housework collection held by MayDay Rooms was donated by Silvia Federici related to the New York Wages For Housework collective and contains publications, posters, flyers, photographs, press cuttings and organisational documents. The documents span the period from the Padova Conference to the publication, in 1981, of the journal Tap Dance.
Spaces are limited so please register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/they-call-it-love-with-alva-gotby-and-the-wages-for-housework-archive-col-tickets-634047662627
Alva Gotby is a writer and organiser living in London. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of West London and an MA in Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University. She has written on feminist theory, social reproduction, housing, emotions, and family, and is active in struggles to abolish prisons and landlords.