Research Findings Seminar by Ms Chen Peier

Topic: Chinese Women’s Rising Refusal of the Family: Problem, Resistance, and the Post-Family and Post- Capitalistic Work Imaginaries

Presenter: Ms Chen Peier (PhD student)

Chief Supervisor: Prof Pun Ngai

Co-supervisor: Prof Roberto Castillo

Abstract:

My project begins with a tradition of Marxist feminism, which advocates for the abolition of the family to emancipate women from gender hierarchies and division of labor. This call for family abolition means ending it and inventing alternatives outside of it through restructuring familial relations. Therefore, it is a political project about imagining how we live in a post-abolition society and, more importantly, speculating strategies for change.

I theorize the abolition as the destruction and simultaneously imagination and construction of alternatives based on three distinctive fundamentals on which my contributions lie. First, I reconnect the abolition of the family with the refusal of work to see how women’s efforts to abolish the family lend weight to the critique of capitalism. The refusal of work involves two processes: a critical assessment of and a set of practices in changing the present organization of work and work values and refusing the present private form of capital and social relations. I find particular importance in the gender division of labor and its corresponding gender hierarchies because I understand their constitutive centrality to the privatization of the family that underpins the capitalist organization of work. The focal point of analysis here is to disclose the contradiction and the weaving association between social reproduction and production to locate further and cultivate transformative possibilities. In other words, what I am attempting to contribute is to explore a biopolitical model of social reproduction – taking family abolition as an entry– less subordinated to the capital logic and capital social relations as well as less transformed into new forms of work but more to challenge and convert them to fit the life-making logic.

Second, I relocate the family abolition as a feminist project in a freedom-centered framework beyond equality. I argue that women’s liberation is not about gender equality between males and females. Instead, it rests upon a deep conviction of and a strong demand for an exhaustive remaking of gender to pursue a radical transformation and reconfiguration of everyday life in which hierarchical and exploitative institutions and social relations no longer exist. This freedom-based feminist project is collective-action-based, exploring what we can do collectively and what we might become together.

Following this lens of feminist freedom, my third contribution is to register women’s acts of resistance daily. I shift the focus to women’s everyday efforts to practice gender freedom to see how they attempt to abolish the family by forming their self-organized community as a potential alternative. I understand Chinese women’s refusal of the family as an initiative attempt to imagine and act collectively. They start by scrutinizing existing systematic injustices and sufferings embedded within the family, coupled with the refusal of work, and further imagining and practicing a version of alternatives to generate a new future in which life goes beyond work. Feminist freedom is, therefore, rooted in our interdependence, our living together, our embeddedness, and our creative, constructive capacities in feminist and anti-capitalist struggles simultaneously.

All are welcome!

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions ([email protected] or 2616 7469).