{"product_id":"the-home-as-laboratory","title":"The Home As Laboratory: Finance, Housing, and Feminist Struggle","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe home has become a laboratory for capital but also for forms of financial disobedience. \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\" style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003eIt has become increasingly clear that home is not a site of private life and isolation, but a battleground where the conflict over the reorganization of working days, over what even counts as labor, is waged. In the very spaces that capital historically sought to portray as an “unproductive” and apolitical space, and refused to pay for, now emerge new forms of debt and profit extraction. Although the home has been transformed into a favored site of finance’s colonization of social life and of experimentation for capital, this is not a finished process—or one without its resistance. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\" style=\"text-align: start; ; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Home as Laboratory\u003c\/em\u003e traces this story through the links between debt and financial technologies, the violence of property, and reproductive and feminized labor, and everyday forms of feminist organizing. Drawing on militant research and interventions with feminist organizers in informal settlements and renters’ organizations in Buenos Aires, Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese offer a powerful feminist methodology that points to the vital space of the home as an open dispute. They critically analyze the changes that have occurred in domestic routines, in labor dynamics, in the very cuts imposed by the pandemic’s reorganization of the sensible and of logistics. Thus, the home—its spatiality, functioning, and dynamics—suffered from reconfigurations during these novel years of the COVID-19 pandemic that have not ended. Yet, these processes are also resisted by feminist organizations, which have put the question of debt at the forefront of alliance-building, political education, and public interventions. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\" style=\"text-align: start; ; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Home as Laboratory\u003c\/em\u003e provides key insights into transformations in the home leading up to and during the pandemic, showing how what was historically considered an “unproductive space” became a crucial laboratory for capital and new financial technologies. Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese analyze how the home has become a site of battles over what work is considered essential, the intensification of paid and unpaid work, often at the same time, the expansion of new forms of financial extraction, and multiple and interconnected forms of violence. But, importantly, by highlighting the research and action of feminist and housing organizations, they also demonstrate how these processes are being resisted on a daily basis.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5 data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\" style=\"text-align: start; ; white-space: pre-wrap;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWhat People Are Saying\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“In \u003cem\u003eThe Home as Laboratory\u003c\/em\u003e, Cavallero, Gago, and Mason-Deese offer a pithy and urgent feminist analysis of the debt traps posed by the neoliberal precarious home. These debts are extracted disproportionately from the growing informal class of nonwaged gendered care workers whose vital ‘essential work’ became momentarily visible during the global pandemic. The authors examine the aftermath of the pandemic re-ordering of ‘home’ and work life, from their vantage point of the precarious peripheries of Buenos Aires, and offer what are in fact global lessons for feminist mobilization against debt and the financialization of the home.” —Paula Chakravartty, James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor of Media Studies, NYU\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\" data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\"\u003e“The personal is political! Such a foundational feminist statement has undeniable economic implications: capitalism cannot be grasped without understanding the everyday functioning of homes. This does not mean sticking to the standard complaint, ‘Oh, how important but overlooked reproductive work is!’ but instead, identifying how this role is reconstructed and challenged. \u003cem\u003eHome as Laboratory \u003c\/em\u003eshows how homes were used as a laboratory during the COVID-19 pandemic to test new forms of value extraction in financial capitalism. But it goes further: while a reprivatization of reproduction is imposed,  Cavallero, Gago, and Mason-Deese show us that our task is to render visible the ‘domestic territories’ that overflow beyond four walls. There lie the possibilities for imagining and enacting a common responsibility in maintaining life and rebelling against capital—an urgent and collective task.” —Amaia Pérez Orozco, author of \u003cem\u003eThe Feminist Subversion of the Economy\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\" data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\"\u003e“If you remember the COVID-19 pandemic as a suspension of the rules of ordinary life, this compelling book will wake you up. Our confinement indoors was not a refuge from the specters of capital afoot outside. Instead, it allowed our homes to be a proving ground for new capitalist forms that were busy transforming the gendered character of work, shelter, and finance, while turbo-charged currents of debt swirled all around us. \u003cem\u003eHome as Laboratory\u003c\/em\u003e offers a breathtaking analysis!” —Andrew Ross, author of \u003cem\u003eCreditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\" data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\"\u003e“By weaving together detailed social inquiry with innovative theoretical investigations, Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese provide both a model for research and an orientation for future lines of struggle.” —Michael Hardt, author of \u003cem\u003eThe Subversive Seventies\u003c\/em\u003e and coauthor of \u003cem\u003eBolivia Beyond the Impasse\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\" data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\"\u003e“Debt, violence, domestic labor, rent, eviction, fintech, production of value, insecurity, poverty, desperation, love, racism, gender mandates and property titles—what happens when we analyze the circuits of financial capital from the place we call home? This brilliant book by leading scholar-activists Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese is the \u003cem\u003eGrundrisse\u003c\/em\u003e for just such a radical left feminist project. Read it now!” —Wendy Brown, author of \u003cem\u003eIn the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\" data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\"\u003e“Elegantly translated, and lucidly argued, \u003cem\u003eHome as Laboratory \u003c\/em\u003eprovides a much-needed post-COVID-19 analysis of the ways that households have become spaces for experimentation for new dynamics of capital. Expanding existing Global South feminist theory and resistance in practice, Cavallero, Gago, and Mason-Deese forcefully demonstrate how the intensification of social reproduction exploitation and extraction via apparatuses like debt has been brutal. \u003cem\u003eHome as Laboratory\u003c\/em\u003e offers us more than just critique; it inspires autonomous feminist struggle and hope wherever the tentacles of financial capitalism need be severed.” —Jason Thomas Wozniak, assistant professor at West Chester University, codirector of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society, and organizer with Debt Collective\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5 style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\" data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAbout the Authors\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\" data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLucía Cavallero\u003c\/strong\u003e is coauthor of A Feminist Reading of Debt, withVerónica Gago. She has a PhD in Social Science, is a researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and member of the feminist collective Ni Una Menos. Her research focuses on debt and gender. She teaches in the gender studies masters program at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. She is also the coauthor in Spanish of \u003cem\u003e¿Quien Le Debe A Quien? Ensayos Transnacionales De Desobediencia Financiera\u003c\/em\u003e, with Silvia Federici and Verónica Gago (Tinta Limón 2021).Liz Mason-Deese holds a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective, the \u003cem\u003eViewpoint \u003c\/em\u003eMagazine Editorial Collective, and the translation collective Territorio de Ideas. Among other works, she has translated \u003cem\u003eThe Feminist Subversion of the Economy\u003c\/em\u003e by Amaia Pérez Orozco (Common Notions, 2022), \u003cem\u003eA Feminist Reading of Debt\u003c\/em\u003e by Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago (Pluto Press, 2021), and \u003cem\u003eFeminist International: How to Change Everything\u003c\/em\u003e by Verónica Gago (Verso Books, 2020).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eVerónica Gago\u003c\/strong\u003e is the author of\u003cem\u003e Feminist International: How to Change Everything \u003c\/em\u003eand coauthor of \u003cem\u003eA Feminist Reading of Debt\u003c\/em\u003e, with Lucí Cavallero. She is a leader in Argentina's #NiUnaMenos movement (Not One More!), as both a theoretician and an activist. She is a Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, Professor at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Her work is deeply influenced by active participation in the experience of Colectivo Situaciones, whose 19 and 20 and Genocide in the Neighborhood recorded the Argentine social movements around the 2001 debt crisis with remarkable acuity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"white-space: pre-wrap;\" data-rte-preserve-empty=\"true\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLiz Mason-Deese\u003c\/strong\u003e is an editor at \u003cem\u003eViewpoint Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e, a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective, and a member of the translation collective Territorio de Ideas. She is a long-time translator of and participant in feminist movements in Latin America.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Common Notions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44505496682589,"sku":"9781945335075","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0562\/0826\/1213\/files\/TheHomeasLaboratory.jpg?v=1781210417","url":"https:\/\/leftwingbooks.net\/en-us\/products\/the-home-as-laboratory","provider":"Leftwingbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}