The Future of Housework: The Similarities and Differences Between Making Kin and Making Babies

Title
The Future of Housework: The Similarities and Differences Between Making Kin and Making Babies
Publication Date
2019
Author(s)
Hamilton, Jennifer Mae
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6380-9067
Email: jhamil36@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:jhamil36
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Routledge
Place of publication
United Kingdom
DOI
10.1080/08164649.2019.1702874
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/29692
Abstract
This article critiques Donna Haraway's slogan 'make kin not babies' via a reading of her SF tale 'The Camille Stories'. It does so by considering the relationship between the care labour practices involved in making both kin and babies. The article has two central operations. It is an explicitly eco-social feminist argument against the use of making kin as an uncomplicated theoretical standpoint in the environmental humanities. At the same time, it deconstructs the iconic feminist ambit to be liberated from housework. These parallel operations emerge by characterising making kin as a kind of housework, which is a deeply ironic evaluation of Haraway's slogan. Overall the article is a response to the question: how is the work involved in making kin both the same as and different to the labour of making babies? The answer is constructed through the method of literary close reading, paying attention to genre and plot of 'The Camille Stories' alongside Fiona McGregor's novel Indelible Ink [2010. Melbourne: Scribe Publications] and Quinn Eades's all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body [2015. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing]. These comparative readings enable a reckoning with the gnarly and contradictory implications of 'making kin' across contemporary environmental humanities and feminisms.
Link
Citation
Australian Feminist Studies, 34(102), p. 468-489
ISSN
1465-3303
0816-4649
Start page
468
End page
489
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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