Mothering against motherhood: doula work, xenohospitality and the idea of the momrade

Today, a new vein of queer Marxist-feminist family-abolitionist theorising is reviving contemporary feminists’ willingness to imagine, politically, what women's liberationists in the 1970s called ‘mothering against motherhood’. Concurrently, the jokey portmanteau ‘momrade’, i.e. mom + comrade, has circulated persistently in the twenty-first century on online forums maintained by communities of mothers and/or leftists. This article asks: what if, in the name of abolishing the family, we took the joke entirely seriously? What makes a ‘mom’ a ‘momrade’, or vice versa? In what ways does the work of reproduction, conceivably, actively participate in class struggles, producing new worlds (and un-producing others)? How do the collective arts of mothering unmake selves? And how does the verb ‘to mother’ work to abolish the present state of things? The chosen point of departure for exploring these questions is the concept of xenohospitality; a term I borrow from Helen Hester – one of the authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto – who defines it as openness to the alien, a definition I link closely to ‘comradeliness’. Further, the meaning of the term ‘family abolition’, here, is aptly summed up by the formula ‘xenofam ≥ biofam’; to abolish the family is not to destroy relationships of care and nurturance, but on the contrary, to expand and proliferate them. Reflecting on the conditions of possibility for such universally xenofamilial – that is to say, comradely – kin relations, this article implicitly argues for utopia(nism) in feminist kinship studies. It grounds this utopianism, however, in first-hand experiences of informal ‘death doula’ labour. The labour of mothering one's mother is offered as a potential practice of un-mothering oneself and others. In fact, the argument pivots on these auto-ethnographic observations about maternal bereavement, because the event of the author's mother's death interrupted and intruded upon the feminist theorising involved.

Counter Class and Counter Identity: Confrontations of Power in Tony Harrison's Poetry

Tony Harrison is a contemporary British author whose poetry is highly influential in encountering the issue of identity and class struggles. As a working-class student, Harrison was subject to prejudice and discrimination for his working-class accent. This paper investigates two of his highly admired poems, “On Not Being Milton” and “Them & uz” from a cultural standpoint, mainly concentrated on John Fiske’s theory of power and language. The role of language in the context of his poems is probed. The multiaccentuality of language is represented in his poetry and these two poems become the site of struggle for the imperialising and the localising power. It is intended to illuminate the sought space of identity which Harrison is constantly referring to as a member of the English working-class society. Lastly, the social and personal relationship between Harrison and Milton has been explored positing Harrison in a transcendental context in his relationship with Milton.

How To Refuse Research from The Ruins of Its Own Production

Writing in 1965, Mario Tronti’s claim was that the greatest power of the working class is refusal: the refusal of work, the refusal of capitalist development, and the refusal to bargain within a capitalist framework. One can see how this "strategy of refusal" has been utilised in all sorts of instances by social movements, but how does this play out now in the context of wider struggles over autonomy today – not just in terms of labour power and class struggles; but also intersectional feminism and queer politics; race and decolonialism, geopolitics, populism, environmental concerns; and the current pandemic? In what ways does a refusal of production manifest itself in contemporary artistic, political, social, cultural, or other movements? And, how might a refusal of certain forms of production come together with a politics of care and "social closeness" – also when thinking of how research itself might be refused?

Relações étnico-raciais: construção da dimensão pedagógica do cinema negro e a afirmação positiva da africanidade

The article demonstrates the centrality of the academic concern, in the discipline Ethnic-Racial Relations, which is given by an observation of the different Brazilian filmographies. A Chanchada was the paroxysm of the stereotype of racial inferiority of the image of the Iberian-Afro-American as a rural ethnic demand of Amerindian heritage in the progress-averse Jeca Tatu. To affirm the racial superiority of the imagetic hegemony of the Euro-hetero-macho-authoritarian as a sign of divine perfection expressed in the priest as God's representative. Racial domination determined by the power of euroheteronormativity. Cinema Novo was the trend that the black man became an aesthetic referent in the Marxist-influenced Glauberian realization. In the syntax of Cinema Novo in the semiotics of class struggles, the black man is a proletarian expression and the white man configures the bourgeoisie. The ontological struggle to affirm the positive image of minorities is a projection of class struggles. In Black Cinema, the Africanity that is a reference in Cinema Novismo conquers the position of subject in this cinema as the author of its own history. It concludes that it is in the Pedagogical Dimension of Black Cinema, as epistemic cinema that the minority builds the image of positive affirmation representing the visual of the decanted place of speech, as inclusive contemporaneity, overcoming the excluding anachronism.

A PASSIVIDADE ESTRATEGICAMENTE CONSTRUÍDA: o consenso contemporâneo a partir de categorias gramscianas.

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a expansão da dominação capitalista e avanço do conservadorismo em busca de hegemonia exercida por meio da construção de passividade, via implementação de políticas sociais focalizadas ecompensatórias para atender as exigências das classes subalternas por meio de consenso e do estabelecimento de estratégias de contenção da luta de classes. Nesse sentido, os procedimentos teóricos utilizados foram a análisebibliográfica das categorias gramscianas expostas nos cadernos do cárcere. O artigo aponta, ainda, elementos que merecem aprofundamento para estabelecimento de uma urgente reforma intelectual e moral das massas como expressão de resistência, tendo em vista a expansão da dominação burguesa com consensos que dissipam a construção de um projeto alternativo para os trabalhadores, com retrocesso de conhecimento, e, principalmente, de lutas.Palavras-chave: Passividade. Lutas de classes. Hegemonia. Consenso.THE STRATEGICALLY CONSTRUCTED PASSIVITY: the contemporary consensus from Gramscian categoriesAbstractThe objective of this article is to analyze the expansion of capitalist domination and the advance of conservatism in search of hegemony exercised through the construction of passivity, through the implementation of social policies focused and compensatory to meet the demands of the subaltern classes, through consensus and establishment strategies of contention of the class struggle. In this sense, the theoretical procedures used were the bibliographical analysis of the Gramscian categories exposed in the notebooks of the jail. It points out elements that merit deepening to establish an urgent intellectual and moral reform of the masses as an expression of resistance, in view of the expansion of bourgeois domination with consensuses that dissipate the construction of an alternative project for the workers. With retreat of knowledge, and, mainly, of fights.Keywords: Passivity. Class struggles. Hegemony. Consensus.

Neoliberal Politics in Turkey

This chapter traces the multiple trajectories of neoliberal politics in Turkey from 1980 onward by putting economic and sociological dynamics of neoliberalism in dialogue with ethnographic and anthropological analyses of its political configurations. The first two sections trace the two formative moments of neoliberal politics in Turkey as responses to the crisis conjunctures of the 1970s and 1990s. These sections provide an account of neoliberal politics informed by class struggles at the macro-historical level. The subsequent two sections analyze the same historical periods at the level of micropolitics from two perspectives: (a) the formations of violence characterizing the enactment of neoliberalization processes, and (b) the subjective processes through which neoliberalism harnesses economies of desire. The final section returns to the macro-historical level and offers critical reflections regarding the direction of the economic politics that is emerging as the institutional architecture of neoliberal governmentality is being dismantled under Erdoğan’s “new Turkey.”