Insurgent Domesticities - Incite at Columbia University

As a concept, home has been used as a boundary-forming device to identify, homogenize, normalize and exclude. Composed of family and nation, and attendant notions of their sanctity, home is no longer open to reinterpretation and reconfiguration; it is pressured as a lived space.

Insurgent Domesticities is a working group under the Center for the Study of Social Difference theme, Women Creating Change, which engages distinguished feminist scholars from diverse fields who focus on contemporary global problems affecting women and on the roles women play in addressing these problems.

This group brings into focus the insurgent environments, objects, and practices that make up the maintenance, creation, labor, and intimacies of home. It investigates the more processual aspects of domesticity to interrogate the politics of home through histories of solidarity, disobedience, stealth, and militancy, from the scale of the clothesline to that of the state.

Insurgent Domesticities indexes and reveals inequalities and injustices cohering in the social, cultural, and political aspects of domesticity. Because domesticity is involved in the production of identity, security, comfort, and belonging, as well as strategies necessary to maintain the status quo, it serves as a double-edged tool that can be confining or emancipatory in its different guises. To combat the pliancy of its shapeshifting between safeguarding and critiquing notions of family and nation, migration and home, this group proposes the fundamental understanding that domesticity is a politicized field of many interdependencies, from the sociospatial to the material and aesthetic, which demand regular negotiation and theorization.