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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Housework
• Donna Haraway
• irony
• apocalypse
• family
• care labour

Acknowledgements

This article is the outcome of a process supported by the AFS Mentoring Programme for New Academic Writers. I’d like to thank the journal’s editors, Professors Maryanne Dever and Lisa Adkins, for their patience and support on what was a process drawn out due to illness and relocation. Having senior mentors that are accommodating of life’s upheavals feels especially important in our current climate. I’d like to thank SSSHARC and FASS at the University of Sydney for supporting the writing retreat and Hacking the Anthropocene event that gave rise to this special issue, to Astrida for collaborating on that adventure and all the people who agreed to come along for the ride. I’d also like to thank my partner Craig Johnson for caring for our son while I worked on the multiple drafts and revisions for this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Jennifer Mae Hamilton is a lecturer in English Literary Studies at the University of New England, on unceded Anaiwan Country. Her work examines the relationship between weather and embodiment. She is co-founder of COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities.

ORCID

Jennifer Mae Hamilton http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6380-9067

Notes

1. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (Le Guin 2017) is a famous short story and philosophical thought experiment by Le Guin where a utopian community is based on the eternal misery and incarceration of a single child. Some citizens can bare it but a select few walk away. It often functions as the grounds of an ethical conversation about what ‘you’ would do.

2. This is the strongest critique levelled at Haraway. The author of Full Surrogacy Now drew partly on the cyborg manifesto to build her theory of gestation as labour. Since then Haraway has publicly reported meeting with Lewis to discuss the critique (Denvir 2019).

3. The contents of the ‘we’ here is necessarily unclear. For Nelson it speaks to a queer feminist community. In terms of feminist environmental humanities, it is a Sedgwickian ‘we’: ‘me plus anybody else/permeable we!’ (1999, 106). This permeable ‘we’ was a founding epigraph for the work of Composting Feminisms.

4. I say all this having been involved in co-creating two communities that could be deemed ‘communities of compost’, one at home (Earlwood Farm which was a kind of intentional community/share house with a multispecies mission – www.earlwoodfarm.com) and at work (Composting Feminisms – compostingfeminisms.wordpress.com). So there is irony in my saying ‘No, I wouldn’t join a community of compost’ when I have co-created two such communities. Indeed, Earlwood Farm’s compost bins are the hero image for the Composting Feminisms article I co-authored with Astrida Neimanis in Environmental Humanities (2018). But the failures and successes of these projects implicitly inform my argument here too.

5. In some feminist uptakes of the concept, they are already complementary but differently so; these deployments figure a feminist ‘technoecological’ praxis and modes of embodiment (Lorenz-Meyer, Treusch, and Liu 2017), rather than explore the implied feminist political economy of the story. The special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on the theme of ‘Feminist Technoecologies’, braid Haraway’s notion of ‘staying with the trouble’ alongside her figure of the cyborg as an impure techno-materialist figure. The political economic critique central to the cyborg is marginalised in this issue, and a different intellectual lineage is centred: the new materialism (building on the work of Barad, Wilson and Kirby). While Barad, for example, has claimed there is no sharp distinction between new and old materialism (2018), the bulk of the queer feminist work picking up on all these thinkers is not directly interested in the question of political economy, even if there are tacit connections. The work here is designed to make these connections, and their associated contradictions and tensions, ever more explicit.

6. The dominant thread of thinking in the environmental humanities in this space is proceeding under the rubric of ‘care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; van Dooren 2014), this project is related but focussed on fusing the making kin and socialist feminist question at this point. So, the question of how the socialist feminist multispecies and the environmental humanities care question articulate together is for another paper.

7. A generous nod to Beth Stephen’s and Annie Sprinkle’s documentary on ecosexuality and mountaintop removal Goodbye Gauley Mountain (2014).

8. A similar point is also made by Louise Crabtree in ‘Decolonising Property’ (2013).

9. I am reminded in this moment of a public lecture at the University of Sydney by Julie Guthman. ‘Willing (white) workers on organic farms’ (2015) explored the politics of difference amongst farm workers in California. She commented on the noticeable lack of solidarity across the region between organic workers (white majority) and conventional farm labourers exposed to toxic chemicals and poor labour conditions (mostly migrants). One of her points of critique was the perversity of teaching organic farming within the university system, and many migrant students whose parents are horrified that their children are at US institutions paying a premium for, effectively, tutelage in subsistence living techniques. Families that have come to US institutions precisely to escape subsistence. This is a real thorny ‘trouble’ that is related to ambition, desire, privilege, aspiration, economy, race (especially whiteness), migration, power, environment, debt and labour that is related to, if distinct from, to the problematic explored here.