Domestic Unrest: Social Reproduction and the Temporalities of Struggle in Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames. Issue 1 (2nd January 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Capper, Beth
• Is Part Of: Third text. Volume 31:Issue 1(2017)
• Page Start: 97
• Page End: 116
• Publication Date: 2017-01-02
• Subjects: Beth Capper -- domesticity -- Black Feminism -- coalition -- Born in Flames -- Lizzie Borden -- state violence -- antagonism -- wages for housework -- black women for wages for housework; Art and society -- Periodicals; Art -- Developing countries -- 20th century -- Periodicals; Developing countries -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; 700.91724
• DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2017.1366410
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0952-8822

Abstract

Abstract: This article explores figurations of social reproduction in Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames . Beginning with the film's representation of the Wages for Housework movement, the article then places the film into dialogue with theoretical analyses authored by Black Women for Wages for Housework in order to advance two related arguments. First, Born in Flames indexes conflicting temporalities of struggle between feminist militant violence and social reproduction in ways that provide a self-reflexive meditation on the antagonisms that pervade the work of coalition-building. The film illuminates how sustaining feminist community depends upon an uneven distribution of work enacted by its black female characters, and therefore underscores fissures between multiracial coalition and black feminist freedom dreams. Second, Born in Flames re-imagines 'housework' and 'the domestic' against their dominant associations with white domesticity, thereby recasting the domestic as an internally differentiated site of struggle and offering glimpses of a black feminist domestic vision.