Family Matters

Family Matters

Melinda Cooper’s latest work tracks the politics of kinship in the era of neoliberalism, placing the centrality of “family values” discourse within the broader context of American social thought and post-Fordist economic transformation. In this interview, Viewpoint asks her about the key insights of her work and their implications for political struggles in the present.

Agriculture Wars

Agriculture Wars

If country music gave voice to many American farmers during the 20th century, what does it have to say about the fundamental shift in farm labor that is coming to define the 21st?

From #MeToo to #WeStrike: A Politics in Feminine

From #MeToo to #WeStrike: A Politics in Feminine

What will it take to move from #MeToo to #WeStrike? As the Latin American movements have shown, it is in the practice of this politics in feminine that a new collective subjectivity is born. It is not our experiences of violence that define who we are, but our struggle against violence that defines a collective we.

Women Strike the Empire: The Women’s Strike in the United States

Women Strike the Empire: The Women’s Strike in the United States

When feminist activists and intellectuals published a collective statement calling for a feminism for the 99% and for a day of action in solidarity with the International Women’s Strike in 2017, the response was heart-lifting: after only two weeks, and after countless hours of frantic collective work, a national network of grassroots groups, informal collectives, national feminist and labor organizations… Read more → 

The Feminist International: Appropriating and Overflowing the Strike

The Feminist International: Appropriating and Overflowing the Strike

The strike appropriated by the women’s movement is literally overflowed: it must account for multiple labor realities that escape the borders of waged and unionized work, that question the limits between productive and reproductive labor, formal and informal labor, remunerated and free tasks, between migrant and national labor, between the employed and the unemployed. The strike taken up by the women’s movement directly targets a central element of the capitalist system: the sexual and colonial division of labor.

Is there a war “on” the body of women?:  Finance, territory, and violence

Is there a war “on” the body of women?: Finance, territory, and violence

There was thus a transversality to the political composition of the strike (unions, grassroots territorial organizations, queer collectives, student groups, health centers, migrant collectives, self-organized individuals, etc.). There was also an intersectionality of problematics that were able to make a concrete critique of renewed forms of capitalist exploitation, through their focus on labor.

Because we want ourselves alive, together we are disrupting everything: Notes for thinking about the paths of social transformation today

Because we want ourselves alive, together we are disrupting everything: Notes for thinking about the paths of social transformation today

Overcoming the fragmentation imposed by the state and so-called “international agendas” has been very complicated. Thus we must turn our differences into the harmony of diverse women who launch their voices in varied scales, in a pluralized choreography that nurtures and does not separate: “Together and strong, always feminists.”

Black Atlantis

Black Atlantis

Like Star Wars, Black Panther presents us not with science fiction but with myth, sharing with it what we might describe as “semi-feudal futurism” – a term far more appropriate for this film than “Afrofuturism,” thrown around in the mainstream media stripped of any meaningful political context. Why do white people love Black Panther, just as they love Star Wars?