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Feminist City. Leslie Kern
Читать онлайн.Название Feminist City
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781788739832
Автор произведения Leslie Kern
Издательство Ingram
This imbalance has global implications, reshaping the lives of mothers in cities around the world. As the demand for help with domestic care labour rises among wealthier working women, transnational women migrants have been conscripted to fill this care labour deficit. In Singapore, domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia allow Singaporean women to participate in the city-state’s drive to become a world-leading financial and communications-centred global city. Feminist geographers Brenda Yeoh, Shirlena Huang, and Katie Willis note that, as in many other cities, Singaporean women who work outside the home have been unsuccessful in transferring a sufficient share of domestic and childcare responsibilities to men, compelling them to rely, often reluctantly, on foreign domestic maids.67
In Canada, thousands of women—mostly mothers themselves—from places like the Philippines and the Caribbean come to Canada as temporary migrants to work as nannies, housekeepers, and home care workers. Feminist geographer Geraldine Pratt’s long-term research with Filipina migrants in cities like Vancouver has highlighted stories of loss and disconnection, as mothers leave their children behind—sometimes for decades—to care for children in Canada. Back home, their children are raised by husbands, grandparents, relatives, or neighbours in a patchwork of care arrangements that sow a heartbreaking emotional distance that might never be overcome. Pratt describes the ways in which the former lives of Filipina migrants are made invisible to us here in Canada, with separation from their husbands and children just a “shadowy existence” that our reliance on their labour forces us to forget.68
When my marriage ended, the demands only intensified. The nights Maddy spent at her dad’s place weren’t especially restful. Drop-offs and pick-ups meant more bus trips with the added stress of betting on the timing of an unreliable system to avoid irritating the other parent. Extra tasks and expenses now included journeys to lawyers and counselors, courts, and social workers. I struggled to figure out how I could possibly be everywhere I had to be while coordinating Maddy’s care and supervision. I was writing my dissertation and teaching classes at three different universities, adding expensive trips on the Greyhound bus and commuter trains to my already inefficient daily travel patterns.
There were times when Maddy had to be left alone for short periods or walk herself halfway to school before meeting a friend. The gaps in the fabric of our household were constantly expanding. Looking back, I don’t really know how I managed it all without disaster striking. Certainly, my privileges as an educated, white, cisgender woman helped to keep us all afloat, but I wasn’t immune to increased surveillance from the state in the form of social workers who demanded that Maddy be provided with certain services. They of course didn’t provide those services. That fell to me. I learned firsthand how the state shifts burdens to mothers and how poorly my neighbourhood and city supported me.
The really annoying thing is that there was nothing unusual about my situation. The traditional nuclear family is no longer the norm. Cities are full of blended families, complex kinship relations entailed by divorce and remarriage, lone parents, queer relationships, polyamorous families, foster families, migration of family members, non-family households, multi-generation households, empty nesters, and more. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the way our cities and their suburbs are designed to function.
Ideally, all of these diverse kinship networks could open up possibilities for sharing the work of social reproduction, care-giving, and child-raising in creative, even feminist, ways. For that to happen, however, our neighbourhoods and cities have to support it. The massive construction of small one or two-bedroom condominium units in high rise apartment buildings has left a shortage of affordable housing for families. Clogged roads and expensive transit systems make it difficult to get kids to and from the homes of extended kin, and then on to school, daycare, and activities. A lack of secure, full-time employment for many parents means juggling the demands of precarious work and perhaps being forced to leave a convenient neighbourhood to find suitable work. Gentrification pushes out single parents, low-income people, and affordable services, scattering kin across the city.
Although the full diversity of family and household forms may be somewhat new, ideas for creating housing developments and even whole neighbourhoods that collectivize and facilitate care work can be found as recently as the 1980s and 1990s and as far back as the late 1800s in North America. Hayden’s book The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities detailed the utopian schemes and sometimes actual homes and communities designed by early materialist feminists who argued that housework and childcare must be socialized and incorporated into new spatial arrangements to facilitate women’s entry into the workforce, equality with men, and intellectual development.69 Visions of the “non-sexist city” often centre housing issues, noting that the nuclear family home is a really inefficient way to utilize labour, one that keeps women tied to the home with little time or energy for other pursuits.70 Housing developments that allow households to share the work of cooking, cleaning, and caring for children are common features of feminist designs. Wekerle notes that in the 1970s and 1980s, before federal funding for subsidized housing was scaled back in the first wave of neoliberalism, a variety of cooperative housing developments that focused on lower-income groups with specific needs—single mothers, older women, disabled women—were built in cities across Canada.71 These examples can remind of us that there are already existing alternatives. Some of the work of imagining the non-sexist city has already been done.
When I started my master’s degree with a child under one year of age and no way to afford day care (wait lists for subsidized spots were outrageous), I scrambled to find time to complete my work. Luckily, I met Anneke. We had classes together and discovered that we were both the primary caregivers for very young kids. I started bringing Maddy to Anneke’s house two days a week and we took turns watching the kids while one of us left for a few hours to study. The little bit of extra time afforded by what I liked to call the “city’s smallest babysitting co-op” made a huge difference. At the time, I thought that we were just lucky. I didn’t realize that we were part of a long tradition of mothers and other caregivers coming up with ingenious arrangements for doing care work in the city. These creative practices of “getting by” have informed feminist urban interventions since the nineteenth century.
Yet, many decades after trenchant critiques of how cities and suburbs fail mothers and other caregivers, the same problems remain. Under neoliberalism, most of the “solutions” generated for those problems have been market-based, meaning they require the ability to pay for extra services, conveniences, and someone else’s underpaid labour. Very few changes, especially in North American cities, have re-imagined and re-worked the built environment and other aspects of urban infrastructure in ways that take care work seriously.72
In Europe, “gender-mainstreaming” approaches to urban planning and budgetary decisions have a longer history. Essentially, these frameworks mean that every planning, policy, and budget decision has to be considered with the goal of gender equality as the departure point. For example, policymakers must ask how a decision will potentially enhance or undermine gender equality. These approaches push cities to consider how decisions support or stymie the care work that literally keeps society functioning.
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