The household as a laboratory: finances, residence and essential labor

Abstract

This paper summarizes and condenses the issues we worked on during the pandemic and is, at the same time, a continuation of the research on the impacts of public and private indebtedness on the daily lives of women, lesbians, transvestites and transgender people that we conducted within the framework of the Feminist Intervention and Research Group
(GIIF). We have located a key area of feminist research in the issue of housing - and, in particular, in the way in which domestic indebtedness reshapes it. This is also where the dynamics of paid and unpaid work are reorganized under new guidelines. It is in the home where we see a series of issues that allow us to continue to deepen our feminist interpretation of debt and to advance in what interests us here: in what sense has the home become a laboratory? How does this intervene in the claims and policies that can be articulated and demanded?