Professor Helen Hester: At Home in the Future: Domestic Labour and Speculative Architecture

This talk considers mid-century efforts to challenge the organisation of domestic labour through spatial design, concentrating on two case studies – the bachelor pad and the fully automated future home. How are care and housework managed within these speculative visions? Who does it, under what conditions, and using which technologies? And what potential lessons do such spaces have to offer contemporary feminism? Whilst these historical examples may indeed offer us resources for thinking about how best to mitigate the challenges of reproductive labour via living arrangements, this talk will point also to their failures, and suggest that contesting these imaginaries (as much as learning from them) is likely to prove necessary in building a meaningfully feminist conception of anti-work architecture.


Biography
Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and theories of work, and she’s a member of the international working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and After Work: The Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2023, with Nick Srnicek).