Speaker:

Selma James

Center for Research on Women and Social Justice

Department of Feminist Studies

Fall Events 2012

SELMA JAMES

THE GLOBAL KITCHEN

International Perspectives on Women’s Unpaid Labor

Thursday, November 29th

4pm

McCune Conference Room

6020 HSSB

Selma James is a women's rights activist, anti-racist campaigner, and author. Raised in a movement household, she joined CLR James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency at age 15, and from 1958 to 1962, she worked with him in the movement for Caribbean federation and independence. In 1972, she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign and coined the term "unwaged" to describe the caring work women do, and it has since entered the English language to describe all who work without wages. That same year, James co-authored the controversial publication, Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa), which launched the "domestic labour debate" by spelling out how housework and other caring work women do outside of the market supports the whole working class, and thus, the market economy is built on women’s unwaged work.

Since 2000 James has been the international coordinator of the Global Women's Strike, a network of grassroots women, bringing together actions and initiatives in many war-torn countries with a focus of returning of military budgets to women in the local communities. She has addressed the power relations within the working class movement, and organizing across sectors despite divisions of sex, race, age, etc., South and North. She spoke to packed audiences at Occupy in London, England, as well as Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, and SF.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Feminist Studies, the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice, the Hull Chair in Feminist Studies, UCHN “Working at Living: The Social Relations of Precarity”, the UC Center for New Racial Studies, the Luis Leal Chair in Chicana and Chicano Studies, the Center for Black Studies Research, the Department of Asian American Studies, the Department of Black Studies, the Office of the Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Academic Policy, and the Education Abroad Program.