We have compiled and annotated an incomplete reading list on and around the family, the body, and the technologies connected to it, care, labor and communality. Shared reading becomes common writing and creates leaks in our respective artistic and curatorial practices, asking how can we assist each other through the violence of a patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist understanding of the family, care, education, and health, as we have increasingly experienced it over the past year?
Drawing on her book Full Surrogacy Now, Sophie Lewis revisits the figure of Shulamith Firestone from a critical transfeminist perspective to pursue the idea that paid and unpaid human gestational labor alike constitute forms of work under capitalism that gestators themselves can seek to abolish. This essay originated as a lecture and discussion organized by Rose-Anne Gush and Barbara Kapusta in November 2020 as part of their «Feminism against Family» program at mumok Vienna.
Ein Gespräch zwischen Barbara Kapusta und Cathrin Mayer über gemeinsames Lesen, Arbeiten, Companionship und Science Fiction. Die Publikation THE 8 AND THE FIST vereint die wichtigsten Texte und Gedichte Barbara Kapustas künstlerischer Arbeit. Das darin enthaltene Poem THE 8 AND THE FIST steht in Zusammenhang mit der gleichnamigen installativen Arbeit, die 2017 bei Gianni Manhattan in Wien zu sehen war.