Experiential

Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

Almost everyone has done work that no one paid for and few noticed: cooking, cleaning, raising children, tending the sick and the old, holding a household together. Almost everyone has learned, and enforced or resisted, a set of rules about how their gender is supposed to act. This lens treats that knowledge as the starting point. Much of the most important material here is already in the room, in what people have carried and what it has cost them.

Anchor questions

Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.

• Who did the unpaid work in the home you grew up in, and what happened if it did not get done?
• What care do you give that no one sees or pays for? What does it cost you?
• When did you first learn the rules for how your gender was supposed to act? Who enforced them?
• Have you ever been trapped in a household or a relationship by money? What made leaving hard?
• Who cared for you when you needed it? Who do you care for now?
• What have you had to hide, or fight for, about your gender or sexuality?

Materials that may help

Experiential work begins from the room. These outside materials extend or challenge what the room can offer. All are free unless marked otherwise.

Oral histories and testimonio

• Rosie the Riveter / World War II American Home Front Oral History Project (UC Berkeley Oral History Center and the National Park Service). Over 250 interviews on home-front work and family life, with transcripts and synced video. A deep first-person archive of women’s wartime and reproductive labor. Free: lib.berkeley.edu
• Voices of Feminism Oral History Project (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College). Long-form life-history interviews with labor, anti-poverty, and women-of-color reproductive-justice organizers, with transcripts and video where narrators allowed. Free: findingaids.smith.edu
• Domestic Labor and Home Economics: Archival Collections (Schlesinger Library, Harvard). A guide to first-person testimony of domestic and care labor, including the 72-interview Black Women Oral History Project and Fran Leeper Buss’s work-and-family interviews with low-income and minority women. Free: guides.library.harvard.edu

Trans lives, in their own voices

The archives above are strong on women’s household labor and quiet about everyone else. These are people the household expelled, speaking for themselves.

• Sylvia Rivera (1951 to 2002) with Eric Marcus, Making Gay History, Parts 1 and 2 (recorded 1989). Rivera on her childhood, the streets, Stonewall, STAR, and being pushed out of the movement she helped start. Marcus recorded these interviews himself and gives them away with full transcripts, so they can be assigned as readings and there is no rights question hanging over them. Free.
• Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, From the Vault: 1970 (Making Gay History). The rarest thing in this lens. Liza Cowan recorded the two of them together in 1970, a year after Stonewall, while STAR was actually running, and kept the tape. They are alive, young, and talking about the house rather than being remembered for it fifty years later. Free, with a transcript: makinggayhistory.org
• STAR: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (Untorelli Press, 2013). The 1970 manifesto with interviews and remembrances of Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who ran a house for homeless street queens out of their own earnings as sex workers. A household built by people the family threw away, which is this theme’s question asked from the other end. Free on libcom: libcom.org
• Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman, 2005, 57 min). About 243,000 views. The 1966 San Francisco riot that came three years before Stonewall, told largely by the trans women who were in it. Stryker is a trans historian recovering her own city’s history. Free: youtube.com

Film and audio

• The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980, 65 min). Five former women war workers tell their own histories, contrasted against the propaganda myth of Rosie. First-person testimony on gendered wartime labor, and in the National Film Registry. Streams via Vimeo on-demand and Kanopy: clarityfilms.org
• All My Relations, “All My Relations and Indigenous Feminism” (Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene, 2019). Two Native women narrate their own paths and their relationships to feminism, gender, and kinship. A first-person Indigenous lens the other materials do not offer. Free: allmyrelationspodcast.com

Short video

• “8 Minutes with Silvia Federici” (The People’s Forum NYC, 2019). Roughly 8 minutes, about 52,000 views. Federici on what feminism is and its message to young people. A short, warm way into the theme. youtube.com/watch?v=CDf0NDNfWEQ
• “Who Cares? The Gendered Burden of Unpaid Care Work” (Aina Salleh, TEDx, 2021). Roughly 11 minutes, about 13,000 views, a niche pick. Connects lived gendered care expectations to the stalled gender revolution. A relatable opener for surfacing the room’s own experience. youtube.com/watch?v=0zcC9M4QKlU

A note on method

This lens can cut close. Care and gender are lived in the body and in the family, and the session may surface exhaustion, grief, or conflict. The task is not to process all of it, but to establish that the unpaid and unseen work people do is real work, and that what they know about it is knowledge. Give it time, and let the history and theory that follow build on what the room names here.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially caregiving outside the United States, and testimony from migrant domestic workers in their own voices: that was searched for specifically and what exists free is journalism and NGO reporting about these workers rather than by them. Migrante International, the Filipino migrant workers’ organization that would supply exactly that standpoint, blocks automated access and should be checked by hand.