A large section of feminist literature on cities has focused on public space and the injustices faced by women and non gender-conforming persons in terms of access to what is deemed paradigmatic of citizenship (Lieber, 2002). While this focus is necessary and worthwhile, it has also been enlisted by policymakers and elected officials to serve a political agenda of ‘cleansing’ public space, in the name of ‘women’s safety’, and ultimately, it dovetails neatly with gentrifying tendencies in a large number of Western cities (Van den Berg, 2017, Listerborn 2016).
This focus was strongly questioned by Black feminists, in particular, who insisted on the home as a place of relative safety from racist oppression and a haven not to be disregarded (hooks, 1990). Mainstream middle-class feminism should be challenged for its inability to take on board concerns central to working-class, racialized women, whose activism reasserts the relevance of housing to feminist investigations of the urban. The combination of growing financialization of housing markets, gentrification, and an unaffordability crisis, with changes in family structures, and a growing share of children being raised by one parent only, bring about a ‘crisis’ disproportionately affecting women.
The general backdrop is a political economy shift well analyzed by Nancy Fraser: a receding welfare state that shifts most care work back on women, while simultaneously requiring dual-income household levels of wealth to afford housing suitable for families (2016). A feminist perspective is needed to measure the impact of such the disconnexion between the city as accumulation of capital and the home as locus of social reproduction and a place for care, sorely needed in pandemic times.
This paper presents some of the arguments for a renewed feminist engagement with issues of housing, drawing on hooks and Fraser’s work, and illustrates them with some preliminary data on housing markets in Paris.
Mots clés : housing|home|social reproduction|care|feminism
A102863CH