Women’s Labor is a feminist-activist project that repurposes domestic tools to become new musical instruments, integrating the massive but invisible gender inequality in housework division in the home. Using embedded technologies, these household-devices-turned instruments are explored in interactive installations, commissioned compositions by women, workshops, and performances.
While policies have made progress in tackling gender inequality in the workplace, such inequality stubbornly remain in the household: women globally spend disproportionately more time doing unpaid housework than men. According to the UN, the feminization of care and domestic work is a pressing worldwide social, cultural, and economic challenge that not only compromises women’s employment opportunities and ability to build assets for themselves; it also significantly impacts women’s health and education, and increases vulnerability to violence and exploitation. Traditionally relegated to the private sphere, Women’s Labor interrogates domesticity through public engagement and performative spectacle with these gendered tools that are visible — and now audible — symbols of domestic labor gender inequality.
The first instrument that won the 2021 International Alliance of Women in Music Ruth Anderson Prize is the Embedded Iron, based on an early-20th century wooden ironing board and antique iron. Rheostat Rotary Rack, the second instrument,is based on the Australian “Hills Hoist” dryer, an outdoor steel rotary clothes line that can spin in the wind, designed to maximize wind drying. Embedded with a rotary encoder and potentiometers, it is performed by hanging clothing on its strings, rotating it by hand or by wind.
The audience is invited to participate by hanging their own clothing on the Rack, listening to the sounds of housework in a collective gender-equal houseworking performance. Rheostat Rotary Rack is both a human and post-human instrument, making for equal collaboration between humans and non-human agents in the Anthropocene.
COLLABORATORS
- Jocelyn Ho, Creative director
- Margaret Schedel, Technical director
- Bryan Jacobs, Engineer
