Abstract:

The pandemic and the quarantine conditions created a confined space where people comply with everyday home routines. This space reiterated the reproductive labour designated mostly as the responsibility of women by the social gender order. As the social reproduction in women’s everyday life has become more salient during the pandemic, this widened the gap between the different forms of masculinities and femininities of social hierarchy both in society and art scenery. Drawing on the work of Virgina Woolf, Rozsika Parker and Iris Marion Young, this article looks at the ways in which social reproduction and intellectual production of women is entangled at home. The article approaches the domestic labour from a twofold perspective: the physical burden it creates, and the mental & emotional burden associated with taking responsibility. It attempts to explain the historical reasons for the physical burden expected from women and their responsibility for the unpaid reproductive labour, but at the same time fleshes out the mental & emotional burden it creates on women. Upon presenting the complexities with these terms, the paper questions how the creative activity of women aligns with their everyday responsibility and to what extent it creates intellectual spaces for the emergence of women as public intellectuals and artists. With reference to writings of Parker and Iris, the study takes up a feminist theorisation and quest to problematise art and looks at the production of feminist art through a triad of home, everyday life and care work. In doing so, it brings these concepts with the debates of hegemonic masculinity operating in the art environment and creating a femininity and masculinity divide in the ways women artists produce or the extent to which they are valued as professionals whose value is assessed in relation to male artists. This surely creates a high and low art divide where the former is attached to men’s domain of production. The article points out the importance of combining creative production which is placed “high” and the necessities of daily life which are placed “low” in a hierarchical manner by discussing how the production of the female artist can be made in the defined conditions. In doing this, the article discusses the everyday labour at home to draw attention to social gender inequality where intellectual production is represented as a masculinity norm. Thus, it challenges the definition of the genius-male artist presented as the ideal model of art production, arguing how it becomes a product of hegemonic masculinity in the art landscape. The paper offers a critique of this art space creating a gender hierarchy, producing the dynamics of masculinities and the processes creating social embodiment of the art production. The fact that women feel obliged to adopt the masculinity and femininity division of intellectual production and social reproduction is discussed through the “angel at home” conceptualisation of Virginia Woolf. This conceptualisation gives us a unique perspective to focus on the art production at home and analyse the limits of art production. Taking KRE as an example of Turkish feminist collective who use home as the new emerging space for intellectual art production and space for resistance to patriarchal norms in art, the paper highlights changing contemporary art canon, dynamics and forms of production.

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