Lexington Davis

Thesis: Women’s Work: Second-Wave Feminist Art and Domestic Labour Politics (working title)

My SGSAH-AHRC-funded thesis examines how feminist artworks of the 1970s situate the home as a critical site of labour struggle. Diverging from previous scholarship that treats the middle-class housewife as symbolic of second-wave feminist domestic labour debates, I focus on artworks centring working-class figures marginalised in feminist art history, including paid domestic employees, migrants, homeworkers, sex workers, unionisers, and the incarcerated. An intersectional, transnational art historical study with chapters exploring works by Betye Saar, Margaret Harrison, and Ana Victoria Jiménez, and a collaborative project by Nil Yalter, Judy Blum, and Nicole Croiset, my project illuminates how feminist artists worked in dialogue with local and international activist groups to position women’s care and maintenance work as essential to labour movements. I argue that Saar, Yalter et al., Harrison, and Jiménez examine the home as a politicised site historically tied to other institutions structured by capitalist power relations, including the plantation, prison, factory, and archive, respectively. Building on methodological intersections between social art history and labour studies, my thesis ultimately illustrates how 1970s feminist art radically re-envisioned labour struggle’s subjects and terrain.

Supervisors: Dr Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews) and Dr Kirsten Lloyd (University of Edinburgh)