The Home as Laboratory

“In The Home as Laboratory, Cavallero, Gago, and Mason-Deese offer a pithy and urgent feminist analysis of the debt traps posed by the neoliberal precarious home. These debts are extracted disproportionately from the growing informal class of nonwaged gendered care workers whose vital ‘essential work’ became momentarily visible during the global pandemic. The authors examine the aftermath of the pandemic re-ordering of ‘home’ and work life, from their vantage point of the precarious peripheries of Buenos Aires, and offer what are in fact global lessons for feminist mobilization against debt and the financialization of the home.” —Paula Chakravartty, James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor of Media Studies, NYU

“The personal is political! Such a foundational feminist statement has undeniable economic implications: capitalism cannot be grasped without understanding the everyday functioning of homes. This does not mean sticking to the standard complaint, ‘Oh, how important but overlooked reproductive work is!’ but instead, identifying how this role is reconstructed and challenged. Home as Laboratory shows how homes were used as a laboratory during the COVID-19 pandemic to test new forms of value extraction in financial capitalism. But it goes further: while a reprivatization of reproduction is imposed,  Cavallero, Gago, and Mason-Deese show us that our task is to render visible the ‘domestic territories’ that overflow beyond four walls. There lie the possibilities for imagining and enacting a common responsibility in maintaining life and rebelling against capital—an urgent and collective task.” —Amaia Pérez Orozco, author of The Feminist Subversion of the Economy

“If you remember the COVID-19 pandemic as a suspension of the rules of ordinary life, this compelling book will wake you up. Our confinement indoors was not a refuge from the specters of capital afoot outside. Instead, it allowed our homes to be a proving ground for new capitalist forms that were busy transforming the gendered character of work, shelter, and finance, while turbo-charged currents of debt swirled all around us. Home as Laboratory offers a breathtaking analysis!” —Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal

“Debt, violence, domestic labor, rent, eviction, fintech, production of value, insecurity, poverty, desperation, love, racism, gender mandates and property titles—what happens when we analyze the circuits of financial capital from the place we call home? This brilliant book by leading scholar-activists Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese is the Grundrisse for just such a radical left feminist project. Read it now!” —Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West

“Elegantly translated, and lucidly argued, Home as Laboratory provides a much-needed post-COVID-19 analysis of the ways that households have become spaces for experimentation for new dynamics of capital. Expanding existing Global South feminist theory and resistance in practice, Cavallero, Gago, and Mason-Deese forcefully demonstrate how the intensification of social reproduction exploitation and extraction via apparatuses like debt has been brutal. Home as Laboratory offers us more than just critique; it inspires autonomous feminist struggle and hope wherever the tentacles of financial capitalism need be severed.” —Jason Thomas Wozniak, assistant professor at West Chester University, codirector of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society, and organizer with Debt Collective

“By weaving together detailed social inquiry with innovative theoretical investigations, Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese provide both a model for research and an orientation for future lines of struggle.” —Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies and coauthor of Bolivia Beyond the Impasse