[Research Seminar] ICOR: “Reorganizing domectic chores in cooperative housing: rule reflexivity and the transformation of domestic spheres” L. BUCHTER – EM Lyon Business School

Domestic work is a major source of gender inequalities today (mental load, invisible work, distribution of chores and childcare, etc.) Despite attention to gender equality and the number of women in the workforce, domestic labor remains unequally distributed. In this article, I discuss how organizing chores within cooperative houses—housing that is ruled by cooperative principles—can help question, at the collective level, deeply-ingrained mechanisms of housework and domestic division of labor. Using the theoretical lens of legal consciousness and the recent developments of rule consciousness and critical legal consciousness, I show how the everyday practice of collectively examining, questioning and reinventing rules in collective housing help set into questions current hegemonic rules about the distribution of domestic work. This article is based on two qualitative fieldworks: one in housing cooperatives in North America (ethnography, visual methods, interviews), and another based on a participatory action research project in France.