Uneventful and obscured: housewife in postsocialist feminist art

Abstract

In the article, we investigate non-spectacular, low-key, and small-scale artistic strategies rooted in everyday acts of defiance that are carried out collectively. For that purpose, we examine the political valence of the figure of housewife in postsocialist feminism by attending to the work The Resistance Kitchen (2017) of Polish artist Małgorzata Markiewicz. Intertwining ideas of Sara Ahmed, Silvia Federici, Ewa Majewska, and Olga Tokarczuk, while building on our prior work on the definition of postsocialist feminism (Kukaine 2023, 2024), we argue for an approach to a political agency that is passive, soft, unspectacular, tender, and weak. We address the kitchen as the unruly space where feminist politics and the domain of art-making intersect, engendering uneventful feminist revolt, obscured political identities, and tender solidarities. Instead of combat, visibility, and heroism, survival, sharing of resources, and mutual care are signature traits of postsocialist feminist art.