Making Worlds: Feminist Theory in activist performance for inclusive Belonging
How to make space when you take space within urban squatter movements
Abstract
My thesis considers how internalized inequity of the neoliberal housing market and its property
mechanisms manifest themselves within the Dutch squatter movement (NKB), causing it to replicate
some of the structures it purports to oppose. As a femme queer-identifying artist with a squatter history,
I am interested in the inter-relationship between (activist) communities,
individual performances of property/non-proprietary comportments,
and the way physical spaces retain complex traces of patriarchal economic structures within daily life.
Putting the Dutch housing policy and struggle in the current context of global capitalism, and
drawing on Marxist, autonomist and feminist spatial theory, I argue that squatting culture in the
Netherlands stymied its radical potential by its structural inattention to the non-binary complexity of
bordered, domestic and interpersonal scales of the political within its un/recognized histories.
This thesis takes an alternative approach from materialist feminist theorists of race, geography, normativity,
and the structurally oppressive household, including Silvia Federici, Sarah Keenan, Davina Cooper and Doreen
Massey, to challenge the masculine norms of Marx’s historical materialism and property critique. The
works of Margaret Davies, Nazima Kadir, E.T.C. Dee/Deanna Dadusc and an interview of Wendelien van
Oldenborgh are used to further contextualize my argument concerning the necessity of feminist and queer
occupations/cohabitations as resistance to both late liberal capitalist belonging within “property logic”
and masculine-normed ideals of autonomy. Material feminist analytics, including from performance
theory, in the scene of activism, here enable radical politics to emerge that are savvy to housing needs and
anti-authoritarian politics by imagining intersubjective worlds that move beyond philosophically limited
concepts of belonging and singular events of property repossession.
Dutch Art Institute (DAI)
Art Praxis Graduate School ArtEZ University of the Arts
Master of Arts Thesis
Supervisor: Rachel O’Reilly
July 2020