Brenda Parker

Abstract In this article, we explore how normative ideologies of good mothering are being reproduced and contested through urban homesteading, a sustainable lifestyle that emphasizes household self-provisioning. Urban homesteading practices may include gardening and urban agriculture, canning, and pickling, and a variety of do-it-yourself and craft projects. Based on qualitative research with 19 urban homesteading households with children in the Boston and Chicago Metropolitan areas, we argue that urban homesteading discourses and practices reflect and align with intensive mothering ideologies in the United States. Intensive mothering ideologies encourage a selfless devotion of physical, emotional, and mental energy to childrearing, and are often associated with individualized, privileged, and gendered subjectivities. We find these intensive mothering ideologies especially visible in the ways that mothers perceive and respond to environmental risk by adopting and enacting urban homesteading labors. We also note that the choice to respond to risk by homesteading is often, but not always, mediated and animated by economic, temporal, and social privilege. In this way, urban homesteading and surrounding discourses may inadvertently raise the bar of ‘good’ motherhood in ways that demand more of women and marginalize or burden mothers with less resources and privilege. However, rather than dismiss homesteading entirely on these grounds, we suggest that it may be possible to harvest impulses of care, connection, and collectivity associated with homesteading in ways that benefit rather than burden all mothers.

COVID-19 has amplified gendered disparities in caregiving, work, and housing in the Unit-
ed States. This Policy Spotlight brings together the latest research and data to discuss the intersection of these disparities with regard to the anticipated eviction crisis in Illinois. Housing insecurity and potential evictions will affect thousands of Illinois single-parent households, most of whom are female-headed, and disproportionately Black and Latino.1 This will likely lead to a sustained crisis of financial, health, and housing fluctuation, and set back historic gains in women’s equality.

The recent $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that was signed into law in March 20212 is an important step in the right direction, as are the federal mor- atorium extension and federal endeavors. Howev- er, there are challenges with getting assistance to where it is needed. There is a need for both wise allocation of these resources and the infusion of additional interventions to stave off the devastat- ing effects of eviction. Upstream approaches must be put in place now, especially because landlords are filing actions in court despite the moratorium.

We identify key issues for housing researchers, practitioners, and advocates working in the United States and Canada to consider, both during the COVID-19 pandemic and far beyond. First, we draw upon feminist and intersectional literatures on gendered inequalities and social structures, which provide the often forgotten or overlooked context for women’s experiences in housing. This includes the broader insight that too frequently, women have not been involved in shaping the policy and planning climate around housing, even as they disproportionately are affected by them. Second, we describe women’s housing-related precarity and some of its implications, grounding this research in a political economic critique of the way that housing and resources are allocated and the neoliberal climate that values profit over people and that has induced instability for many women in so many communities. We conclude by offering examples of organizations and initiatives that work to address the disparities identified herein. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the need for intersectional and interdisciplinary collaborations (for example, among queer, anti-racist, feminist, political economic, and other scholars) that engage with complexity and orient toward equity and justice.

This chapter, 'Reproduction Amplified' reflects on the ways in which the challenges of life's work for poor African American women in neoliberal Milwaukee are 'amplified' by the history of, on one hand, state abandonment, and not he other, disciplinary interference and punitive strategies of control of the racialized working poor and their children. In Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction (2015), edited by  Katie Meehan and Kendra Strauss and published by University of Georgia Press.

Thanks to Heather McLean (University of Glasgow) we’re able to present here a superb series of engagements with Brenda Parker’s Masculinities and Markets: Raced and Gendered Urban Politics in Milwaukee. Published last year as part of UGA Press’ “Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation” series, the book explores how gendered approaches affect the landscape of urban politics:

We describe a growing crisis in housing affordability and homelessness for one‐person, low‐income, non‐senior households who rent in Canada. Important and not incidental, this crisis results from gendered, colonial, and neoliberal policies and practices sedimented over time. One‐person households which are low‐income and non‐senior (LINS) have fallen through a crack created by a gendered and colonial welfare state that has primarily focused on “deserving” families; a neoliberal political economy has widened this chasm by making housing less affordable and workers more vulnerable, while diminishing social supports. We illustrate our argument through a case study of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, a region in Nova Scotia with a struggling economy. Using data from sources including housing providers, tenants, and the local homelessness count, we demonstrate the significant unemployment and low median incomes for one‐person LINS households, and describe how this household type, more than any other, experiences core housing need and homelessness. In turn, we show that these individuals may be considered undeserving in that they receive less generous shelter allowances, and have fewer rental housing options available with respect to quantity (including no public housing) and quality. We point to some differential vulnerabilities within this population and suggest opportunities for intervention.

In this article, I place Ahmed's notion of the feminist killjoy into conversation with feminist geography literature to explore possibilities and praxis in research endeavoring to illuminate uneven power relations and the moral orders that frame them. According to Ahmed, a feminist killjoy is one who exposes sexism, heterosexism, and racism, only to be criticized for disrupting happiness and social consent. Drawing on fieldwork on urban politics and development, I explore the implications—both promise and peril—of adopting feminist killjoy research subjectivities, emphasizing the important role of affect. I suggest that when feminist researchers direct killjoy research not just at mainstream institutions but also at progressive endeavors, they risk being construed as double killjoys who disrupt supposed joy and solidarity within progressive politics.

In this paper I argue that imbalances and silences persist in urban research. In particular, there is insufficient attention to anti-racist and feminist theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights. Intersectional and materialist urban analyses that take difference seriously are under-represented, while patriarchy, privilege, and positivism still linger in the way cities are run, represented, and studied. As a partial and aspirational remedy, I propose a “Feminist Partial Political Economy of Place” (FPEP) approach to urban research. FPEP is characterized by: (1) attention to gendered, raced, and intersectional power relations, including affinities and alliances; (2) reliance on partial, place-based, materialist research that attends to power in knowledge production; (3) emphasis on feminist concepts of relationality to examine connections among sites, scales, and subjects, and to emphasize “life” and possibility; and (4) the use of theoretical toolkits to observe, interpret and challenge material- discursive power relations. My own critique and research centers on North American cities, but FPEP approaches might help produce more robust, inclusive, and explanatory urban research in varied geographic contexts

This article provides a review of contemporary literature related to gender and the city, drawing primarily from Anglo-American feminist geography, but also architecture and urban planning. It first reflects back on early feminist interventions in the modern city, often referred to as the ‘municipal housekeeping’ movement or early ‘feminist materialism’. In this movement, middle-class female reformers drew upon ideological associations between women and homes to address ‘material’ concerns related to home/housing, health, and urban politics. I reflect on this activism to raise awareness of early feminist praxis and to suggest that these three themes (and the materiality that links them) remain important areas for investigation within feminist geography, especially as cities have been ravaged by neoliberal austerity and are embroiled in a global recession. Using new feminist materialism as an organizing theme, I argue for a refined and reinvigorated material gendered urban research that addresses home/housing, health, and urban politics. This feminist materialism is decoupled from restrictive versions of structuralism, attentive to embodiment, encompassing of intersectionalities, focused on the everyday and beyond, and attuned to social justice and feminist praxis.

Studies of urban neoliberalism have been surprisingly inattentive to gender. Brenda Parker begins to remedy this by looking at the effect of new urbanism, “creative class,” and welfare reform discourses on women in Milwaukee, a traditionally progressive city with a strong history of political organizing. Through a feminist partial political economy of place (FPEP) approach, Parker conducts an intersectional analysis of urban politics that simultaneously pays attention to a number of power relations. She argues that in the 1990s and 2000s, the city’s business-friendly agenda―although couched in uplifting rhetoric―strengthened existing hierarchies not only in class and race but also in gender.
At once a case study of the city and a theorization of urban neoliberalism, Masculinities and Markets highlights how urban politics and discourses in U.S. cities have changed over the years.