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Claire-Louise Bennett
Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before settling in Galway. Her short fiction and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Penny Dreadful, The Moth, Colony, The Irish Times, The White Review and gorse. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013 and has received bursaries from the Arts Council and Galway City Council. Her debut novel, Pondwas published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015 and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. Her second novel, Checkout 19, is published by Jonathan Cape in August 2021.

Articles Available Online


The Russian Man

Fiction

Issue No. 27

Claire-Louise Bennett

Fiction

Issue No. 27

Many years ago a large Russian man with the longest tendrils of the softest white hair came to live in the fastest growing town...

poetry

Issue No. 13

Morning, Noon & Night

Claire-Louise Bennett

poetry

Issue No. 13

Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should...

A few years ago, I read Revolution at Point Zero (2012), Silvia Federici’s career-spanning collection of essays on reproductive work and domestic labour The essays articulate, in anger and clarity, what I and other women of my generation have begun, stutteringly, to understand: that the mass introduction of women into the waged workforce has not changed the fact that domestic chores outside of paid work continue to be conducted by women, nor the fact that this work remains invisible, or if seen at all, utterly devalued   Federici, who was born in Parma, Italy, in 1942, has been writing about these issues for almost 50 years She was a founding member of the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign, an international effort to draw attention to the unpaid labour of women in the home; after she moved to Brooklyn to teach at Hofstra University on Long Island, she became centrally involved in the New York Wages for Housework Committee She detailed that organisation’s history in Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory, Documents (2017), which also reproduced her 1975 pamphlet, Wages Against Housework, famous for its provocative opening lines, ‘They say it is love We say it is unwaged work’   I came late to Federici’s theorising, but once I found her, I engaged with as much of her writing as I could The collection of essays in Revolution at Point Zero encompasses Federici’s early writings on feminism and housework alongside later pieces on the impact of globalisation on social reproduction – that is, the reproduction of everyday life – on the redistribution of housework onto the shoulders of immigrant women, and on the role of the commons in contemporary society   Federici’s work on capitalism’s war on women’s bodies is encapsulated by two books on witch-hunts, Caliban and the Witch (2004), which argued that the exploitation of women was a central element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (2018), which revisited the subject matter following the return of witch-hunting in many parts of the world   Her recent research on the commons, collected in Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism

Contributor

August 2014

Claire-Louise Bennett

Contributor

August 2014

Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before settling in...

The Lady of the House

fiction

Issue No. 8

Claire-Louise Bennett

fiction

Issue No. 8

Wow it’s so still. Isn’t it eerie. Oh yes. So calm. Everything’s still. That’s right. Look at the rowers – look at how fast...

READ NEXT

feature

July 2011

Herat

Sam Duerden

feature

July 2011

At Kabul airport, a man I mistook for a foreigner.   A security guard, red-haired with blue eyes and...

poetry

September 2011

Sleepwalking through the Mekong

Michael Earl Craig

poetry

September 2011

I have my hands out in front of me. I’m lightly patting down everything I come across. I somehow...

poetry

October 2014

Roman Nights

Martin Glaz Serup

TR. Christopher Sand-Iversen

poetry

October 2014

4.    It’s New Year’s Eve, I’m standing newly divorced on a roof in a town, we toast the...

 

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