Archiving Labour Reconceptualisations: ‘Scaling Up’ with Technological Means

The smart home acts as an iteration of a recurrent socio-technical imaginary that is a fully controllable household, operatable from a distance. Problematic as it may be, the smart home does address feminist concerns with questions about automating households and the reconceptualisation of work. This elaboration is guided by the research question of how one can imagine the automation of the household with a concept of labour covering domestic, affective, precarious, and research work, and even non-work. Revisiting the archival turn in feminism, this article selects an archive of its own while following Kathi Weeks’ (2021) invitation to establish a counter-archive and ‘scale up’. With the selection of three texts, namely Serres’ ‘Thumbelina’ (2015), Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (2016/1985) and Federici’s ‘Wages Against Housework’ (1975), the goal of the archive is to (1) challenge canonical theoretical reproduction in feminist theory; (2) create an opportunity for possible re-imaginings of different feminist perspectives; and, finally, (3) scale up using technological means. Conclusively, the juxtaposition of texts generates friction which is complemented by incorporating hyperstitious dynamics of overcoming labour’s drudgeries and finding new hosts within both existing and non-existent IoT and smart home technologies.