Protest camps as 'homeplace'? social reproduction in and against neoliberal capitalism

This chapter brings feminist literatures on domestic space and the gendered division of labour into dialogue with research into protest camps. It responds to a ground-breaking account of protest camps by Anna Feigenbaum and colleagues (2013), which argues that social reproduction is integral to the political effect of camps. Yet this point remains insufficiently interrogated in their framework; as a result, gendered and racialised inequalities and insecurities in protest camps are not fully explained, and continuities with the wider neoliberal capitalist context are downplayed. In this chapter, I draw on Marxist- and Black/anti-racist feminist research to examine the ways in and extent to which social reproduction was reconstructed in two protest camps in my locality, Occupy Glasgow and Faslane Peace Camp. This allows for some wider lessons to be drawn about the limitations of protest camps as sites of resistance in conditions of neoliberal capitalism.