I just got reinspired by a piece of writing I found lurking on my laptop. It speaks intuitively to my love of number crunching and plain operating; maybe sowing the seeds for a potential blog project on everyday spends/consumerism/and challenges to the contrary. Lets see how it goes, maybe I'll run with this.

Feminism falls behind my wallet:

the maths of a working class girl

I’m laying on concrete slabs in my back garden, billowed up with blankets (which I note, one comes from a charity shop, two from Walmarts – an impulse buy on the way to the so-call ‘anti-commercial’ Burning Man festival held in Nevada when travelling). I’m surrounded by my non-wireless laptop, a box of grassroots media books from Amazon, a 2 litre spring water bottle that I’ve been filling up from the tap and refrigerating non-stop for the past three months, and a pair of sunglasses I stole off my brother. I’ve slept in my clothes the last two days whilst hammering out a funding proposal for a project on contemporary feminist media production in Europe. My t-shirt used to belong to an 11-year old boy and was bought for a quid in a thrift shop. My blue workman’s dungarees, which I adore, were shoplifted from Lidyll’s when I bought a stack of beans, pasta and 34p big chocolate bars.

Just from this mental run-down of a specific moment in time, unconsciously arranged, I can see the contradiction of my politics literally hanging right off me.

It probably comes as no big shocker to you lefties and otherwise-engaged that we live in an age of big, juicy, constant contradiction (and doing-the-best-we-can-especially-when-we’re-skint ethics). Sprinkle in some righteous idealism, some well-honed theory, some instances of practical working alternatives – and a flying can’t-give-a-fuck about consumer-based femininity – and you arrive at something like the honey pot of my lifestyle politics. I follow a mutant practice of retreating from globalized economics whilst sucking up the benefits of ICTs, high store jeans (don’t look at the label!), and cheap imported grub. For good measure, I throw my working-class background into the equation – increasingly stretched and curled as it circulates in the echelons of middle-class feminism and academia – and the struggle with green capitalism (organic and local, good. Growing/doing it yourselves, better. Having money to eat, most important).

Right now I’m interested in the maths of working class life: what does it take, being poor? What does it add to a person and what does it subtract?  This project begins an intimate stroll through the daily spends of a white family who are struggling: a written mathematics that investigates the alternatives. My perspective is charged as someone with two hands in the class system: both working class and professional, finding my feet in the break from my background. By considering the options of a family under capitalism, I wanna understand what anti-alienation, comfort and respect feels like – what it costs, and how we can do-it-ourselves as far as possible. Consider this a feminist ethnography – taking the lived experiences of women, wringing the weight of subordination and dead ends from it, and discovering what is possible, what can be done. It’s a look at daily economies – and the web of political traction that comes with upholding capitalism through our conscious, and not so conscious, choices.