The Labour of Lesbian Life: Wages Due Lesbians and the Politics of Refusal

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‘It is the existence of lesbianism that makes fucking visible as labor’ write Wages Due Lesbians Toronto in their 1975 founding manifesto; ‘Fucking is work’. This statement formed the basis of the writing and activism of the group. Part of the international Wages for Housework (WFH) campaign, Wages Due Lesbians (WDL) were a network of Marxist-feminist lesbian activists mainly based in Toronto and London. While there has been a renewed interest in the writings of writers associated with WFH, such as Silvia Federici, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the WDL archives remain unexplored as a source of queer Marxist theory. 

Wages for Housework was founded on the conviction that women’s reproductive labour, often invisible and unwaged, is work that enables capitalist societies to function. The feminised work of caring for others is essential for ensuring that people can return to work every day, and for the generational replacement of the working class. WFH sought means for resisting this work, and thus for challenging capitalism. WDL put this into practice by refusing the labour of catering to men’s emotional and sexual needs, thus hoping to disrupt the smooth functioning of heterocapitalism. To refuse such labour, however, is not a merely negative withdrawal of one’s efforts. Rather it entails other practices, which are both similar and distinct from those of heterosexual women. In the WDL writings, lesbianism emerges not as a fixed identity but as a particular practice – one that involves the efforts of living a life outside of the institutions of the capitalist organisation of the heterosexual family. WDL thus conceptualised lesbianism not as the end-goal of the feminist movement, but as a collective organisational form based on both refusal of reproductive work as we know it and the invention of new types of sociality and different forms of life.

Heterosexuality is a work discipline

In their diagnosis of life under capitalism, WDL argue that heterosexual families are a primary site for the exploitation of unwaged labour – the primarily feminised work of attending to the needs of others. Women’s work, they suggest, is not only that of cleaning and cooking – the work of maintaining the physical health and capacities of the body – but also the work of creating and maintaining forms of subjectivities and desires. Under institutionalised heterosexuality, certain forms of desire come to appear as natural needs. These needs are taken for granted as the universal requirements of a good life. Yet the satisfaction of such needs results in the continued exploitation of women’s undervalued and invisible labour of attending to men’s sexual, emotional, and physical wellbeing. WDL thus define heterosexuality, in Lesbians Organise (1977), as ‘a way of extracting unpaid and low paid servitude from women’. However, women are not passive victims of such social formations, but are rather its active participants and primary work subjects. In heterosexual marriage, WDL Toronto write, ‘the woman supports the man to work harder, to buy a bigger house, a car, etc., and to subjugate her needs to these needs, which are capital’s’. Heterosexuality is an institutionalised lifestyle that requires not only the sexual desire for a different-sexed partner but the social desire for a particular kind of life, and all the material underpinnings of that life. This desire compels both men and women to perform certain types of labour. Capital’s need for specific patterns of consumption becomes near-identical with the workers’ own need for a liveable life, and thus they also come to desire their own subjugation to work. For WDL, capitalism is always heterocapitalism, where sexual desire and emotional need have become bound up with certain forms of labour and the material, legal, and social institutionalisation of the heterosexual couple and the nuclear family. 

In her 1976 article, ‘The autonomy of black lesbian women’, Wilmette Brown, a member of WDL and co-founder of Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWfWfH), suggests that heterosexuality is a work discipline. It is thus not merely an individual expression of desire or a sexual orientation, but the social organisation of life and labour. It extracts a certain amount of labour, especially for those who have been tasked with ensuring the wellbeing of others within the heterosexual couple or family. This labour simultaneously produces and depends upon particular subjective forms. It is also invisible as labour – if it were not, it could not appear as a natural and therefore non-political condition. For WDL, and for WFH more generally, heterosexuality and its attendant gender positions have to appear as simply being but are, in fact, doing, a highly particular practice that comes to appear as a natural state. The highly codified and institutionalised work discipline of heterosexuality, therefore, seems to be a merely private, natural, and intimate state of being.

Because sexuality is seen as private, there is a reluctance to understand it as work. According to Silvia Federici’s ‘Sexual work and our struggle against it’ (2017), sexuality is constructed as ‘the last stronghold in the division between the public and the private, which hides the degree to which our alleged private life is controlled and planned according to the same criteria that regulate factory work’. A central project of the WDL writings is to undo the mystery and romanticism which surrounds sexuality, appearing as a site of freedom from the regimentation of the waged workplace. Ruth Hall, a member of WDL London, argued in ‘Lesbianism and power’ (1975) that it is a common misconception, even among contemporary feminists, that sexuality is not political. These feminists participate in the liberal myth that ‘what you do in bed is your own business’. This also suggests that there is a separation in capitalist life between sexuality and all other spheres of life. Sexuality is split off from all other activity. This is simultaneously a gendered, spatial and temporal separation, in which work time is distinguished from the temporality of sexuality. While many people mainly work with people of the same gender as themselves, ‘our “leisure” and sexual activity is organised on heterosexual lines’. According to WDL Toronto, this serves to isolate women from one another as well as from their sexual partners, by separating the forms of intimacy that are seen as appropriate in the different temporal and spatial spheres of work and leisure. The heterosexual organisation of leisure fragments capitalist social life, making the private sphere the exclusive zone of acceptable sexuality, while outlawing other forms of relationality. For WDL, then, sexuality is confined to the ‘private’ sphere of heterosexual coupledom, whereas women’s friendship and intimacy is constructed as devoid of sexuality. (Hetero)sexual relations are made to compensate for the impoverished state of all other social relations, in which sensual pleasures are taboo.

This heterosexual sphere is not only that of the heterosexual couple itself, but importantly also that of their children – the people who must be socialised and disciplined into becoming future workers. The work of creating subjectivity and desire thus becomes the work of reproducing such subjective investments in one’s children. ‘Women’s work’ is to teach children to desire the same things as their parents had – the same work discipline and the same social position. Capitalism requires not only the reproduction of healthy individuals, but also society itself. As much as capitalism seems to rely on constant change in social relations, it also depends on a great degree of continuity, in which children become adults by acquiring the desires and social habits of their parents. The reproduction of heterosexuality is both the means and the desired outcome of this work. It will ensure that future workers continue to adhere to a familial model in which their physical and emotional wellbeing is not the responsibility of their employers or the state, but instead relegated to the private sphere of the family. This also means that families are likely to be conservative in the desires and subjectivities they reproduce. In Policing the bedroom, and how to refuse it (1991), written after the rise and consolidation of the Thatcherite regime, WDL London state that ‘[m]onetarism – government by market forces – needs moralism’. Rather than a free market and a deregulated family structure, therefore, neoliberalism continued to rely on state regulation and more traditional ideas of the role of the family as an institution of reproduction, not only of people but certain conservative values. 

For WDL, it is important to note that this arrangement of intimate life is detrimental for everyone – heterosexual men and women, children, lesbian and gay people. Hall states that ‘[o]nly the revolution destroying all productive relationships will destroy the hell hole of our sexual relations, lesbian and heterosexual’. Heterosexual men benefit the most from heterocapitalist arrangements, as their sexual pleasure and their need for emotional and physical comfort is given disproportionate weight. Yet the institutionalisation of heterosexuality, and its connection to the work discipline that structures men’s lives in the sphere of waged work, serves to limit the lives even of those whose needs are most fully met. Those needs themselves are an expression of a deeply restricted, fragmented and regimented form of life. For those whose needs are not met by the institutionalised heterosexual family, life is precarious and fragile. They might achieve some freedom from the work discipline of heterosexuality, but all sexual and reproductive arrangements are restricted by the institutionalisation of the heterosexual family in the private sphere. As Beth Capper and Arlen Austin write in a 2018 essay for GLQ: The Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ‘BWfWfH and WDL impressed that “the home” disciplines the sexualities and labors of even those seemingly excluded from its domain’. WDL argue that it is necessary for both heterosexual feminists and lesbians to resist this arrangement, by various forms of refusal of heterosexual work discipline.

Refusal and power

A core argument of the WDL texts is that lesbian relations are one way of resisting the capitalist organisation of reproductive labour. But this is not a complete refusal. They emphasise that one cannot simply opt out of capitalist society, and therefore every form of resistance and refusal will be partial. Lesbianism, as the Power of Women Collective write in ‘At home in the hospital’ (1975), does not free us from work. The lesbian separatist movement, they suggest, misdiagnosed the causes of women’s oppression, by making men appear as the eternal enemies, thus missing the role of capitalist relations in institutionalising heterosexuality. It also, as WDL London note, locates the exploitation of women’s labour solely within marriage. By contrast, WDL members argue that lesbians still participate in gendered reproductive labour in various ways – for other women, for their children, elderly people, in their communities, and at their waged workplaces. WDL offer a rebuttal of the critique often made of WFH – that the movement solely focused on married white women’s labour within the domestic sphere. As Capper and Austin have argued, the writings of WDL and BWfWfH expand the field of housework by conceptualising it as something those excluded from normative domestic arrangements are still made to participate in. By refusing the heterosexual, institutionalised form of reproductive labour, WDL argue that lesbians are forced to reinvent reproductive labour in various ways. The refusal of work, as a political strategy, always carries an element of creative invention.

By including more forms of activity in the term ‘work,’ they also expanded the possibilities of political refusal. WDL writings apply labour tactics such as strikes, absenteeism, and wage struggles in our seemingly most intimate relations – those of the family. Love, they argue, is not a natural state in the relation between men and women. Rather it must be constantly produced. According to WDL, such production can be refused, a form of resistance that also exposes the power hierarchies that are part and parcel of the production of love and desire within heterosexual couples. Hall writes that lesbianism is a struggle against work ‘in the obvious sense that relating to men is very hard work – sexual, emotional, and laundry’. Lesbianism emerges as a resistance to multiple types of labour, which form a continuum within heterosexual arrangement. WFH member Leopoldina Fortunati suggests, in The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, prostitution, labor and capital (1975), that it is the emotional aspects of heterosexuality that make heterosexual women carry out housework such as cooking and cleaning for their partners. There are many reasons why women perform reproductive labour – not all of them are ‘for love’ – but love changes those work relations and makes it harder to resist the work discipline of heterosexuality. By rejecting this emotional and sexual aspect, WDL also reject the uneven distribution of unwaged care work and physical housework that characterise most heterosexual couples. In this way, WDL had a pivotal role in the WFH strategy as a whole, by refusing the most intimate and naturalised work of heterosexuality.

The WDL writings thus propose a politics based on a drastically rethought notion of sexual intimacy, both in suggesting that heterosexuality requires hard work and because it opens up the possibility for a different form of sexuality. This is inherent in their notion of refusal, which enables women to resist exploitative aspects of sexuality in order to move towards different practices. Francie Wyland, a member of WDL Toronto, writes in Child custody, motherhood, lesbianism (1976) that the practice of lesbianism undermines men’s power to command sexual labour, not just for lesbians, but for heterosexual women too. This characterisation of sexuality also allows the category of lesbian to remain open, in that currently heterosexual women could move towards a refusal of their current sexual practices, thus creating the potential for something new. WDL member Ellen Woodsworth writes in ‘Lesbians want wages for housework too’ (1975): ‘As a lesbian, I am refusing one area of the work that women are supposed to do – the sexual and emotional support of men. I know that by refusing that work, I am saying we can all refuse that work that society expects of us’. 

An aim of the refusal of this work is to denaturalise heterosexuality – creating a practice that contradicted the seeming inevitability of heterosexual coupledom and family forms. Lesbian struggle, according to Hall, ‘upsets the appearance that the capitalist organisation of our work is natural and inevitable and all for our own human needs’. Women’s personalities and skills have been shaped to meet the needs of capital production and the men who are the main beneficiaries of the current organisation of reproductive labour. Both women’s personalities as caregivers and the needs to which such caregiving responds are presented as naturally existing facts, rather than the outcomes of a certain organisation of production, inside and outside of the nuclear family. In their foundational manifesto, WDL Toronto state that the existence of lesbians shows that ‘heterosexual love and marriage is not women’s biological destiny’. Such denaturalisation is simultaneously a precondition and an outcome of lesbian refusal. The construction of lesbian sexuality as a form of struggle against the current organisation of work and society requires a view of sexuality as a type of reproductive labour, rather than a natural expression of sexual desires. Thus moving away from the naturalised nuclear family as the best way to respond to people’s needs, WDL opens space for rethinking our sexual and emotional needs as part of the process of feminist struggle. As WDL London put it in Policing the bedroom, ‘[t]his rejection may not bring utopia, but it does help shake up all robotic intellectual, physical and social responses to the assumptions we have been force-fed’.

The refusal of the work of the heterosexual couple and family also created potentials for resisting other kinds of work. For WDL, lesbianism exists within a continuum of struggles against the exploitation of women’s labour. According to WDL Toronto members, it is one form of refusal among many, opening the potential for a general disruption of the capitalist model of reproduction, which depends on women’s low waged or unwaged labour both within the home and outside it. While lesbians were thus integral to the WFH practice of refusal more broadly, they did not construe their own activism or sexual choices as the only or necessarily most radical form of feminist struggle. In their critique of lesbian separatism, WDL members often return to their conceptualisation of the lesbian struggle as a necessary but not sufficient aspect of the women’s movement more broadly. Separatism serves to isolate lesbian women from heterosexual women, argue WDL Toronto in ‘Lesbian testimony presented at the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women’ (1977), who might also be struggling against aspects of the heterosexual work discipline. Differently located women within the social totality have access to various forms of refusal, which might be distinct from the decision to live without a male partner. In a statement in support of the decriminalisation of sex work, WDL Toronto and London argue that not only are many lesbians themselves sex workers, but that sex workers more broadly act in continuum with the lesbian refusal to have sex with men for free within the context of a romantic relationship. In a similar vein, Brown stresses that Black women’s childbearing and seemingly unruly sexual practices can be read as a refusal of the capitalist sexual discipline based on white, bourgeois domestic arrangements. WDL thus construe lesbian refusals as part of a broader struggle against the sexual labour imposed by capitalism. As Capper and Austin write, 

[r]ather than assert strict divisions between ‘straight’ and ‘queer’ women, WDL framed heterosexuality in a manner far closer to Cathy J. Cohen’s (1997) use of the concept of heteronormativity to describe how normative heterosexuality’s state-sanctioned and institutional organization regulates and immiserates a range of social subjects (including those who may nevertheless engage in hetero-sex).

Hall also gestures towards labour struggles within waged workplaces in, for example, nursing, as part of the same denaturalisation process that lesbians engage in when refusing the labour of love within the heterosexual family. Women’s reproductive labour, and their refusal of such labour, thus takes place within a dispersed network of sites and forms of subjectivity, and cannot be reduced to one form of refusal. The struggle against reproductive work could only be effective when starting from the perspective of a social totality in which differently located subjects’ labours are intertwined. 

This struggle was based on an organisational model in which differently located women formed autonomous yet interlinked groups. While WDL and BWfWfH were the most visible of the autonomous groups within the WFH network, the English Collective of Prostitutes and WinVisible, an organisation consisting of disabled women, were also affiliated with WFH. The purpose of these groups within the broader WFH movement was, as WDL Toronto explained, to make sure that the interests of these groups were at the forefront of the movement, and to build the power of the most marginalised people. This form of organising enables lesbian women to struggle together with heterosexual women without either risking being further marginalised or presenting their own struggle as unique or vanguard in relation to the feminist movement more broadly. According to WDL, organisational autonomy permitted more oppressed groups to work together with less marginalised groups, on terms set by those with less power. Such a model was designed to foster a sense of solidarity, where those more marginalised were given a central place in the broader movement. It was also a question of power – only by strengthening the position of those seemingly most powerless, WDL London wrote, could the working class as a whole become more powerful.

Conceptualising their own struggle in this way allows WDL Toronto to argue that lesbianism is not in itself a victory. Contrary to understandings of lesbianism as itself an ideal form of sexuality, WDL insist on seeing lesbianism as an ongoing practice. WDL texts construe lesbianism as we know it as severely limited by the broader reproductive arrangements of heterocapitalism. But this also means that lesbian sexuality is a process rather than a finished identity. Lesbian struggle is a self-abolishing movement, which strives to undo lesbianism as a separate identity. Because lesbian identity is not external to the capitalist organisation of sexuality more broadly, it cannot be a solution to the patriarchal organisation of reproduction. Rather, it is an immanent potential for struggle.

For WDL, this struggle took the form of the demand for a wage. As WDL Toronto succinctly put it: ‘For us lesbian women, wages for housework means wages against heterosexuality’. A wage for past and current housework would enable lesbian women to leave heterosexual households, giving them the financial independence needed to live without men. Against those critics who suggested that the WFH strategy would institutionalise women in the (heterosexual) domestic sphere, WDL Toronto members argue that more money would in fact give women more freedom to leave it. Being compensated for all the work women do, they insisted, would strengthen women’s position and enable them to refuse that work. For WDL, it is women’s generally financially weak position and low wages, combined with little access to the means of subsistence independently of men, that makes it difficult for many women to come out as lesbians. In the words of WDL London: ‘We want the particular physical and emotional housework of surviving as lesbian women in a hostile and prejudiced society, recognised as work and paid for, so women have the economic power to afford sexual choices and can come out in millions’. This perspective also implies an analysis in which many lesbian issues appear as a result of women’s low-waged jobs, and the seemingly biological imperative to perform reproductive labour for men in exchange for economic security. The fact that many lesbians lost custody of their children when coming out was linked to their inability to independently support their children, Wyland explained, as well as judges labelling lesbians as ‘unfit mothers’. WDL Toronto also emphasise that lack of suitable and affordable housing is a barrier for lesbians who want to leave unsatisfying and abusive marriages with men.

Throughout their writings, WDL highlight the economic and material conditions of lesbian lives. Lesbian and gay visibility, they argue, is not a goal in itself but could only be the consequence of the collective mobilisation of queers to gain power and the material resources needed to secure liveable queer lives. Against the individualising emphasis on ‘coming out’, WDL Toronto stress that visibility is not a question of individual will but of collective power. Through their analysis of sexuality and class, they make the link between sexual choices and economic power, arguing against those parts of the left that saw the gay and lesbian movement as a middle-class concern. But WDL London also take a stand against the parts of the movement that sought respectability and influence for its most privileged members, arguing that only a working-class movement can bring about real change, as more affluent gay men were likely to opt for shallow notions of sexual diversity and inclusion over a structural reconfiguration of sexuality and domesticity.

For WDL, the lesbian movement must thus be concerned with building women’s access to resources – a move that allows them to meet (and reimagine) their needs independently of having to perform reproductive labour for men. Such resources consist not only of material objects but of social bonds. Lesbianism, while not a solution to the contradictions of reproductive labour under capitalism, serves to increase women’s power. Hall writes that ‘our ability to live without men, our ability to express ourselves and our feelings for each other are in turn a source of power, just as money, time, facilities, even laws that we win serve to increase our strength’. Lesbianism also creates the space to redefine and experiment with women’s sexual needs. WDL Toronto argue that these needs, which have been constituted in order to bring pleasure to men, can be reconfigured in ways that increase the power of all women. Yet this could also produce a backlash, in which the increased power and visibility of lesbians leads to heightened levels of violence against those women who refuse the labour of heterosexuality. Lesbian visibility, then, even when resulting in more collective power, can also lead to various forms of violence and isolation, which in turn produce the distinct challenges of reproducing oneself and others as lesbian women.

The labour of lesbian life

Lesbians, WDL argue, are faced with distinct forms of homophobic violence, perpetrated both by men and heterosexual women. Heterosexual men are likely to be the main perpetrators of physical violence against lesbians. Lesbians face various forms of punishment, explain Hall and WDL London, for stepping outside of the heterosexual work discipline, including sexual harassment. But more important, because more difficult to confront and address, are the various forms of structural violence that lesbians face in their daily lives. Here, WDL insist that heterosexual women, even feminists, often participate in upholding the heterosexual organisation of the home and the workplace. According to Hall, the relation between heterosexual women and lesbians is a power relation between ‘those who are living according to the rules, who are accepted and established, against those who are abnormal’. In this relation, straight women act like ‘agents of the state’ – enforcers of an established work standard. Lesbians are branded as ‘shirkers’ for refusing the labour of heterosexuality, and thus stepping outside of women’s established (heterosexual) experience of exploitation. Such refusals, WDL member Ellen Woodsworth explains, lead to the exclusion of lesbians from the position of ‘real women’ – a position that is dependent on servicing men emotionally and sexually.

It also leads to the persistent isolation of lesbian women, which Hall argues is one of the worst effects of homophobia on the daily lives of lesbians. Such isolation excludes lesbians from even supposedly feminist milieus created by straight women. Lesbians are excluded from the solidarity and comfort that comes from complaining about husbands and boyfriends together. Here, Hall’s description is similar to Tamsin Wilton’s characterisation, in ‘Sisterhood in the service of patriarchy: Heterosexual women’s friendships and male power’ (1992), of heterosexual women’s friendships, which function analogously to a battlefield hospital, ‘to get the casualties fit and well so that they may be sent straight back to fight – not to rescue combatants from the horrors of war or to protest at war itself’. Heterosexual women’s intimacy, including the feminist variety, might thus serve to uphold heterosexuality by tending to the emotional damage without questioning the source of that damage. In the same process, lesbians are excluded from the community of women and definition of womanhood, which becomes construed as the willing participation in one’s own subordination. But, as Hall writes in ‘Lesbian testimony presented at the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women’ (1977), ‘the source of this crime is not women, but those in whose interest it is to keep women disciplined by heterosexuality’. One of the goals of autonomous lesbian organising, then, is to create autonomous lesbian power that would force heterosexual women to take lesbian practices and organising seriously, and foster solidarity among women of different sexual identifications. This also means not drawing strict lines between those identifications and thinking of them as stable and inherent, but rather conceptualising them as open to change.

According to WDL, the lack of visibility of lesbian women might serve to isolate lesbian women from each other. Women’s
limited economic independence, made more precarious in situations where discrimination against lesbians might lead to the loss of jobs and housing, also made it more difficult to create lesbian communities. For WDL London, this is expressed in the lack of specifically lesbian spaces. With their limited economic means, women have little capacity to create financially viable community spaces, especially in cities such as London where rent is high. But lesbians often find themselves moving from towns and rural areas to larger cities, WDL London write, in order to find what little community there is in the cities. According to WDL, then, the lack of material resources, and its attendant lack of visibility for lesbians, means that lesbians struggle to create and sustain communities outside of the nuclear family form. The institutionalisation of heterosexuality, including through various economic means, leads to a lack of sustainable alternative modes of sociality from which lesbian communities can grow. Queer experiments in community-building are often short-lived. This lack of resources to build community should also be understood as a more subtle form of violence against lesbians and other queer people, who might suffer physically and emotionally from the lack of available spaces and socialities to sustain them.

In such a climate of isolation, mental illness among queer people is likely to be frequent. Hall writes that ‘[i]n places where no other lesbians are visible it is an isolation that is right next door to madness, and often delivers us into the hands of medical institutions’. Add to this the fact that lesbians have long been likely to be branded as mentally ill, whether they experience themselves as such or not. According to Woodsworth, lesbians are women who step out of line, perverted and unladylike women – like those unruly women who are called ‘crazy’, engage in sex work, or rely on benefits from the state instead of the economic security of the nuclear family. As Wyland stressed, lesbian women’s loss of custody of their children also relies on the stigmatised position of ‘bad mothers’ who are seen as performing social reproduction incorrectly, thus threatening the well-being of their children. WDL London wrote that ‘lesbian women’s mothering is under constant suspicion and scrutiny’ – something that became more apparent in the aftermath of Section 28, the clause of the 1988 Local Governments Act which branded homosexuality as ‘a pretended family relationship’.

These forms of discrimination and prejudice against lesbians and their families and communities led to an increased need for what WDL refer to as ‘emotional housework’ – all the labour that goes into comforting and caring for those experiencing the emotional harm of living in a hostile society. Hall writes that ‘there’s so much pressure all the time on all of us that we are continually having to struggle to hold each other together and keep sane. We’re all mothers, all the time mothering each other and trying to keep a grip on ourselves’. There are thus two aspects of the reproductive labour that lesbians perform. Firstly, lesbians are still understood as women (though perhaps not ‘real women’), and therefore expected to perform certain forms of reproductive labour for men. As members of WDL Toronto put it, the power relation between men and women ‘is so pervasive in our lives that even when we stop sleeping with individual men, we are still expected to be servants to men on the job, on the streets, in school, etc.’. The gendered division of labour is thus not only located within the heterosexual couple itself, but stretches outside of it and shapes society. 

Secondly, lesbians have to perform the labour of caring for one another, often outside of established institutions such as marriage. Part of this work is making sure oneself and one’s partner are able to return to work the next day – work that is similar to that of heterosexual couples, including cooking and cleaning as well as emotional support. As Capper and Austin note, this analysis presciently portrays lesbian relationships as reproductive, at a time when homosexuality was solely associated with non-reproduction. At a time when lesbian lives were understood as more decisively outside of capitalist normativity, WDL thus understood lesbian reproduction as containing elements of capitalist labour, and not fully distinct from heterosexual social reproduction. Unlike many other gay and lesbian movements at the time, WDL theorised a homosexuality which could be at least partly integrated into normative social reproduction. 

However, WDL add that part of the reproductive labour that lesbians perform is unique to those who are marginalised in society. This involves the labour of trying to compensate for the emotional harm of homophobia and the additional labour required of those who are trying to survive without material and institutional support. But it might also entail the labour of building communities and struggles that challenge the status quo, creating forms of sociality that are not based on exploitation. Marginalised people are compelled to reproduce themselves for capital, but also for themselves – inventing social forms that become sources of comfort and joy. Often these acts of invention sit somewhere between work and play, pointing towards new structures of feeling and collective forms of care. 

WDL experimented with celebrating the supposedly lacking and unnatural quality of lesbian reproductive labour. Embracing the label of lesbians as ‘bad mothers’, Wyland states that ‘[w]e are demanding the power to be with those children in a way that is not work’ (emphasis in original). For WDL, not living up to the standards set by heterosexuality becomes a point of pride. This includes the refusal to raise a disciplined and heterosexual workforce. WDL strived for a different way of relating to children – one that could be more playful and undisciplined, orientated towards pleasure in the present, rather than aimed at producing a future-orientated subjectivity characterised by a desire for the discipline of work and family.

In the decades since these writings were produced, capitalist social and emotional relations have changed. The hegemony of the breadwinner family model has been replaced by a dual-earner model, and divorce has become more common. While women still struggle with financial insecurity to a higher degree than men, many women have been able to opt out of the heterosexual family form. The feminist and gay movements have successfully challenged some of the restrictive and oppressive practices that are associated with the nuclear family. But we are also living in a time of violent backlash against queer and trans people, as well as misogynist tendencies which re-emphasise women’s role as reproductive workers first and foremost. The term ‘lesbian’ has become associated with transphobic versions of feminism, although a majority of the women participating in the TERF movement are straight. Wages Due Lesbians London changed its name to Queer Strike, and continues to operate as an explicitly trans-inclusive group of queer women. Perhaps the moment of organising strictly under the banner of lesbianism has been superseded, yet given the unruly and queer legacy of the lesbian movement, we should be wary of giving up the term lesbian to the TERFs. The refusal of heterocapitalist work, a key part of the WDL tradition, lives on in queer movements. 

In 1986, WDL London made a list of the work that lesbians do. One item on this list is ‘[h]aving to invent lesbian lives’. WDL do not understand lesbianism as a finished identity but rather an ongoing project – continual acts of invention. As all our sexual identities and practices are hampered by capitalist work ethics, the work of lesbianism is also the labour of inventing new social and sexual practices. Here, there is a similarity to the notion of queerness as that which is outside of institutional support, and which is therefore different for the homonormative modes of life that have strived to include certain same-sex practices within the institutions of heterosexuality. While showing that lesbians are forced to accept certain normative forms of labour for their own survival, lesbian practice also entails resistance to those forms of labour. In a time when the mainstream lesbian and gay movement has become increasingly integrationist, we might draw inspiration from this understanding of lesbian struggle – as a practice not outside the constraints of reproduction under capitalism, but also not fully subsumable into the institutionalised sociality of heterosexuality. What WDL proposed was not just a refusal of the heterosexual family but familial forms of labour tout court. The labour of queer life, then, would be the playful work of inventing new ways of survival and flourishing, on our own terms, outside the privatised care and love of the family. Such practices of invention, in which many queer people already engage, might gesture beyond the current constraints of heterocapitalism. They also open up queerness as a practice of experimentation rather than a fixed identity category. Those who currently understand themselves as heterosexual, and benefit from the material rewards of heterosexuality, may potentially betray their loyalty to the status quo and become part of the collective struggle against work and for new forms of sociality and desire.

In the WDL writings, lesbianism is a set of practices of refusal of work, as well as new forms of labour. Lesbian struggle is thus one that seeks to reimagine life in a way that is less constrained by the regimentation of sexuality and the demands of unwaged and waged work. In trying to live life outside of the institutions of heterocapitalism, collective queer struggle can create the power to unsettle the gendered division of labour as a whole. This would in turn undermine the capitalist organisation of needs and desires, and point to a more liveable future. In arguing that lesbian lives contain both labour and refusal, both violence and power, WDL constructed an understanding of queer life as anchored in material conditions that always contain their own immanent potential for resistance. WDL tried to constitute autonomous lesbian subjectivity that would challenge the heterosexual regimentation of reproductive labour and potentially enable all women to refuse the labour that had been forced on them by virtue of their gendered positionality. Such refusal brings the challenges and possibilities of imagining life anew – where new forms of sociality can create space for flourishing outside of the constraint, exploitation and violence of the heterosexual family.

Alva Gotby is a writer and organiser living in London. Her first book is They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life (Verso, 2023). Her second, Feeling at Home, is forthcoming from Verso in 2025. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of West London. She writes on feminist theory, social reproduction, housing, emotions, and family, and is active in struggles to abolish prisons and landlords.