Abstract
During the twentieth century, housework has become an endless cycle of work that usually goes without social recognition. Even though housework became one of the building blocks of social reproduction, society at large treats it with very little regard for the well-being of the ones carrying it out. Since it has been secluded in the private sphere of the home, it has become practically and discursively invisible. The technological innovations within the household and the policy of a family wage individualised the reproductive workers and isolated them in the social form of the 'housewife'. The housewife then lives in an endless loop of daily routines of caring for the house and family.
These daily routines are captured in the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) over a period of three days. Similarly, our videographic essay takes the viewer through three stages in the cycle of the extension of the housewife logic into the sphere of the digital. It proceeds from introducing the evolution of reproductive labour, to a playthrough that foregrounds the connections between reproductive and cognitive labour in the datafied society, to a demonstration of how this development of housework turns us all into 'digital housewives'.
Our videographic essay demonstrates how the transformation of labour and housework in the recent decades can be performatively transcribed into the desktop interface. Making Jeanne Dielman perform her daily routines in a digital simulation, inspired by the videogame series The Sims, highlights that the heroine of Akerman's film is not alone in her repetitive endeavors. In the virtual space, we are all becoming digital housewives.