Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines feminist commoning practices as resistance to neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy. Drawing on Federici's analysis of reproductive labour and women's ecofeminist leadership, we demonstrate how commons create autonomous spaces that challenge capitalist exploitation.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation examines concrete practices of feminist commoning as ecofeminist resistance to neoliberal capitalism and patriarchal structures. Drawing on Silvia Federici's analysis, we argue that capitalism fundamentally depends on the exploitation of unpaid reproductive labour—the work of caring, nurturing, and maintaining life that produces labour power itself. As neoliberal austerity intensifies this exploitation, systematically downloading social reproduction costs onto women's unpaid labour, marginalised communities create alternatives that refuse this arrangement while building autonomous alliances from below. These commoning practices—from community-controlled spaces and collective childcare to shared resource networks, tool and seed libraries, and intergenerational knowledge transmission—break down capitalist divisions between home and community, waged and unwaged work, domestic and public spheres. Understanding feminist commons as autonomous spaces from which to challenge (not escape) the existing capitalist organisation of life and labour, this work demonstrates how these practices emerge not from reforming institutions but from collectively inhabiting and transforming the ruins left by capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems. Drawing connections to women's ecofeminist leadership internationally, we reveal how commoning practices create "elsewheres" that transform both material relations and desires. These are spaces where reproduction becomes collective rather than individualised, where the commons represents both the social relations we aim to achieve and the means for constructing them. This presentation demonstrates how ecofeminist commons offer practical models for post-capitalist, post-patriarchal social organisation grounded in care, justice, and ecological flourishing, while challenging the commodification of life and labour under global capitalism.