Petal 2021
This book is about knowledge found in grief–of the body and its entanglements, and of the way it responds, moves, and is altered when someone leaves the earth. It was published by Incendium Radical Library in 2021.
The body,
holding the temporal discipline of capital
wants to move forward, but sometimes doesn’t.
Loss too opens a space
that is out of synch,
it stays very still.
Petal is Chelsea Hart's meditation on loss, love, ecology, motherhood, labour, of our entanglements and how we are always in collaboration in unintentional ways. It includes illustrations by Julia Trybala, and was part of a collaboration that produced the show ‘Hold a Body Together’ at Station Gallery. Petal has sold out of it’s first and second round of prints, but can be sent as a pdf via email request.
With Love, and Labour 2022
We are naming the work to refuse respect for the work altogether.
With Love, and Labour was In With Love, and Labour, which comprises a single poem-essay, Chelsea Hart offers a political economic account of sex work as work. This claim is not meant to reify work, for sex work is work and all work sucks, as she writes, citing a collective slogan of workers against work. Hart writes not just a theory of the labour of sex work but also a poem of the different ways that lineage — the passing of knowledge and the transmission of agency — can be read across the history of sex work and between generations of workers. Hart’s articulation of lineage emphasises the ambivalence of collectivity and solidarity forged under the sign of work: a labour of love, where love is synonymous with refusal.
This piece was part of the second pamphlet series for Rosa Press: three softcover, pocket-sized titles from Tabitha Lean | Budhin Mingaan and Carlos Soto-Román and Chelsea Hart. The pamphlets document solidarity and survival (across essay, memoir, and poetry) against torture and incarceration and within sex worker labour militancy. (write up by Rosa Press).
I Want It I Need It I Make It: an anthology of SW writing from so-called Australia. (editor) 2023
I Want It, I Need It, I Make It is an anthology of SW writing in so-called Australia, produced and published through the project SW Narrative Salon. In this anthology, we are invited to explore ideas about work, bodies, resistance and care through the voices of SWs. Part auto-fiction, part poetry, experimentation and critical theory, I Want It I Need It I Make It is a hybrid of different forms. Inhale Hello Kitty body spray, latex, sweat, poppers, cum, exhale. Be invited into new understandings of what we mean when we say we are talking about sex work. Available to purchase at Fiend Bookshop. (write up by Queenie Bon Bon)
Masters Thesis 2023
'They Call it Love': Ideology and reproductive labour struggles during COVID-19 lockdowns in Victoria
Jointly supervised by Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks as part of a Master of the Arts (Research).
This thesis draws on Marxist feminist frameworks to examine the ideological underpinnings of state government discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia, with a particular focus on reproductive labour and the ways that official discourse occluded the gendered and radicalised impact on those shouldered with increased responsibility to undertake care work. Autonomist Marxist feminists of the 1970s initially proposed reproductive labour as the paid and unpaid labour that goes into reproducing labour-power as a commodity. These theorists have long critiqued that such labour is often framed as a matter of love and care for women, rather than work. Focusing on the city of Melbourne – which was subject to the longest lockdowns in the world – I analyse the crisis response articulated by the state government through press releases and media statements. I find that the state mobilises the concept of a duty to love, care, and sacrifice for one’s family and community. I highlight how this discourse obscures the extraction of surplus labour both in state-organised social reproduction (such as nursing), and the massive increase to unwaged feminised labour in the family (such as domestic work and childcare). I position this discourse as an extension of divestment from state-organised reproductive labour (for example, public healthcare and childcare) and social welfare programs that have been hallmarks of capitalist governance over the past 40 years. The thesis then analyses counterpublic discourses that emerged during lockdown in Melbourne in 2020–2021 and that offer articulations of care, support, and community that respond directly to abandonment by the state. I focus on three key case studies: the organising of sex workers to support each other financially during lockdowns; the organising of public housing residents to provide food and health care during forced quarantine; and harm reduction organising between sex workers during COVID-19, which itself draws on the legacy of self-organised community care during the HIV/AIDS crisis. In these counterpublic discourses, I identify a strong sense of pessimism and dissent towards the uneven work of building and sustaining life during the pandemic, and I identify counterpublic modes of speech such as bitching as tools through which reproductive workers’ organise and express solidarity. Finally, I argue that community-led harm reduction can be seen as a form of insurgent social reproduction – as a world-making project that is linked to the abolition of the family and the aspiration to generalise care. As a whole, this thesis identifies the material and ideological dynamics that exists as part of contemporary reproductive labour struggles - between the state’s desire to mobilise the idea of a hegemonic public in the service of restoring pre-pandemic capitalist function, and modes of resistance against this political project that aim at a future beyond capital.