London people, come to the launch of Feeling at Home today at Foyles! I'll be speaking about political meaning of housing and home with the amazing Lola Olufemi. @VersoBooks

And if you live in London, you can come along to the book launch!

You can preorder it here:

My new book Feeling at Home is out in just two weeks time, published by.@VersoBooks! . Foyles picked it as one of their top ten reads for January :)

A new article of mine for South Atlantic Quarterly, with some reflections on Sweden, the welfare state, gender and the family:

London friends and comrades, I'm launching my new book Feeling at Home on Thursday 23 January, in conversation with Lola Olufemi. More info and tickets here:

RT @yazzarf: ✊🍉1000s of authors, translators, booksellers, & publishing staff have signed and the number is rising every minute. 📚Book work….

My new book Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing is now available for preorder here:

It’s very hard to do justice to all the complexity of intimate life while writing about it in a political way. But I’m convinced that this type of critique remains essential to transforming how we live and care for one another.

The emotional labour discourse on social media a few years ago was incredibly annoying, but also contained a grain of truth. Lots of relationships, but family relationships in particular, are burdened by expectations of unwaged care work.

Finally, on work: I agree that the “everything is work” argument can be overdone. But many things are in fact work.

More on my thoughts about friendship here:

But to argue that friendship falls short as a form of sociality because “what happens if a friend finds a partner and abandons us” seems to assume that friendship is inherently limited/fickle, which I disagree with. It’s limited because of our current social world limits it.

Thirdly, on friendship: I don’t think either me or Sophie K Rosa pretend that friendship is always perfect in it’s current form. In fact, I argue that it’s often very constrained, partly by the family form itself.

I think the fact that a lot of people don’t have access to lifeworlds of intimate strangers is part of why life under capitalism gives rise to the “epidemic of loneliness” that Sarah Jaffe mentions.

What I’m hinting at here is more something like what we might call “community” (though I don’t love the term) or the experience people have in some political organisations – standing side by side with people you might not know very well but feel you can rely on.

Secondly, on strangers and intimacy: this is where I agree my language is probably too vague. With the term “lifeworld of intimate strangers” I mean not just any random stranger and definitely not “everyone”.

I get the frustration with the “have you tried just not being straight” argument, but that can’t mean we simply ignore the role of sexual politics.

This, importantly, was a deeply political project, but not an argument that who you fuck is the most important aspect of politics. Queerness remains politically important to a lot of us.

Firstly on queerness: I mention sexual practices as political in a context of queer movements that tried to deprivatise sex and build care/solidarity outside the private household.