ABSTRACT

In her acclaimed 1983 cult film Born in Flames, Lizzy Borden presents a montage of women at work. A woman nurses a baby. Another stirs food in a steaming pot. Others ride the subway, answer the telephone in an office, punch the clock, and work the assembly line. One places a condom on a penis, preparing for a sexual encounter. The scene frames work in morally neutral terms, as an act that a person performs to obtain the resources necessary for survival. By giving each task similar time in the sequence, Borden creates an equivalence between manufacturing, service provision, housework, procreation, mothering, and sex, and renders all of them examples of work. But since Born in Flames is an underground feminist film, a utopian fantasy about a leftist “Women’s Army” staging a coup against a socialist U.S. state, the audience senses the scene’s irony. What begins as a seemingly transparent depiction of the ordinary tasks that many women perform every day ends up raising the deeply fraught cultural foundations of the United States: the nuclear family, domesticity, and motherhood. The audience laughs with Borden at the notion that work—and especially work that the low-income white women and women of color portrayed in Borden’s film perform—could ever be presented in apolitical terms.1