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Commented (p1) : ¿Y La Comuna de Faraday Road?
Commented (p1) : ¿Y La Comuna de Faraday Road?
Commented (p1) : ¿Y La Comuna de Faraday Road?
The commune of radical queens dispersed, but the women’s commune at Faraday Road
continued.
Central in these experiments was the GLF’s relationship to their physical environments,
which they settled, transformed and adapted to the requirements of their pursued social
vision(s). Notably, both men and women in the GLF communes commented on the
experience of engaging with their physical houses in ways that deviated from standard
gendered roles, with women in the Faraday Road commune remarking on the way that
they repaired their electrical system, plumbing and other fixtures in the house “like men,”
and the men from the film studio commune remarking on their engagement with interior
design and decoration. In this sense, one of the ways that commune residents engaged
with gender politics was by challenging the gendered home/house distinction, with its
legacy of gendered division of labor.
In their new socio-spatial environments, members of the GLF performed alternative
gender roles, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, these manifested in the very way that they
occupied their spaces. The members of the six-person lesbian commune in Faraday Road,
Notting Hill, for example, redefined their relationship to gender roles partially in and
through their relationship to their physical house. The building, which belonged to
absentee landlords and had gone without renovation since it was built, required frequent
repairs and retrofits. “[E]verything was original including the wiring,”
one of the commune’s founding members remarked. The house had come without hot
water, and at one point, someone fell through the floorboards—situations that the
communal occupants resolved and repaired themselves. As one member explained,
Likely using popular do-it-yourself guides like Nicholas Saunders’ Alternative London,
93the lesbian members of Faraday Road associated their knowledge and practices of home
repair with the transcendence of gender roles, and with a new mode of domestic life more
generally.
The members of the London GLF communes shared physical space in nonnormative
ways, ignoring the “proper” or designed-for uses of the buildings they inhabited. At
Faraday Road, experimentation with the recoding of the functions attributed to different
rooms was part of a broader program of redesigning everyday life in the domestic
environment. The residents of the all-female commune sought to overturn gender roles,
to transcend individual ownership, abandon normative standards of privacy, and to
suspend monogamous arrangements and expectations, and together, these social
experiments called for an altered usage of domestic space.
The resultant separatism manifested spatially, with the Faraday Road commune
withdrawing from GLF meetings into their comunal space, and, when the commune was
finally evicted in 1975, with the dispersal of many of its members to rural separatist
communes around the country.
With the dissolution of the broader GLF, the individual communes each fought an uphill
battle to secure and hold onto their buildings, to define their own norms, to develop
consistent expectations about the sharing of money, etc. Under these conditions, many of
the communes fell apart in a short order of time. In the Faraday Road commune, “slowly
but surely there was this period when everything seemed to break up and some of the
women in the house suddenly went into a total extreme of separatism,” as one member
put it. “There were in-house arguments because people were starting to vary in their
politics.”129 Aubrey Walter reflected that, in the end, “[t]he actual problems of living
together in a total way were really enormous, and many communes broke up very soon
after formation.”130 Between sexual and emotional strife, political disagreements, and
financial problems, one by one, the GLF comunes collapsed.
“Four women from the Faraday commune, putting into words the feelings of many
women in the movement, added their names to a notice declaring that they’d had enough
and wanted to do something about the situation. They booked a space and put an
announcement in Lesbian Come Together.”
“Nettie Pollard: That night I was there, I went with all the other women to a pub near All
Saints Hall and the women got quite emotional and were saying things like, the men didn’t
care about them, all they cared about was cottaging and cruising. It was the radical
feminist type women rather than the socialist feminist type women. It was Faraday Road
and the women who hung about with them. There were quite a lot of women there, about
forty or fifty, but obviously they had come in strength in order to walk out. And then we
went in and it was the ordinary part of the meeting, and then one of the women got up
and said why the women were going to leave.”
En sus nuevos entornos socio-espaciales, los miembros del GLF desempeñaban roles de
género alternativos y, tal vez sin sorpresa, éstos se manifestaban en la misma forma en
que ocupaban sus espacios. Los miembros de la comunidad lésbica de seis personas en
Faraday Road, Notting Hill, por ejemplo, redefinieron su relación con los roles de género
parcialmente en y a través de su relación con su casa física. El edificio, que pertenecía a
propietarios ausentes y que no había sido renovado desde que se construyó, requería
frecuentes reparaciones y reacondicionamientos. "Todo era original, incluyendo el
cableado". comentó uno de los miembros fundadores de la comuna. La casa había llegado
sin agua caliente, y en un momento dado, alguien se cayó entre las tablas del suelo,
situaciones que los ocupantes de la comunidad resolvieron y repararon ellos mismos.
Como explicó un miembro,
Los miembros de las comunas GLF de Londres compartieron el espacio físico en forma
no normativa.
de los edificios que habitaban, ignorando los usos "adecuados" o diseñados para ellos. En
Faraday Road, la experimentación con la recodificación de las funciones atribuidas a las
diferentes habitaciones formaba parte de un programa más amplio de rediseño de la vida
cotidiana en el entorno doméstico. Los residentes de la comuna, en la que sólo hay
mujeres, trataron de derribar los roles de género, trascender la propiedad individual,
abandonar los estándares normativos de privacidad y suspender los arreglos y
expectativas monógamos, y juntos, estos experimentos sociales exigieron un uso alterado
del espacio doméstico.
Con la disolución del GLF más amplio, cada una de las comunas libró una batalla cuesta
arriba para asegurar y mantener sus edificios, para definir sus propias normas, para
desarrollar expectativas consistentes sobre la distribución del dinero, etc. En estas
condiciones, muchas de las comunas se desmoronaron en poco tiempo. En la comuna de
Faraday Road, "lentamente pero con seguridad hubo un período en el que todo parecía
romperse y algunas de las mujeres de la casa de repente entraron en un extremo total de
separatismo", como dijo un miembro. Había argumentos internos porque la gente estaba
empezando a variar en sus políticas".129
Aubrey Walter reflexionó que, al final, "los problemas reales de vivir juntos de una
manera total fueron realmente enormes, y muchas comunas se separaron muy poco
después de la formación".130 Entre las luchas sexuales y emocionales, los desacuerdos
políticos y los problemas financieros, uno por uno, los comunes del GLF se derrumbaron.
"Nettie Pollard: Esa noche estuve allí, fui con todas las demás mujeres a un pub cerca de
All Saints Hall y las mujeres se emocionaron bastante y dijeron cosas como, los hombres
no se preocupaban por ellos, todo lo que les importaba era la convivencia y el crucero.
Fueron las mujeres de tipo feminista radical y no las de tipo feminista socialista. Era
Faraday Road y las mujeres que andaban con ellos. Había bastantes mujeres allí, unas
cuarenta o cincuenta, pero obviamente se habían fortalecido para salir. Y entonces
entramos y era la parte ordinaria de la reunión, y entonces una de las mujeres se levantó
y dijo por qué las mujeres se iban a ir".