Spaces for Feminist Commoning? Creative Social Enterprise’s Enclosures and Possibilities

This paper contributes an intersectional feminist analysis and methodological approach to debates about commoning and social enterprise. Through a narrative description of feminist social enterprise projects based on action research with the Kinning Park Complex, a social centre with a radical history in Glasgow’s South Side, I demonstrate how contemporary community economic development models can entrench intersectional exclusion. Specifically, I show how market-oriented social enterprise models reproduce precarious work, hinder cooperative ethics, and promote depoliticised notions of difference. However, I also investigate the ways that community organisers and activists at KPC are re-working these neoliberal models to carve out spaces for feminist commoning. Through these acts, women-identifying and non-binary activists, artists, and community organisers grapple with the classed, raced, and gendered politics of community organising and foster solidarities across difference.