Relations of production and social reproduction, the state and the everyday: women’s labour in Turkey

Abstract

Social reproduction and women’s unpaid reproductive labour are integral both to capitalist production and class relations, and to international and national political economies. Based on an original theoretical framework that combines a Thompsonian historical materialist class approach, a Marxist-feminist social reproduction approach and a feminist political economy approach to the everyday, this article suggests that productive and reproductive work should be analysed as an integrated process and everyday experience of social life, and in relation to each other. This argument is then applied to the case of Turkey to indicate the interplays between the productive and reproductive realms at the national political economy level and the significant role of the state in shaping the reciprocal relationships of production and reproduction. Building on an ethnographic extended case study of women garment workers carried out over 14 months, it then analyses the interrelatedness of production and reproduction at the everyday level, within women’s daily experiences and from their own perspectives. Overall, the article argues that the relations and socio-material conditions of production and reproduction are constitutive of each other at the macro and micro political-economic levels and should be analysed from a comprehensive, relational approach in their historical and geographical context and in dialogue with the everyday.