Reproductive Labor Research Articles

Gendered administrative burden: regulating gendered bodies, labor, and identity

Abstract Gendered burdens are experiences of coercive and controlling state actions that directly regulate gendered bodies, labor, and identity. Burdens are not simply about preventing access to rights and benefits, they're about control and coercian. Gendered burdens generate gender inequality through four mechanisms. First, administrative burdens regulate reproductive bodies, legitimating the state’s direct control over reproductive health care, including abortions, with consequent implications for peoples’ health. Second, burdens require reproductive labor, shifting unpaid and underpaid reproductive labor onto women as the policies that support such labor tend to have high administrative burdens that impede access. Third, gendered burdens restrict reproductive labor, impeding the right to provide such care labor with dignity, by exerting control over how, and sometimes whether, care is performed, including in rights-granting venues, like redistributive benefits, and rights-depriving venues, like the supervision of families by child protective services. Fourth, burdens regulate gendered identities, reinforcing heteronormative and cis-normative constructions of gender, including by directly controlling gender identification. While gendered burdens are not only experienced by women, they are most strongly applied to poor and racially marginalized groups of women. These claims provide a basis for public administration scholarship to connect with feminist theory by illustrating the centrality of administrative processes and related experiences to structural patterns of inequality.

Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction

The low value of reproductive labor, and the related “crisis of care,” are often attributed to gendered attitudes about work. This article traces this explanation to the attempted synthesis of Marxist and feminist theories of ideology in the 1970s and offers a sympathetic critique with implications for both contemporary theories of labor and the “new ideology critique.” It reconstructs the explanatory role of ideology in feminist analyses of unwaged housework and tracks its uptake in theories of “reproductive labor” more broadly, via what I call the “naturalization thesis.” While these analyses have been influential, I show that they do not provide a convincing account of either gender oppression or the low value of reproductive labor. I offer an alternative explanation for the latter rooted in labor processes and patterns of capital accumulation and argue for the reintegration of ideology critique with the critique of political economy.

Social Reproductive Labor and Uto/Dystopia: An Analysis of Leila, Midnight Robber and Woman World

ABSTRACT Contemporary science fiction and speculative fiction with utopian/dystopian aspects from South Asia and the Caribbean have rarely been studied in tandem. Furthermore, no scholarly work has analyzed such texts produced under conditions of contemporary capitalism in the light of social reproduction theory which considers social reproductive labor that rejuvenates labor power. I study Leila (2017) by the Indian writer Prayaag Akbar, Midnight Robber (2000) by the Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson, and Woman World (2018) by the diasporic Indian writer Aminder Dhaliwal to connect social reproductive labor and utopianism and argue that social reproductive labor rejuvenates the labor power of utopian agents in social reproductive spaces such as homes, schools, hospitals, gardens etc. resisting dystopian conditions, nurturing hope, and rejuvenating utopian thinking. I question how utopianism is related to social reproductive labor in postcolonial contexts of the Global South, and propose that 1) dystopian scenarios are brought about by control of social reproductive spaces and 2) progress/betterment is actualized with renewal and rejuvenation via social reproductive labor. I contend that relating twenty-first-century utopianism to social reproduction is a valuable and novel approach, especially in postcolonial contexts where conditions of labor have been determined by complex histories of colonialism, enslavement, and indentured labor.

Ideal Family Size and Reproductive Orientations: An Exploration of Change Over Time in the United States

Drawing on more than 30 years of nationally representative microdata from the General Social Survey, this article comprehensively updates recent trends in ideal family size in the United States. It first documents stability in ideal family sizes between the mid-1980s and 2018, even in the face of a recent fertility decline. Next, the study adopts a latent class approach that identifies typologies of “reproductive orientations,” defined as multidimensional mental models of reproduction encompassing ideal family size, attitudes toward reproductive labor, and views on reproduction contexts. The findings indicate three distinct classes of reproductive orientations: Progressive Familialists, Conservative Familialists, and Blended Egalitarians. Further analyses suggest that the prevalence of these classes has changed over time and that class membership is associated with distinct patterns of childbearing and marriage. These findings deepen contemporary understandings of ideal family size in the United States and have broader implications for how demographers conceptualize and measure fertility preferences across diverse contexts.

The fragrance of ghee: food aesthetics, food insecurity and policy dreams

In this short article, we call for policy makers, activists and academics to take account of food aesthetics of economically and racially marginalised people – especially women – when understanding and intervening in food distribution. Although it may seem that aesthetics and poverty are mutually exclusive, and somewhat provocative to suggest that food aesthetics, when understood more expansively, aesthetics is an important aspect of domestic food work, as our findings from our research with British Bangladeshi women from Tower Hamlets on low incomes and responsible for social reproductive labour in their families and communities attest. We draw inspiration from feminist philosophy of food and taste, and everyday domestic aesthetics. Reflecting on our data, we combine these philosophies with Krishnendu Ray’s critique of food sociologists who imagine that people on low incomes lack a sense of beauty because their lives are dominated by their life of suffering. To conclude, we propose that food aesthetics should become part of the politics of food distribution and rights.

Planning’s ecologies: Democratic planning in the age of planetary crises

The idea of planning has reappeared as an object of interest for critical research on post-capitalist organizational futures. This article offers a critical review of the emerging scholarship on planning, with reference to historical and contemporary precursors to democratic planning. Building on this review, the article develops a critical political ecology of planning that situates planning thought and practice within the matrix of the oikos. This encompasses not only the sphere of production and commodity exchange, but also the household of reproductive labor and the planetary household of the natural world. In this way, it is argued that democratic planning is indispensable for generating the forms of collective intelligibility and power needed to heal the metabolic relations of society and nature. By reimagining and reframing planning, the article aims to expand “the archive” of social imaginaries, as part of broader efforts to envision and develop more desirable organizational futures.

Child Marriage in “Hitaw” and Mādīyān

Abstract Child marriage, the union between a child below the age of consent and a spouse who is the same age or older, remains a prevalent practice in Iran. Often these marriages involve young girls betrothed to much older men as a result of economic arrangements between the girl’s guardian and the groom. This practice imposes numerous physical and psychological hardships on the child bride, whose domestic and reproductive labor becomes bound to a man she chose not to marry. By analyzing “Hitaw” (1973), by Ali Ashraf Darvishiyan, and Mādīyān (1986), directed by Ali Zhakan, this article aims to examine the perceptions and portrayals of these girls and their sexuality within the realm of art and literature. Through this analysis it seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and political dynamics that perpetuate child marriage and impact the lives of young girls in Iran.

Analysis and mapping of global research publications on migrant domestic workers

Recognizing the importance of evidence-based research in informing migration policies and empowering migrant domestic workers (MDWs), this study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of MDW research patterns and trends. Using a descriptive cross-sectional study design, research articles on MDWs were retrieved from the Scopus database. The findings reveal a substantial increase in research output in recent years, with notable contributions from journals in the fields of social sciences and humanities. Key contributors include scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, and institutions such as the National University of Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Journals in the field of migration have prominent role in publishing research on MDWs. At the author level, Yeoh, B.S.A, at the National University of Singapore was the most prolific author. Academic activities were the main driver of research and that funding was suboptimal in this field. Highly cited articles focused on topics such as transnational motherhood, the international division of reproductive labor, and the negotiation of citizenship rights. Major research hotspots in the retrieved articles included mental health aspects, caregiving especially of the elderly, and struggles for legal rights. Specific nationalities, such as Filipina/o and Indonesian MDWs, have been the focus of numerous studies, shedding light on their narratives, challenges, and agency within transnational contexts. Overall, this study underscores the urgency of addressing the needs and rights of MDWs, advocate for human rights, and enhance understanding of occupational health and safety in the unique context of domestic work.

Keeping African women in social reproduction roles: a systematic qualitative review of literature on post-FTLRP Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT The capitalist sytem has been underwritten by unpaid social reproduction labour mostly provided by women. This article deploys social reproduction theory (SRT) to systematically review scholarly literature on Zimbabwe's fast track land reform programme (FTLRP) published since 2011. Research evidence indicates reasonable improvement on women's access to and control of land, but whether or not FTLPRP led to a more egalitarian division of social reproduction labour remains to be researched. The paper concludes by proposing a new research agenda on the shifting boundaries between workplace and home, paid and unpaid labour, for women on post-FTLRP farms.

Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

In this book review, I reflect on a selection from Jennifer L. Morgan’s (2004) book, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. I have returned to this selection several times to process its applicability, not only to the time in which it was written about, but to my existence as a Black woman in the world today. Throughout modern history, Black women’s lives have been marked by contradiction and nuance, in large part because our physical, sexual, and reproductive labour figured prominently in shaping the plantation structure and economy, a central tenant of modern society. In what follows, I share my thoughts about how Morgan engages these insights in her book, giving focus to her introductory chapter.

The Asian American Contract: On Useful Labor and Social Reproduction in Severance and Minari

This article examines the central role that the work contract plays in the production and reproduction of Asian diasporic worlds. In light of the history of Asian indentured contract labor in the Americas, the article proposes that the “Asian American contract” emerges as an affirmation of the exchange of useful labor for a sense of belonging and world for the Asian American subject—even when this exchange comes at the expense of life. Through readings of Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018) and director Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari (2020), the article demonstrates how the contract ultimately transforms Asian Americans’ reproductive labor—their childbearing and child-rearing—into their social reproduction as a racialized class of useful, compliant workers.

Maternal Subjectivity Behind the Couch: The Analyst’s Secondary Dependency and Its Implications for Political Psychoanalysis

In the international discussion on psychoanalytic technique, there is a controversial discourse on the use of the countertransference. In this paper, I discuss positions that recognize the shared experiences of regression of analyst and analysand in the analytic process, focussing on undifferentiated affective states in the analyst and their effect on the process. Starting from the metaphor of the maternal analyst, I think about these positions through the prism of the current discourse on maternal subjectivity. The naturalization of motherhood and the consecutive denigration of secondary dependency of actual mothers on a facilitating environment is described and compared to the position of the analyst in the regressive process. Referring to feminist and psychoanalytic literature on motherhood and reproductive labor, I discuss reasons for resistance against the recognition of secondary dependency. I argue that the patriarchal structuring of society and psychoanalytic culture seems to be a defense against vulnerability and the recognition of emotional needs. I outline the implications of the full recognition of emotional needs of the analyst for our understanding of the psychoanalytic process. In conclusion, the possibility of expanding the concept of the psychoanalytic frame to political circumstances as facilitating environment of the mutual regressive process is discussed.

“Akili zetu ziwe moja / Let our minds be one”: Emergent strategy for adapting to seafood insecurity in coastal Kenyan fishing communities

Small-scale fisheries provide food sovereignty and capital for millions globally. However, coastal Kenyan communities who harvest reef fishery resources are often still food insecure, especially due to the detrimental effects of climate change and overfishing in their communities. This study aims to understand the environmental perceptions and priorities of fishing families in Kilifi County, Kenya, and how these relate to both food security and sustainable development policy. We rely on qualitative methods including interviews with household caregivers from 42 fishing families to provide insights not only on fishery sustainability but also on the additional aspects of reproductive labor related to fish food security, including the food securing aspects of availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability. Our findings highlight the complex challenges that environmental change places on families in this situation: lack of fish availability, seasonal food inaccessibility, shifting baselines, and experiences of loss in the food system are markedly a prevalent result. Despite these struggles, we see emergent strategies to address food needs unfold in a variety of resilient and opportunistic ways, including adaptation, trust, and multimodal networks of support. Further policy support must be given to communities to practice food sovereignty in their own contexts, especially as climate changes continue and these strategies become salient adaptive practices elsewhere.

For Whom Does One Toil? Time Use Differentials, Social Reproduction, and Occupational Prestige

Social reproduction theory builds upon Marxist theories that center on the extent to which labor power is the source of capital’s growth through the exploitation of the working class, providing a unique lens for analyzing how labor power differences may contribute to structural inequity. While research has shown that women and girls are primarily responsible for the majority of unpaid reproductive labor, little research has considered how time spent in unpaid work may also vary by social class position. We utilize nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey to estimate time use differentials across occupational prestige deciles, separately by gender, to address this question. We find that higher occupational prestige is significantly associated with less time spent on unpaid household labor for women, but not for men. Our results highlight the complex nature of unpaid reproductive work under capitalism, emphasizing the importance of considering social class positions when examining inequities in the unpaid work burden.

European Union gender equality and work–life balance policies: managing tensions between the demands of production and reproduction

European Union (EU) gender equality policies increasingly acknowledge the existence of tensions between the demands of productive and reproductive labour, with the former defined as waged work and the latter as the (unpaid) activities reproducing the labour force and provisioning for caring needs. As women increasingly enter the labour market, the EU addresses the growing tensions through new gender equality policy initiatives, prompting the question of whether these recognise the value of reproductive labour to the economy. This article analyses the discourses of three EU institutions (the European Commission, Council of the EU and European Parliament) and finds that EU policy as a whole continues to prioritise the interests of the productive economy. This results in a loss of the emancipatory potential of its gender equality goals, in particular, for women from working-class, minority ethnic or migration backgrounds.

Feminism, reproductive labour and the gendered welfare state in Britain’s National Insurance Act of 1911

Abstract In 1911, numerous women’s organizations, of varying political interests, mounted a campaign against the National Insurance Bill. Such opposition emerged despite feminist support for increased welfare provision in general and especially for the maternity benefit that the Bill proposed to introduce. Feminists criticized National Insurance for discriminating against women, especially its failure to recognize the economic contribution of women’s unwaged reproductive labour. They lobbied and campaigned for a series of amendments, some of which were successful. Feminist opposition to National Insurance sheds new light on an ongoing historiographical debate over the degree to which women were able to influence early welfare states prior to enfranchisement. Their activities cannot be easily contained within a framework of ‘maternalist feminism’, and call into question distinctions between ‘maternalist’/‘social’ feminism and ‘equality’ feminism, and middle-class and working-class women’s agendas. Instead, feminist campaigns around National Insurance reveal an early analysis of ‘social reproduction’ (the origins of which are usually traced back only to ‘second wave’ feminism) whereby British feminists participated in international conversations contesting the gendered definitions of work that went on to inform insurance-based welfare states across Europe.

Living with, or despite, organized abandonment: social reproduction and real estate speculation on Chicago’s Large Lots

ABSTRACT Between 2014 and 2020, the city of Chicago sold hundreds of city-owned lots for a dollar to property owners across its South and West Side neighborhoods through the Large Lots program. An expedient way of returning city land to tax rolls and offsetting its holding costs, the city cast Large Lots as an effort to empower residents and turn vacant lots into vibrant neighborhoods. This article examines the labor of making vibrant neighborhoods. Against its erasure by the dominant planning imagination, I situate this labor as an important dimension of life's work under regimes of organized abandonment and their attendant economies of real estate speculation. Through interviews and participant-observation with lot owners, I demonstrate that Large Lots has reconfigured relations of responsibility and obligation around vacant land in ways that enroll residents’ social reproductive labor of land care into the production of investable landscapes. Through a property records analysis, I then show that this labor unfolds in tension with renewed channels for speculation established by Large Lots in program neighborhoods. These findings situate social reproduction as a generative vantage point for politically capacious understandings of real estate speculation and the uneven geographies of life-making it engenders.

The Unhappy Marriage of Care and the Global Market: ‘Soft Backsliding’ in the Narratives of Two Romanian Badanti

This paper encompasses an analysis of the novels written by two Romanian badanti who emigrated from Eastern Europe to Italy at the beginning of the 21st century, namely Liliana Nechita (Romania) and Lilia-Bicec Zanardelli (the Republic of Moldova). The reading grid of these narratives is a Marxist feminist one, as it continues the analytical framework of Lise Vogel and links it to the last decades’ “new gender arrangement” (Lutz) that emphasises the outsourcing of reproductive labour towards migrant and gendered labour-power. The work of these badanti partakes in the global care chain of our world-system, which privileges families in the West and affects poor households in the East. The novels written by the two workers show how agents directly involved in this global division of labour explain their own history, as it is shaped by their new working experience. However, their literary inquiry will circumscribe a contradictory rhetoric, also called “soft backsliding”, that combines emancipatory insights with reactionary ideologies related to the nation-state, family and Christianity. This study aims to explain them as both methods of subjective subsistence in capitalism and a virtual path to political radicalization.

‘Babies are a massive money spinner’: Data, reproductive labour and the commodification of pre-motherhood in fertility and pregnancy apps

‘Babies are a massive money spinner’: Data, reproductive labour and the commodification of pre-motherhood in fertility and pregnancy apps

Who’s got time for social reproduction? Migrant service workers as embodied infrastructures of the algorhythmic city

ABSTRACT This article, working within the ‘infrastructural turn’, combines social reproduction and Lefebvrian rhythm analysis to examine the everyday labour and life of migrant cleaners and delivery service gig workers in Stockholm. Using in-depth interviews, we demonstrate how this highly mobile and flexible workforce makes the city ‘tick’ by keeping its inhabitants clean, fed, healthy and cared for. Specifically, we highlight a contradiction: workers extricating free time for others through reproductive labour, are themselves systematically deprived of the (paid and unpaid) time necessary to meet their own reproductive needs. The conditions of work in the urban on-demand and just-in-time service economy, we show, produce spatiotemporal (dis)orders of living and labouring in the algorhythmic city, as workers are required to be both on standby, waiting, whilst also fulfilling customer orders at an ever-increasing speed. Migrant gig workers who appear on the doorstep, on demand and just in time, form a kind of human infrastructure, serving the urban population whilst nonetheless being subject to disinvestment – unrepaired and unmaintained. This article, then, contributes to the literature on gig work, migration and social reproduction, by theorizing the algorhythmic city as reliant on the constant transformation of gig labour into an urban infrastructure for social reproduction.