Reproductive Labor Research Articles

Remains to Be Seen

AbstractThis article unspools the history of nylon as a commodity between two Black feminist cultural expressions, Senga Nengudi's R.S.V.P. series and Audre Lorde's Zami. The first popular petroleum-derived synthetic fiber, nylon was a crucial material in building what Dwight D. Eisenhower was to dub the “military-industrial complex.” Through readings of R.S.V.P. and Zami, the article traces the racial and gendered history of nylon as both a fashion commodity and a military resource. These readings demonstrate Black feminism's central relevance to US military imperialism, particularly in Asia and the Pacific, as well as imperialism's impacts on Black femininity during the Cold War. This article argues that Black feminist aesthetics, such as those Nengudi and Lorde employ, restores the context of commodities like nylons, revealing the centrality of Black women's productive and reproductive labor to US empire. Most important, as R.S.V.P. and Zami restore context, they also generate a system of value in opposition to racial capitalism that does not depend on violence against Black women.

Are You My Progeny?: Academic Labor as Reproduction

Abstract: There is a long discursive history that addresses academic labor within a metaphorical framework of reproductive labor. This trend has seen a viral rebirth on social media platforms as countless posts have extended this connection, fleshing out the ways in which these forms of labor might equate to or inform one another. Looking to a series of recent online posts, this brief essay examines what results from the continuation of this metaphorical framing.

‘We work for the Devil’: Oil extraction, kinship and the fantasy of time on the offshore frontier

In the offshore oil industry of Takoradi, Ghana, white expatriate workers describe oil extraction as both ‘the work of the Devil’ and a ‘labour of love’. While companies strive to produce the offshore as a timeless and spaceless fantasy of ‘frictionless profit’, workers emphasize oil work as a sacrificial economy where risk, loss and distance are traded in the pursuit of an ideal of family life. In this article, I argue that the operational structures and labour regime of the offshore (characterized by a rotation pattern, continuous production, distant locations, a segregated workforce, and mobile installations) create not only a model of capital accumulation, but a mode of being and making kin. I describe oil workers’ aspirations to a ‘good family life’ and parental care, pitting time against distance, and the interpersonal ruins that remain when they fray. In probing how oil workers make petro-capitalism affectively workable, by exploring the entangled processes of extractive and reproductive labour, this article contributes to recent scholarship on the role of kinship in sustaining global capitalism.

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Prevalence of Preterm Premature Rupture of Membrane and Associated Factors among Pregnant Women Admitted in Hiwot Fana Comprehensive Specialized University Hospital, Eastern Ethiopia

Background: Preterm premature rupture of membrane (PPROM) affects approximately 3% of all pregnancies and is responsible for one-third of all preterm births. Despite its contribution to maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity, evidence on the burden of PPROM and its associated factors in the study area is scarce. Therefore, this study was aimed to assess the prevalence of PPROM and its associated factors among pregnant women at University Hospital, Eastern Ethiopia from August 01 to 31, 2021. Methods: A hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 449 randomly selected preterm pregnancies admitted to the labor ward of Hiwot Fana Comprehensive Specialized University Hospital. Data related to socio-demographic variables, obstetric and reproductive health conditions, and labor and related pregnancy outcomes were extracted from their medical records using a structured checklist. After checking for completeness, the data were entered into Epidata 3.1 and analyzed using SPSS 25. Factors associated with PPROM were identified using bivariable and multivariable logistic regression. Association was described using an adjusted odds ratio (AOR) along with 95% confidence interval (CI). P-value <0.05 in the final model was considered as statistically significant. Results: Of 449 preterm pregnant women included in the study, 64 (14.3%; 95% CI:11.1% -17.5%) had PPROM. Preterm PROM was significantly associated with urinary tract infections (AOR=6.33; 95% CI:3.26-12.29), vaginal bleeding (AOR=2.62; 95% CI:1.23-5.57), history of abortion (AOR= 3.07; 95% CI:1.33-7.06) and mid upper arm circumference <23 (AOR=7.06; 95% CI: 4.02-12.43). A total of 3 (4.3%) stillbirth and 16 (22.9%) early neonatal deaths occurred corresponding with a gross perinatal mortality rate of 271 per 1000 births. Conclusion: One in seven preterm pregnancies in eastern Ethiopia had PPROM. Urinary tract infection, vaginal bleeding, previous history of abortion, and undernutrition were associated with PPROM. Early screening and treatment of urinary tract infections and vaginal bleeding are essential to reduce the risk of PPROM.

Migration and development, without care? Locating transnational care practices in the migration‐development debate

AbstractHighly‐restrictive temporary labour migration schemes are commonplace throughout the Indo‐Pacific region and continue to expand amid sustained policy enthusiasm for ‘migration‐development’. Yet, the developmental benefits of guestworker schemes are routinely evaluated according to narrow economic criteria, with little consideration given to transnational family separation and the displacement of socially reproductive labour that sustains everyday life. ‘Migration’, ‘development’ and ‘care’ are deeply interlinked political economic processes, yet they have been theorised in partial isolation. We challenge this analytical disconnect, situating the developmental implications of guestworker migration in relation to the total social organisation of labour, and argue for a more holistic ‘migration‐care‐development' nexus that foregrounds unsustainable disruptions to care economies. We ground our framework in the context of Australia's Pacific Labour Scheme to illustrate the developmental consequences for Pasifika households and communities, highlighting the need for ‘decent care’ policies to address care deficits in support of sustainable and gender‐equitable development.

Anti-Work Architecture: Domestic Labour, Speculative Design, and Automated Plenty

Abstract This article presents a partial history of visions of technodomesticity in the global north, concentrating on dwellings which seek to problematize, challenge, or reorganize unpaid household labour. It is structured around three case studies, primarily drawn from the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: the single-family suburban dream house, the bachelor pad, and the fully automated future home. While these chosen examples may lend us certain resources for thinking about how best to mitigate the challenges of reproductive labour via living arrangements, they also possess a number of clear drawbacks or limitations. The article will argue that contesting these imaginaries (as much as learning from them) is likely to prove necessary in unpicking the connections between an inequitable distribution of unpaid intrafamilial domestic labour and the house itself as both a concrete site and an ideological formation – necessary, that is to say, in terms of building a meaningfully feminist conception of anti-work architecture.

BaYaka forager food sharing networks in the Congo Basin: The roles of gender homophily and kin sharing

AbstractObjectivesFood sharing is a costly form of cooperation that was likely critical to human evolutionary success, including the emergence of human's life history strategy. Food sharing in human communities may be maintained through a number of pathways, including direct dyadic reciprocity, reputation‐based processes, and kin‐biased exchange. Differences in reproductive demands, labor, and cultural norms may also result in gendered differences in cooperative networks. Here, we examine cooperative networks in egalitarian BaYaka foragers from the Congo Basin.Materials and MethodsWe collected social network data from 112 adults in 41 households in this subsistence community. We implement a Bayesian latent network model to assess individual‐, dyadic‐, and block‐level predictors of food sharing partners.ResultsConditioning on covariates, we found limited evidence for direct dyadic reciprocity in food sharing. Despite local norms regarding prestige avoidance, we found status‐based homophily. High‐status individuals—council members and local healers—were more likely to share with one another. Importantly, our results highlight gender differences in patterns of food sharing, interacting with genetic relatedness. Women were more likely to share with one another, especially with kin as genetic relatedness increased.DiscussionOur results align with evolutionary framing emphasizing kin selection in costly cooperation. The results showing that women cooperate with other women, particularly kin, also complement sex‐based patterns in some other mammalian species, potentially reflecting the social support necessary to manage reproductive costs and childcare. BaYaka women's subsistence productivity and local cultural dynamics for autonomy and egalitarianism may likewise help facilitate women's preferential cooperation with one another.

Situating platform gig economy in the formal subsumption of reproductive labor: Transnational migrant domestic workers and the continuum of exploitation and precarity

In conversation with critical platform and labor studies, which tend to focus on drivers and food delivery workers, this article seeks to expand our understanding of the platform gig economy from the perspective of reproductive labor and migrant domestic workers. The exploitation of women’s unpaid and low-paid reproductive work has persisted throughout various stages of capitalist development. Migrant domestic workers’ underpaid reproductive labor becomes an essential site for primitive capital accumulation and the production of the labor force in the contemporary neoliberal global economy. Building upon analyses of the historical and contemporary circumstances of transnational migrant domestic workers in Canada, I argue that digital labor platforms become a technology-enabled, capital-driven force in the larger commodification and exploitation process of migrant workers’ reproductive labor, and such processes are underpinned by entangled structural and institutional forces of the uneven capitalist development, racism, patriarchy, and the state’s discriminatory (im)migration and labor policies. The article suggests that understanding the seeming prevalence of platform work should be situated in the continuous formal subsumption of reproductive labor and the class immobility of migrant domestic workers, and labor activism and movements should contest the entwined power dominations beyond merely demanding regulations over platforms.

‘Who Cleans the Blood of the City?’

Teresa Margolles's 2009 exhibition, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?), as part of the 53rd Venice Biennale, explored Mexico's militarized cartels, narcoviolence and the complex history of Mexico's relationship to gendered and racialized violence. Limpieza was a daily cleaning performance that worked to reproduce a crime scene; the blood used, diluted with bleach, was drawn from the crime scenes of murder victims across Mexico. This article focuses primarily on Margolles's use of blood as an aesthetic material and the ways the installation further draws out complicated questions around crime scenes, domestic and reproductive labour, and economic exploitation. Overwhelmingly, many critics focus on how Margolles's use of blood moves beyond the frame of the crime scene, distending and expanding upon the trauma of narcoviolence, creating what Iván A. Ramos calls an ‘ecology of death that quite literally bleeds out within and onto an unfamiliar, delocalized space' (2016, 'The Viscosity of Grief: Teresa Margolles at the Scene of the Crime', Women & Performance: A journal of feminist theory 25(3): 298-314). I move against these perhaps more cathartic, constructive and salutary readings of Margolles's materialist use of blood and human remains, and instead propose that Margolles draws our attention to the material, domestic and reproductive labour that underpins these ecologies of violence and death. Unlike Margolles's previous artworks, what are the stakes of removing corpses and the crime scene from view, where all that is left in its wake are the faint musty smell of death, a few blood-soaked mops and a lone cleaner washing away the violence? Further, while blood is important here, I propose that Limpieza draws us to more gendered, racialized and classed question of who labours to ‘manage’ crime scenes as products of ongoing state-sanctioned narcoviolence - affectively, emotionally, practically, physically - and what this further reveals about a history of colonized domestic labour in Mexico and the US.

Agency and time poverty: Linking decision-making powers and leisure time of male and female farmers of Central India

The present study examines the gender difference in the workload and its association with the agency for intra-household decision-making. Analyzing the cross-sectional data collected from wheat farmers of Central India in 2019, we observe significant differences between male and female respondents with respect to the total number of work hours and agency on farming activities and consumption expenditure. While women provided fewer labor hours than men for different farming operations, their available leisure hours were compromised due to a greater involvement in household chores (reproductive labor). Irrespective of their higher workload, women’s involvement in intra-household decision-making was limited. More importantly, there was a tradeoff between the leisure time available for women and their involvement in decision-making. Women with agency had less leisure time than others. Land ownership was associated with a higher workload for female respondents. However, neither agency nor the possession of land titles had a significant effect in determining male farmers’ work or leisure hours. The leisure hours were particularly limited for farmers belonging to marginalized castes. These findings have implications for designing and implementing interventions with labor-related outcomes, such as programs for rural employment generation and dissemination of labor-saving technologies in agriculture.

Vulnerabilities, power, and gendered violence in food systems

abstract Food systems present a complex web of interests and within this web exists different levels of vulnerabilities, inclusions, or exclusions, depending on the levels of power accessible to different interest groups. In addition, due to the global interconnections, more complexities have been added to local and national food systems. As national boundaries and rules enmesh into more powerful global trade rules, salient hierarchies based on race, class, nationality, and gender emerge with social and economic outcomes in food systems. There is consensus that women carry a disproportionately larger burden of productive and reproductive labour within food value chains, yet they are more likely to face greater distress and violence over scarce food and other life enhancing resources. This article is empirically informed by the life histories of 21 elderly women farmers as they navigated the different epochs in Zimbabwe’s political, economic, and agrarian reforms. An African feminist standpoint provided the lens through which the narratives and agency of elderly women farmers are framed as they negotiated with gendered structural biases and the violence coded into power asymmetries within food systems from production to consumption. Women’s acts of resistance are explored, including transnational collaboration through food justice social movements as acts of radical political resistance to forced assimilation into unsustainable modes of capitalist extraction. The voices of elderly women are centred in articulating alternative pathways to food sovereignty based on mutual reciprocity in a non-violent and ecologically sustainable food system.

Reflections on the politics of gendered food chains

abstract Throughout history, social relationships surrounding food have traditionally been divided along gender lines. That the food chain is gendered from kernel to platter is therefore probably to repeat a truism. Afterall, the most fundamental form of care, providing food, is still mostly carried out by women in the majority of societies today. In addition, despite having a duty to feed others, women may in many geo-political locations frequently fail to do so providing for their own needs. In this perspective, I consider gender and food related-relationships by exploring gender dynamics in the modern agrifood system. Firstly, I investigate the relationship between food and women’s subjugation and the sublimation of feminist consciousness. Secondly, I ask, how gender relations related to food are configured in the context of three categories of food − material, socio-cultural, and corporeal − that characterise women’s interactions with food (Allen & Sachs 2007). In each of these areas, gender is expressed in ways that I argue reflect women’s social disadvantage. Linkages between women’s work with food in the fields and labour market, their responsibilities for food provision in the care economy, and relationship with eating are explored. It is argued that these are integral to the field of food studies and research which has tended to ignore the normalisation of ‘women’s work’, undervalued domestic reproductive and productive labour. Integrating feminist studies with political economy can provide food studies with a theoretical framework that is able to throw light on some of the critical elements that shape gender relations in the agrifood system. Critical food studies, it is asserted, need to focus on steps women are taking to unsettle the existing oppressive power relations in the agrifood system.

Taking Platform Domestic Work Offline: Using Platform Leakage to Resist Precarity in South Africa’s Domestic Sector

ABSTRACT This article focuses on platform domestic workers’ (PDWs’) experiences and their decision to engage in platform leakage—taking platform domestic work offline. We argue that delving into the types of domestic work choices PDWs make reveals their agency with and through digital platforms in response to precarity on the platform and in the domestic sector. The article demonstrates, through an interpretivist case study that included semi-structured interviews with a sample of PDWs in Cape Town and analysis of documents related to their platform company, that platform leakage is an unavoidable and possibly inherent feature of the platform domestic work model. The findings show that PDWs’ experience of platform domestic work as a form of “gig work” is informed and mainly influenced by unemployment and underemployment in the domestic sector rather than its benefits of flexibility for work life balance and fulfilling unpaid reproductive labour needs. Further, the algorithmic management of the labour process shows that flexibility leaves PDWs in a precarious position but also, paradoxically, creates the need and opportunity to engage in platform leakage. As a result, algorithmic management as a form of control over PDWs’ work performance, and its contingence on personalism for reputational ratings, does not always imply the inescapable power of platform companies. We conclude that further research is needed to deepen our understanding of the employment relationship that emerges from platform leakage, particularly how PDWs experience it and the management of it.

In Search of Shelter: Precarity, Protest, and Pronatalism among Laboring Women in Kazakhstan

AbstractIn 2019, near Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, five children perished in a house fire while their parents were away at night shift jobs. This widely-reported tragedy brought to light conflicting imperatives and highlighted the precarity of gendered productive and reproductive labor across Kazakhstan. This highly-publicized incident ignited a conflagration of protests by “mothers with many children” (mnogodetnye mamy, kopbala analar), the official designation for low-income women who have four or more children and are eligible for state support. This paper analyzes the mothers’ protests of 2019, and the public and official responses to these protests. It finds that, by centering motherhood and traditional gender norms in their protests, these protestors successfully linked their demands for social benefits back to historic Soviet-era protectionist and paternalist policies, thus legitimizing their demands. However, the article argues that at the same time these gendered labor norms force women, especially marginalized mothers, to engage in precarious forms of labor that neither Western-style NGOs nor limited government support are able to adequately address. The article further concludes that “mothers with many children” labor under precarious conditions and are subject to skepticism and censure, as their actions challenge idealized national scripts of proper womanhood in Kazakhstan. This research contributes to the study of labor, gender, and reproduction in Central Asia and calls for centering the study of gendered labor precarity within Central Asian studies.

Повседневные практики воспитанников системы профессионально-технического образования Крыма в 1940-е – 1950-е годы

Importance. A lot has been written about the relationship of the Soviet person with the authorities and the space of big politics, his life and way of life. However, the author of the article is sure that it is advisable to continue studying the problems of Soviet everyday life. Nowadays, interest in the topic of the history of everyday life and microhistory, as well as attempts to rethink the experience of the Soviet period, is gaining importance. The research deals with the everyday life of pupils of the state system of labor reserves after the end of the Great Patriotic War on the example of educational institutions of the Crimea. Materials and methods. The principles of historicism, consistency, objectivity, research methodology – a systematic approach, as well as a set of complementary general scientific methods were used. Results and Discussion. Vocational education as an object of research was not chosen by chance. For more than 80 years, it has been an institution for the reproduction of skilled labor and at the same time performs an economic function. It also opens the way to mastery for young people, creates the basis for creative growth. As part of the research, new archival data on this topic were introduced into scientific circulation. Conclusion. The significance of referring to the history of vocational education makes it possible to avoid past mistakes, equalize existing contradictions, and also choose the most productive way for the development of vocational education today. Today, new approaches to the system of education and training of workers are being presented. And the knowledge and skills accumulated in vocational education provide unlimited potential for improving the content, forms and methods of education. Therefore, it is necessary to study the activities of the earlier existing schools, colleges and technical schools.

Совершенствование механизма регулирования оплаты труда в системе материального стимулирования персонала

The more successful the activity of a commercial organization, the more opportuni-ties it has to regulate wages upward. However, wages indexation even in this case should be carried out in accordance with clear scientifically sound principles that contribute to ex-panded reproduction of labour and further growth of the company's profits. All other things being equal, a highly qualified employee will choose to hire the company with higher wages. But one more thing is also true – it is unprofitable for a commercial organization to pay much higher wages than the market value of labour. Otherwise profitability will begin to de-cline, and in the long term the enterprise may become unprofitable due to too high labour costs. The management of the enterprise needs to create such a mechanism for regulating wages, which will allow achieving faster growth of labour productivity compared to its re-muneration growth. The article discusses the methodology for improving the mechanism for regulating wages on the example of a real operating enterprise. The main conclusions of the article can be used in scientific and practical activities when considering the principles of wage regulation in the system of personnel material incentives.

Generalized Semiproletarianization in Africa

This article provides an overview of Africa’s contemporary social formation. It is argued that the labour question in Africa has undergone a decisive transformation under neoliberalism. While under colonial rule the formation of labour reserves was mainly the result of political engineering, especially in regions of white settlement, today labour reserves are driven by the spontaneous operation of generalized monopoly capitalism and have become coextensive with the continent. This changing labour question is the most basic element of an apparent tendency of structural convergence among the continent’s macro-regions; it amounts to a generalized condition of semiproletarianization, insofar as the bulk of the population is unable to meet its basic needs within the wage relation or outside it. Peasant and worker households straddle various labour regimes in rural and urban areas and seek to secure their social reproduction by a combination of wages, petty production and trade, simple use values, and unpaid reproductive labour. Data sourced from the ILO are used to qualify some of these trends, including their gendered dimensions. JEL Codes: C1, F5, J2, N5, R1

Bringing Up Beauty

This paper provides a novel response to Vlastos’s challenge that Platonic erōs in the Symposium, since it is for the form of beauty rather than any particular person, is impersonal and egotistical. Vlastos, in addition to generations of his readers and critics, badly misunderstands Diotima’s reproductive theory of love. In particular, it has been widely overlooked or diminished that the ideal erotic relationship set out in the ladder of love mirrors the reproductive labor of ancient Greek mothers and caregivers. The lover of the highest mysteries undertakes the psychic equivalent of motherly care to rear virtuous ideas in the next generation. Thus, properly understanding Diotima’s gendered vision of psychic reproduction reveals that Platonic love is anything but impersonal and egotistical.