Social Reproductive Labor Research Articles

Rooted flexibility: social reproduction, violence and gendered work in the Indian city

Drawing on feminist marxist and feminist geography scholarship the article develops the concept 'rooted flexibility' to examine the latent frictions between flexible labour regimes and the rooted, gendered demands of social reproduction in worker tenements and factories in Gurgaon, India. The article explores the everyday gendered terrain through which migrant women are incorporated into, disciplined and navigate flexible labour and precarious social reproduction in the city. Unlike the male migrant workers who are made flexible through ideologies and practices of mobility, the mobility of migrant working-class women whose stories are narrated in this article is constrained by patriarchal control and responsibilities to social reproductive labour. In the absence of labour mobility, the article explores how migrant women workers navigate conflicting demands of being both flexible waged-workers and rooted, ‘respectable’ housewives, resisting violent practices of labour discipline on the shop-floors and tenements. In doing so, the article examines how an embodied and differentiated politics of 'respectability' comes to materialise how ‘rooted flexibility’ is lived, contested and secured.

The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism

In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of Black geographies as a domestic form of colonialism, with an expanded understanding of domesticity as political work. We develop the domestic geopolitics framework based on the dual meaning of domestic: the inward facing geopolitics of racialization and the resistance embodied in domestic labors of maintaining life, home, and community. Drawing on Black feminist scholars, we describe three categories of social reproductive labor in conditions of racialized toxicity: the labor of keeping wake, the labor of tactical expertise, and the labor of revolutionary mothering. We argue that Black survival struggles exemplify a domestic geopolitics of everyday warfare against racial capitalism’s onslaught.

The Intensification of Liberian Women's Social Reproductive Labor in the Coronavirus Pandemic: Regenerative Possibilities

674 Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Erica S. Lawson, Florence wullo Anfaara, Vaiba Kebeh Flomo, Cerue Konah Garlo, and Ola Osman The Intensification of Liberian Women’s Social Reproductive Labor in the Coronavirus Pandemic: Regenerative Possibilities In Liberia, a post-conflict country of five million people, the coronavirus pandemic has intensified women’s social reproductive labor to institutionalize peace, security, and gender equality. The challenges facing Liberian women are partly rooted in the conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), civil wars, and the extraction of natural resources to enrich local “warlords” and international investors, all of which have eroded the health infrastructure as well as public trust. Traditional Marxist analyses of such challenges largely center commodity finance, private property, and labor for wages. Given that women are typically unable to benefit from capitalism in these ways, this commentary explores how we think about women’s social reproductive labor. Broadly informed by this question, we discuss the strategies that Liberian women have used to manage the coronavirus pandemic, how these strategies exemplify and extend women’s reproductive roles, and how women view the fallout from the virus as a threat to their fragile peace gains. We locate our examination at the site of gendered work in Peace Huts. These are community councils largely managed by Liberian women for transitional justice, security, and peace-building goals. This commentaryisbasedonresearchinprogresstodocumentwomen’ssocial reproductive labor in Peace Huts. The quotes presented are excerpted from recent conversations with Liberian women about the virus’s impact Lawson et al. 675 on their lives, including those who provide or use Peace Hut services, many of whom are at the forefront of pandemic containment. Feminist political economy interrogates gendered social reproductive labor and its contributions to capitalist modernity, even as it is undervalued . Women’s social reproductive labor, largely unpaid and invisible, sustains families and households, provides care for children, the elderly, and the sick, and “cushion[s] ‘crisis shocks’ whether associated with financial crashes, conflict outbreak or humanitarian disasters.”1 Feminist scholars further address how capitalism generates different forms of gendered debt traps for women, as they try to earn a living in informal sectors where their income-generating activities are precarious.2 Our thinking is framed by Nancy Fraser’s critique of a narrow view of capitalism, which focuses solely on the economy, to an expanded reading of it as an “institutionalized social order” that relies on, while simultaneously denying, the centrality of reproductive labor to its operationalization .3 Further, informed by the argument that social reproductive labor is essential to “the protection and strengthening of communities and intimate relations,” we understand this type of work as central to Liberian women’s mass protests against the fourteen-year civil war (1989– 2003).4 The continued and strategic deployment of this labor holds politicians and citizens accountable for maintaining peace, and importantly, women identify connections between peace building and containing the spread of the coronavirus.5 In other words, because women rely more closely on community and social networks, they are invested in protecting these assets with their labor. 1. Shirin M. Rai, Jacqui True, and Maria Tanyag, “From Depletion to Regeneration : Addressing Structural and Physical Violence in Post-conflict Economies ,” Social Politics 26, no. 4 (2019): 565. 2. Genevieve LeBaron and Adrienne Roberts, “Toward a Feminist Political Economy of Capitalism and Carcerality,” Signs 36, no. 1 (2010): 19–20. 3. Nancy Fraser, “Critique of Capitalism: What Should Socialism Mean in the 21st Century,” June 11, 2020, Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, New School, New York, YouTube Video, 1:21:90, https://www.criticalsocialinquiry.org /photosvideos. 4. Rebecca Hall, “Caring Labours as Decolonizing Resistance,” Studies in Social Justice 10, no. 2 (2016): 220. 5. Helene Cooper, “Liberia’s Women Warn Male Presidential Candidates: Keep the Peace,” New York Times, October 9, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2yTP6lg. 676 Lawson et al. Liberian women are extended a degree of cultural respect for motherhood , and this facilitates some support for women’s political participation in the society.6 Furthermore, they view their social reproductive work as regenerative with the potential to advance transitional justice and post-conflict recovery centered in a care-focused economy.7...

The Intensification of Liberian Women's Social Reproductive Labor in the Coronavirus Pandemic: Regenerative Possibilities

The Intensification of Liberian Women's Social Reproductive Labor in the Coronavirus Pandemic: Regenerative Possibilities

The Hassle of Housework: Digitalisation and the Commodification of Domestic Labour

This article revisits materialist second-wave feminist debates about domestic labour in the context of digitalisation. Using a differentiated typology of labour, it looks at how the tasks involved in housework have undergone dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour in social reproduction, drawing on recent research on the use of online platforms to deliver social reproductive labour via the market in a context in which reproductive labour sits at the centre of an intense time squeeze. It reflects on the implications of the commodification of domestic labour for feminist strategy. The author points to the inadequacy in this context of traditional feminist strategies—for the socialisation of domestic labour through public services, wages for housework or labour-saving through technological solutions—concluding that new strategies are needed that address the underlying social relations that perpetuate unequal divisions of labour in contemporary capitalism.

Dangerous Fictions

Dangerous Fictions

Athletic Labor and Social Reproduction

This article connects the exploitation experienced by athletic laborers to sports fandom by theorizing athletic labor as a form of social reproductive labor. The work of athletes in high-performance spectator sport contributes to the affective reproduction of spectatorial subjects required by capitalism, albeit at a great cost to the laboring athlete. This intervention advances Marxist scholarship on the sociology of sport by extending the literature on social reproduction and labor into an entirely new and necessary sphere. Framing athletic labor as a form of social reproduction reveals that high performance spectator sport is more central to the political economy of late capitalism than is often understood and that sport is a more exploitative and dehumanizing site of labor even than conventional Marxist analysis has suggested.

High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor and Transmigration by Amy Bhatt

Reviewed by: High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor and Transmigration by Amy Bhatt Soniya Munshi (bio) High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor and Transmigration by Amy Bhatt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018, 204 pp., $90.00 hardcover, $30.00 paper. In High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor, and Transmigration, gender and women's studies scholar Amy Bhatt centers the unpaid and undervalued women's labor that sustains the circulation of Indian transnational migrant (or, transmigrant) information technology workers among different global technology hubs. Through rich ethnographic research that includes formal interviews with almost one hundred respondents, mostly women, in the understudied IT sites of Seattle, Washington, and Bangalore and Hyderabad in India, Bhatt deftly engages the complex experiences of these "embodied subjects of transnationalism" (ix) who are positioned between and across geographic locations, immigration statuses, and company affiliations. Resisting simplified characterizations that valorize or demonize temporary worker programs, Bhatt's nuanced analysis shows that Indian transnational IT workers and their spouses [End Page 177] embrace their liminality. This flexible position informs how they pursue their aspirations and claim the value of their labor while navigating the insecure conditions of the immigration, economic, and sociocultural systems within which they live and move. Bhatt's research focuses on the gendered dimensions of the H-1B work visa program. Over the past three decades, this program has significantly increased the numbers of migrants working in the information technology sector; in 2017, over 69 percent of the H-1B visa and renewal applications were for technology-based employment. Indian IT professionals—who are primarily young, heterosexual, English-speaking, upper-caste Hindu men—constitute the vast majority of applicants for the visa. Although the H-1B visas are subject to an annual cap, the H-4 visas, which are granted to spouses and dependent children of H-1B visa holders, are not limited. Despite being allowed to migrate, these family members have generally been prevented from formally participating in the labor market. Bhatt focuses on the role that their unpaid social reproductive labor plays in transmigration, specifically through the critical figure of the transnational housewife whose caregiving work enables the cross-border migration of workers. Bhatt begins her study in the suburbs of Seattle, a technology center developed by Boeing and Microsoft, two of the largest employers in the region and the main draws for Indian IT workers. Through a thoughtful discussion of identity and place-making, Bhatt shows that the transmigrants in her study aspire to be able to circulate among IT worksites. Obtaining citizenship becomes important in the flexibility and mobility that it enables for future opportunities and not necessarily for the sake of permanent settlement away from the homeland. These transmigrants claim their liminality, positioning themselves as ideal immigrants who can blend into local work cultures and leisure activities as well as ideal global workers who will adapt and sacrifice as needed for their employers. Through activities that form local social and professional networks such as volunteering in Indian development NGOs, they position themselves as bridge builders who, by sharing their lessons of neoliberal models of economic change, demonstrate that they are valuable to the Indian nation-state. In the second and third chapters of her book, Bhatt directly examines how the liminality of transmigration disrupts and reinforces gendered expectations around work, marriage, and family formation, and how women actively navigate these opportunities and constraints. She begins her discussion with examples of women who obtained their own H-1B visas—an overlooked group in discussions of workers in IT industries—and delayed marriage in order to build professional and social lives in the United States. Most women in her study, including the H-1B visa holders, report a frustrating gendered discrepancy: for both women and men, IT education is a mode to improve economic opportunity, including their chances of getting married, because education and professional compatibility are increasingly seen as important matchmaking criteria. Women, however, are expected to give up their career ambitions to follow the patriarchal norms of [End Page 178] heterosexual married life. Thus, many of them become "transnational housewives" with the primary responsibility of care work as well as the reproductive labor...

Cosmopolitan sidestep: University life, intimate geopolitics and the hidden costs of “Global” citizenship

In higher education in the US today, particular practices of global engagement are positioned as essential to student learning. Institutional stakeholders foreground the potential of outward‐facing orientation to the globe while sidestepping local connections to racial inequality and injustice foregrounded by student and waged‐worker activism. Faculty and student composition, course content and hierarchies of waged work have been targeted by activists from within and without. In this example, relations between labour, students and administrators at a large southern research university in the USA reveal the mechanisms by which especially neoliberal cosmopolitanisms require an intentional and narrow rendering of what and who counts in the production of campus life. A discussion of student activism and changes to housekeeping work practices reveal how power is produced and divided by controlling and corralling particular kinds of social reproductive labour. In light of the redistribution and erasure of this labour, we argue that US universities are geopolitical in nature, shaping young people's orientations to an imagined global citizenship to create a specific form of cosmopolitanism that centres whiteness and makes claim to a globally oriented generosity rather than a justice‐oriented framework with explicit connections to the breadth of waged work undergirding university life and practice. To create this possibility, the university frequently side‐steps complex interconnections between student life and systems of racialised, ethnicised and gendered exploitation in local spaces in favour of a focus of similar inequalities in the world “out there.”

Depleting fragile bodies: the political economy of sexual and reproductive health in crisis situations

AbstractIn a crisis-prone world, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by both armed conflicts and environmental disasters has drastically increased and displacement risks have intensified. Despite the growing attention within global security and development agendas to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), there remain striking gaps in addressing SRHR in crisis situations, particularly among IDP women and girls. This article examines the continuum between social reproduction in times of crisis and the material and ideological conditions that restrict women’s bodily autonomy in everyday life. Using the case of the Philippines where millions of people are routinely affected by conflict and disaster-induced displacements, it argues that the failure to recognise the centrality of women’s health and bodily autonomy not only hinders the sustainable provision of care and domestic labour during and after crisis, but also fundamentally constrains how security is enacted within these spaces. Thus, the article highlights an urgent need to rethink the gendered political economy of crisis responses as a building block for stemming gendered violence and depletion of social reproductive labour at the household, state, and global levels.

Three reflections on Revolution at Point Zero for (re)producing an alternative academy

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle is a collection of Federici’s essays, her theorizations and research on feminist struggles to reconfigure social reproduction in ways alternative to capitalist relations. In this intervention, I present reflections on three experiences – teaching Federici’s work, being a graduate student and precarious academic worker, and engaging in rich and meaningful friendships – in order to offer a consideration for how Federici’s centering of social reproduction can provide lessons for resisting the neoliberalization of the academy, taking care of each other, and cultivating alternative and more just social relations. Federici’s work gives principles for how to live and resist together, principally because of her centering of social reproduction and the possibility of crafting an alternative set of social relations. In this intervention, I question and advocate for relationships, accountability, and a critical politics of social reproductive labor as being essential to such a struggle.

Micro(bial) management: everyday cleanliness and the divisive power of hygienic worries

At a major research institution in the American South, cleanliness norms are intensifying for students, housekeepers, and institutional administrators. Whether individual practice, waged labor, or institutional policy concern, daily hygiene routines often refer to invisible or otherwise absent threats to health. Broadly construed as ‘germs’, these include flu, norovirus, and Escherichia coli, as well as dirt, dust mites, allergens, and mold. Their mobilization influences students’ and housekeepers’ interpersonal relations in a range of common university spaces, revealing connections among disease, embodiment, risk, and care. At the same time, concern with germs aligns with institutional efforts to control a historically powerful cadre of workers. Connections between students’ experiences of health and disease risk and housekeeper and institutional orientation to those risks are obscure, although fundamentally constitutive of each other. Analysis of their different, but intersecting ideas about microbial hygienic risk draws together critical geographies of social reproductive labor, cultural geographies of more-than-human agency, and a recent call to elaborate a political ecology of health. Ethnographic and archival data reveal how germs retrench institutional disparities, placing the (re)production of student cleanliness practices and the working lives of housekeepers in tension. For students, germs help shore up valorized subject positions, informing regimes of self-care. For department administrators, a new employee management regime made the potential of microbial threats to student health a scientific instrument of labor control. For housekeepers, germs are particularly evocative of the demand to care for student health by managing exposure to microbial disease risk. Exploring different mobilizations of germs reveals the importance of more-than-human life to systems of and divisions between social reproductive labor regimes on campus.

The Artist's Household

The concepts of social reproduction and immaterial labour, normally deployed in accounts of art since the 1960s, can and should also be deployed in the examination of earlier periods of art practice. Using census data and other primary sources which document the households of (primarily) London artists in the 1870s and 1880s, this article explores the intimate spatial relationship of art work and family life within these households; the social and entrepreneurial labour which was taken on by the family members or servants of artists; and the distribution of responsibility for routine family and domestic labour in these households. Women's exclusion from professional art practice appears to be entrenched in the division of household labour, and the conclusion invokes the relationship between the household structures and the wider economic context of capitalism (specifically, the dealer-critic system that formed in the second half of the nineteenth century) as significant in accounting for women's history as artists.

Losing Ground?

This article offers a study of the Hackney Flashers' project Who's Holding the Baby? (1976–1978). The agitprop series documented the establishment of an independent nursery in North London, while providing analysis of the profoundly gendered and classed nature of such work. This historical example illustrates with striking accuracy transformations to the urban landscape of London over the past four decades, in particular pointing towards the critical entanglement between collective art practice, liberal voluntarism and processes of gentrification. The article therefore raises a set of problems: To what extent does feminised social reproduction labour and care voluntarism assuage or challenge the normative functioning of urban public space? What is the relationship of cultural to economic capital, and how is gender relevant to these forms of value? Has the potential of creative, urban protest tactics been exhausted? Drawing from writings across cultural geography and art history, the article proposes that a historical consideration of the Hackney Flashers opens up a pressing discussion around shifts in the organisation of social reproduction since the 1970s.

Caring Labours as Decolonizing Resistance

This article brings feminist theories of social reproduction in conversation with decolonizing feminisms. It takes up Indigenous women's social reproductive labour as enactments of creative expansion. In approaching social reproduction as a site of struggle, it identifies three processes of expansion and resistance at this site: the expansion of care and intimacy into subsistence production; the expansion of the “family” beyond the nuclear through community and kin networks; and the expansion of relations of care to include the land.

The Art of Social Reproduction

This article considers how the museum produces knowledge about the past and present of feminist politics through its framing of marginal, activist artworks that have engaged the sphere of social reproduction or care labour. It is contended that neoliberalism’s assault on social reproduction in our current ‘age of austerity’ – which sees responsibility displaced from the state onto individuals – has sparked a reengagement with earlier socialist–feminist discourse and, as a result, we are perceptibly enmeshed within a new age of social reproduction debates. The Hackney Flashers’ germinal photographic project Who’s Holding the Baby? (1976–1978), acquired by Madrid’s Reina Sofia in 2010, is taken as a case study to explore a range of contextual, temporal and historical contradictions in further detail. Examining the ambiguous relocation of this photographic project provokes vital questions about the contribution of culture to the troubled terrains of art, property and care labour in the 21st century.

Reproduction and Resistance

In Northern Canada, Indigenous mixed economies persist alongside and in resistance to capital accumulation. The day-to-day sites and processes of colonial struggle, and, in particular, their gendered nature, are too often ignored. This piece takes an anti-colonial materialist approach to the multiple labours of Indigenous women in Canada, arguing that their social-reproductive labour is a primary site of struggle: a site of violent capitalist accumulation and persistent decolonising resistance. In making this argument, this piece draws on social-reproduction feminism, and anti-racist, Indigenous and anti-colonial feminism, asking what it means to take an anti-colonial approach to social-reproduction feminism. It presents an expanded conception of production that encompasses not just the dialectic of capitalist production and reproduction, but also non-capitalist, subsistence production. An anti-colonial approach to social-reproduction feminism challenges one to think through questions of non-capitalist labour and the way different forms of labour persist relationally, reproducing and resisting capitalist modes of production.

Conversations of motherhood : women's writing across traditions, Ksenia Robbe

The devaluation of social reproductive labour has taken on unique and insidious forms through the functioning of the 'post'-apartheid political economy of South Africa. In particular, the non-racial and neoliberal ideology of the 'Rainbow Nation' and its various guises of 'freedom' render the forms and mechanisms of racialised and gendered oppression in South Africa increasingly more difficult to make sense of. In considering the reproduction of socially constructed materiality and experience in this country, the history of racial capitalism, and the enduring racialisation of inequality should be taken into account. It is against this context and backdrop that the centralisation of gendered experiences and representations of transcultural motherhoods by Ksenia Robbe in Conversations of motherhood: women's writing across traditions (2015) is particularly important to examine. The central thrust of the book is one concerned with representations and experiences of motherhood.

Caught Between the Factory and the Home

This article focuses on María Ruido's video work Real Time (2003), a work that points to the perceived centrality of subjectivity for post- Fordism. Analysis of Real Time is twofold: the body ‘marked’ by capitalism and, concomitantly, the ascendency of the documentary form in contemporary art. The author situates Real Time within the renewed interest in social reproduction and migrant labour in light of the debates around the ‘feminisation’ of global capitalism.The article charts the importance that the video camera (and its critique) had for the women's movement and feminist artists of the 1970s. It seeks to unpack how and why – and indeed if – such a scarred and marginalised form as the documentary can become critically viable for discussions around what is knowingly termed ‘women's work’. The article uses Real Time to work anachronistically in its exploration of the ‘marked’ working body in contemporary capitalism and the representational methods we might use to ‘see’ and ‘know’ experiences of labour.

Countertopographies of Migrant Women: Transnational Families, Space, and Labor as Solidarity

Through our analysis of the domestic workers' lives in New York City and Hong Kong, we explore how Filipina migrants make transnational connections, how these connections operate, and when these connections act as a basis for transnational mobilization. We find that, although Filipina migrant workers experience very different working and living conditions, they similarly engage in transnational solidarity organizing with and for one another across their migrant locations. Further, the subjectivities through which they engage in cross‐border activism can take parallel forms. We find that migrant women's experiences of gendered social reproductive labor, both paid and unpaid, are salient in shaping their political subjectivities, and they connect these experiences to a critique of their “home” state.