This international symposium, structured around two axes of investigation, aims at addressing some delay in the French reception of feminist theories of social reproduction. The first historical line of inquiry shall return to the classical feminist approaches to social reproduction in order to put them in dialogue with the alternative proposals that have nourished them, that they have discussed and displaced, or that have developed in parallel in the field of Critical theory. As for the second line of inquiry, it intends to map the contemporary landscape of theories of social reproduction through both an internal discussion of this paradigm whose rebirth was precipitated by the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and its external confrontation with ecofeminism, ecological Marxism, the ethics and politics of care, the thesis of the centrality of work, the concept of intersectionality, and the theory of the commons. 

Conferences abstracts :  

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Cinzia Arruzza

Social Reproduction and Ongoing Primitive Accumulation

Several authors working in the broad tradition of theories of social reproduction as connected to gender oppression have used the notion of ongoing primitive accumulation to explain an array of distinct phenomena, from gendered violence to surrogacy. In this paper, I criticize the notion of ongoing primitive accumulation and argue that different concepts are necessary to explain and describe distinct phenomena.

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Céline Bessière et Sibylle Gollac

The Gender of capital : or how the family reproduces inequalities

We know that capitalism in the 21st century is synonymous with growing inequalities between social classes. What is less well known is that wealth inequality between men and women is also on the increase, despite formally equal rights and the belief that, by entering the labour market, women have gained autonomy. To understand why, we need to look at what happens in families that accumulate and transmit economic capital in order to consolidate their social position from one generation to the next. Spouses, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers do not occupy the same positions in family strategies of reproduction, nor do they derive the same benefits from it. The fruit of twenty years of research, our last book shows that capital has a gender.

With the help of legal professionals, we investigate the calculations, divisions and conflicts that take place at the time of marital separations and inheritances. From the lone mothers of the Gilets jaunes movement to the divorce of Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, from small business transfers to the inheritance of Johnny Hallyday, the mechanisms for controlling and distributing capital vary according to social class, but always result in the dispossession of women. We analyze how class society is reproduced through the male appropriation of capital.

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Tithi Bhattacharya

Social Reproduction Theory as Diagnostic, Abolition as Politics: Reimagining Anticapitalism.

Since the welcomed renewal of scholarly and political attention on care and social reproduction, there has also been an ahistoricization of care as a beautiful, even virtuous, expression of human labor. Care as practiced within capitalism, however, is a dialectical unity of opposites.  On one hand it constitutes a stubborn, intractable aspect of humanity that refuses capitalist modifications, continuing to support and sustain life-forms. On the other, as an act inserted into capitalist social relations, it can be limited in its welfare functions. The commodification of social reproduction involves a bricolage of new forms of domination and a reliance on older ones where non-class modes of domination are employed to shape class formations and exploitation. If Social Reproduction Theory is a diagnostic of capitalist social relations that has the unique potential to reveal both the stable procedures of capital as well as its fault lines, abolition is its politics. SRT, in itself, does not point towards a solution, merely outlines the problem; it is abolition that creates that horizon of liberation giving us a futural glimpse when care can transcend need and become a principal.    

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Giovanna Di Chiro

Social Reproduction in the Age of Climate Crisis

In this talk, I argue for the importance of building intersections between social reproduction theory and environmental justice praxis.  Using a critical ecofeminist lens, I examine how neoliberal “green” solutions to the climate crisis have not taken seriously the material effects of embodiment and the capacity for communities (human and non-human) to accomplish social reproduction – that is, the capacity to sustain everyday life and to thrive into the future.  What would a just approach to ‘sustainability’ look like that supports ‘life-making’ in all its forms, even—or especially—in the wake of the ruins of capitalism?  I discuss examples of how environmental justice and reproductive justice activists from marginalized communities demonstrate the intersections between the health of their environments and the health and survival into the future of their bodies, lands, and communities.

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Jules Falquet 

Putting heterosexuality, interlocking relations of oppression and the appropriation of women back at the heart of the analysis of social reproduction

In this talk, I will first recall the core of Francophone materialist feminist analysis. I will develop the concept of social relations of private and collective appropriation of women by men, as antagonistic sex classes, and their concrete manifestations (notably the physical burden of group members) (Guillaumin, 1978). I will also return to the concept of straight mind or gender ideology (Wittig, 1981), and to heterosexuality as a political system that cements the concrete models and practices of home, family and even community, generally little discussed in theories of social reproduction, even though they are structured by and for appropriation. I will also highlight the racial and class dimensions and colonial logics of heterosexuality. Secondly, I will show how the analysis of heterosexuality and the appropriation of women, understood in this way, can be put back at the heart of theories of social reproduction. Firstly, in theories of care, where there is still a considerable lack of awareness of the importance of the care work provided by wives to healthy adult husbands, under the guise of the naturalness of "love". Secondly, to take into account the "better living" that husbands and men as a sex class (and not just bosses and capital) derive directly from women's domestic and communal work, and to keep an eye on power relations and economic inequalities within the domestic unit and "communities" themselves. Finally, to seriously analyze the "production of producers", the central question of social reproduction, as the real procreative labor of women organized by "straight combinatory".

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Sara Farris

The coloniality of social reproduction

Since the early 2020s the UK has recruited hundreds of thousands of migrant care workers as it faces a huge care crisis where shortages in care are amongst the worse in recent history. An aspect of this current flow in labour mobility that has not received sufficient attention is the fact that the large majority of these migrant workers are women from former British colonies. While labour recruitment from the colonies is not new in British history, as it regularly took place during colonial times and under the Commonwealth, It is worth noting that this new mass wave of labour mobility involves mostly women to be employed in the socially reproductive sectors of health and social care. Based on research with migrant workers employed in private care homes in London, this paper aims to explore the specific implications of colonial relations for understanding the contemporary capitalist re-organisation of social reproduction. To do this, I bring SRT into dialogue with the work of Anibal Quijano, Maria Mies and Gargi Bhattacharya among others.

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Leopoldina Fortunati

How can we understand today’s reproduction?

Starting from the analysis contained in L’Arcane de la reproduction: travail domestique, prostitution, travail et capital, I will attempt to explore the structural changes that have occurred in the sphere of the reproduction of labor power as a result of women’s struggles. 

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Nancy Fraser

Is social reproduction theory labor-reductionist?

“Social-reproduction theory” analyzes care as a genre of socially necessary labor, without which capitalist societies could not function. My own recent contribution to this theory probes the idea that feminism can be a considered a labor movement, albeit one that has not been recognized as such. While this interpretation offers the prospect of an emancipatory labor coalition uniting the exploited, the expropriated, and “the domesticated,” it is open to a serious objection: to reduce feminist concerns to issues of labor is to truncate and distort them, omitting such pressing, central matters as sexuality and violence against women. My remarks will evaluate this objection. 

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Fanny Gallot et Aurore Koechlin

Wecasa, un féminisme de marché ? La reconfiguration du travail reproductif par le travail de plateforme 

While the male sectors of platform work, on the one hand, and paid reproductive work, on the other, are the subject of growing research, little attention has been paid to the effects of platform capitalism on reproductive work. Yet it is making a major contribution to reconfiguring the organization of social reproduction. Based on an investigation of the Wecasa company, the aim of this contribution is to show how reproductive work is reshaped by the platform, with a discourse promoting female empowerment based on the neoliberal principle of « working more to earn more ». However, this ideal of the emancipated self-employed woman, managing her own life as if she were running her own business, comes up against the reality of the status and its daily constraints: platform work, far from putting an end to exploitation, merely changes its terms.

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Claude Gautier

Social reproduction and history in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology

It is often claimed that Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the contemporary social world tends to favor reproduction over transformation. The specific form of his field theory would lead him to give primacy to “structure” over “history”. Yet his work is full of exemplary studies of the ways in which new fields are structured – in literature or art, in religion or science, and so on. In all these spheres of the social world, Bourdieu has never ceased to show the social conditions of possibility for major social transformations... Because his sociology is deeply rooted in a permanent effort to historicize its objects, he has never ceased to give an account of the unstable and provisional character of the institutions that organize the social world. Bourdieu’s social world is neither fixed nor resistant to change.

Thus the question arises of understanding what, in the continuity of these transformations, remains and nourishes the feeling that “everything changes so that nothing changes”. The plan of analysis must then be modified, and concern the axiological and political orientations that define the general framework of his work as a sociologist: the permanence of injustice and its social forms, the continuity of experiences of inequality, domination, oppression, etc.: the constantly renewed gap between what is and what could be. In this sense, of course, his sociology can be called critical.

The aim of this presentation is to locate and study as closely as possible the tension that constitutes P. Bourdieu’s work, between “reproduction” and “transformation”, and which gives its function – axiological, epistemological, political – to the critical dimension of his approach. To give substance to this reading, we will try to draw on a few examples of the individual “experience” of social change.

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Émilie Hache

Reproducing the world or reproducing labor power? An ecofeminist perspective on the concept of social reproduction

The early 1980s saw the simultaneous publication of major works in the theory of social reproduction (Fortunati, 1981; Vogel, 1983), as well as two texts by Illich on Le travail fantôme (1980) and Le genre vernaculaire(1982). The misunderstanding between the two was total, and Illich’s criticisms were relegated to the dustbin of history. The aim is to revisit and clarify these disagreements from an extra-industrial historical perspective, asking “what do we want to reproduce?”

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Aaron Jaffe

Social Reproduction Theory, Disability, and the Reified Form of Labor Powers

Social Reproduction Theory’s analysis of the production and reproduction of labor powers can be refined by considering the commodity-form. When labor powers are commodified, those who can more easily develop and actualize powers fit for exploitation - or fit into the social relations appropriate to an order premised on such exploitation - are rendered "able" while those who have greater difficulty are subject to recognized or disavowed forms of "disability". This ableist-exploitable form dominates, shapes, and excludes other labor powers to such an extent that the division between ability and disability appears as if it is a-historical and objectively valid. Ability, in other words, becomes reified, and the form determining it becomes fetishized. To their political detriment, neither Italian Feminist, nor North American versions SRT have sufficiently explored the disabling effects of the ableist-exploitable form which determines labor powers as commodities. The paper concludes by drawing on Marx’s analyses of labor power in Capital and the “Critique of the Gotha Program” as offering resources that can help SRT take disability seriously and, thereby, point to the transformations necessary to move beyond fetishizing the existing form labor powers are constrained to take by capital.

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Prabha Kotiswaran 

SRT and Care Jurisprudence for the Global South.

Abstract. Post pandemic, ‘care’ has become central to the policy agenda of numerous international institutions and activists alike, whether in the form of Care Manifestos, the ILO’s proposals for governments to invest in the purple (care) economy or to the W20 program of multilateral governmental groupings like the G20. My paper will use the opportunity created by the global turn to care for reimagining social reproduction theory and care jurisprudence from the perspective of the global South. Although social reproduction feminists have been resolutely internationalist in mapping the interdependencies between care economies in the global North and global South, a more sustained retheorisation of the premises of social reproduction theory and of the ‘care diamond’, namely, the state, market, family, and community is crucial. Further, studying the co-constitutive relationship between these reimagined institutions and the law through an empirically informed, legal realist and critical socio-legal approach lens, reveals new and urgent conceptual and political challenges for social reproduction theory while helping articulate prospects for a renewed care jurisprudence and agenda for redistributive politics. 

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Frédéric Monferrand

Nature and Reproduction: About Some Possible Articulations between Feminism and Political Ecology 

The powerful upswing in ecofeminist themes has popularized the idea that “the domination of women and the domination of nature belong to the same culture”. While easily acceptable from a descriptive point of view, this idea nevertheless raises the problem of knowing how to define the relationship between the domination of women and the domination of nature. My communication aims at dealing with this problem, by distinguishing in broad outline three possible models for an articulation between feminism and political ecology. One of them falls under ecofeminism and the other two come under social reproduction feminism. Disclosing these different models shall allow to tackle the following issues: should the domination of both women and nature be attributed to the “Modernity” has often claimed by ecofeminists, or to “capitalism” as put forward by social reproduction feminists? In the latter case, should we conceive of capitalism as a social system extending a same exploitative logic from the factory to the home and natural milieux, or as an economical regime embedded in a broader social totality, which it presupposes and whose reproduction it threatens? At last, what are the political consequences of these theoretical debates on the articulation of feminist, ecologist and anti-capitalist struggles? 

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Geneviève Pruvost

Subsistence Work is Not a Work of Consumption/Production. Contributions of an Ecomaterialist Approach. 

I intend to propose a tradition of feminist and ecofeminist theorizations which since the 1970s have been part of a subsistence approach. This approach moves the partition between reproductive and productive work by drawing another historical, economical and political dividing line between, on the one hand, subsistence work and, on the other hand, production/consumption work. Far from being a category reserved to peasant work, to women or to southern countries, subsistence work refers to a core of activities necessary to production/consumption, the latter being unsuccessful unless small invisible hands take over the work of renewing, regenerating, repairing and caring of vital matters. The stake of this presentation is to revisit the notions of matter, exploitation, emancipation and work in non-capitalocentric and non-anthropocentric terms. It is important to supplement the intersectional approach with a feminist ecomaterialist approach: access prohibitions to subsistence territories and know-hows are to be added to the crossroad of gender, class and coloniality-based discriminations. 

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Emmanuel Renault

Exploitation of domestic labour or exploitation of the work of reproduction

What difference does it make to think of exploitation with reference to reproduction rather than to domestic labour? This question will be tackled from the point of view of the theory of exploitation. These two conceptions of exploitation, of domestic labour/work of reproduction, indeed intersect, all the more if the very concept of domestic labour is understood in its broadest sense. Conversely, in its broadest sense, social reproduction is irreducible to work activities, so that social reproduction theories are not always dealing with exploitation. They nevertheless offered decisive contributions to the theory of exploitation. 

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Lucile Richard

Queer Labor(s)? SRT, The Public Sphere, and the (Un-)Productivity of Politics

This communication focuses on the reproductive labor that occurs in our streets, public squares, and political gatherings, extending the concept beyond the organisation of the household, the factory, and the firm. It raises a fundamental question: can we truly grasp the multifaceted power dynamics of capitalist relationships without delving deeply into the functioning of the public sphere? Historically, Marxist thought has somewhat neglected this depth, often relegating the public sphere to a mere superstructure. Starting from the observation that Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is only partially exempt from this tendency, I develop the idea that the unproductivity of politics can best be understood as the effect of a specific kind of labor that occurs in public spaces, rather than as non-work. Drawing inspiration from queer theory and sociological research that highlights the gendered divisions within activist work, I emphasize that, from a feminist point of view, considering the public sphere as a laborless space is problematic for three reasons. First, it obliterates the reproductive labor (particularly cleaning) that takes place there. Second, it obscures the specific productivity of the work of politicizing/de-politicizing public spaces. Third, it forecloses an analysis of the “material basis” of the social relations of power that come into play when public spaces are utilized as sites of collective action. Challenging the perpetuation of these blind spots, I argue for a reevaluation, within SRT, of the strategic implications of distinguishing between productive and reproductive labor—a question long abandoned by Marxist Feminists.

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Maud Simonet

Working Freely for the Capital… Rethinking Work and Its Exploitation Through Analyses of Reproductive Work 

This comunication intends to bring to light the conception of work which is at the heart of the analysis of domestic work as reproductive work developed in the 1970s by feminists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silivia Federici or Leopoldina Fortunati. We will show how this conception invites us not only to enlarge the definition of work but above all to politicize the analysis of its frontiers, even beyond what is commonly referred to as the sphere of social reproduction. The key to such politicization is provided by a critique of the processes which make work both invisible and unpayable. 

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Christine Verschuur

Social Reproduction Crisis in the Global System and Feminist Solidarity Actions 

In the context of a crisis of social reproduction, of growing impoverishment and inequalities, myriads of initiatives led by women emerge, articulate and transform into political force. Their experiences and struggles allow to revisit empirical, theoretical and political debates about social reproduction. They are reorganizing and politicizing social reproduction, redefining the meaning of work and value, exploring new ways of doing economics and politics, struggling against their subordination and for their rights. The presentation will more particularly focus on the initiatives of collectives of afrodescendants female peasants in the Vale do Ribeira in Brasil. To reorganize social reproduction appears to be unavoidable for a feminist and sustainable social change. 

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