How can we understand reproduction as a form of production? Because of course, in liberal theory and in Marxist theory they are considered to be diametrically opposed to each other.
In the reproductive labor debate they were not talking about biological reproduction in quite the same way. The arguments were more about domesticity and the space of domestic reproduction. That is, the space where child bearing, child care, housework, and nurturing—the space in which children are raised and brought up—takes place. These Marxist/feminists argued that this space was not merely a private space of natural gift relations, where it was part of women’s nature to give for nothing. Instead these apparently selfless gift relations were rather a kind of economic activity. They argued for the recognition of reproductive labor as labor, rather than simply a natural aspect of femininity, and in turn, some argued for wages and benefits to be provided on that basis.
These arguments need to be put in historical context. They are critiquing the social relations often described as the Fordist Social Contract or the Keynesian Social Contract, which developed at the end of the Depression particularly in Western Europe, and reached its strongest expression in the European welfare state after World War II. The key features here are the regulation of the male wage to include a family support element, and the statutory delivery of a large share of social protections through the male wage. Hence, the full-time housewife has access to income and social security only through her husband. Again, this idea was not quite as well-established in the United States because it never had a completely inclusive welfare state, although the New Deal involved many of these elements.
In their critiques, the Marxist/feminists were pointing to the foundational economic role of reproduction within the Fordist Social Contract, and demanding a direct form of market recognition for this economic role, rather than its transaction through the male wage and the nuclear family. They were appealing directly to the state to say that the subsidization of this type of reproduction should not be through the male wages; it should be directly to the woman, as a type of recognition of her economic role.
We are not the only commentators on the bioeconomy who have gone back and looked at this debate as a way to think about these relations through reproduction and production. Charis Thompson, in her book Making Parents, makes an argument about what she calls the “biotech node of production.” Donna Dickenson, a feminist bioethicist, has also looked at these reproductive labor debates and how they appear to have quite a strong and interesting relationship to the kinds of phenomena that we are commenting on here. That is the symmetry of the arrangements between the women in the family in the 1970s and the women involved in gift relations that underlie sectors of the stem cell industries today, where both groups create an economic value that is not recognized as such. Instead, it is simply treated as a naturally-occurring gift, a naturally-occurring maternal surplus which is really, already in a sense, available to be procured.
But what we have done with the reproductive labor debates is try and go back and look at the extent to which both the idea of labor and the idea of reproduction evoked in these accounts are embedded in a 1970s formulation and need critical reconsideration.
So at the level of political economy, those accounts rely on the Fordist industrial model of labor and a nation-state model of reproduction, both of which have been significantly displaced; and at the level of biology, they of course naturally fail to take into account the significant technical and contractual reworking of the potentials of reproductive biology.
The rest of my paper is going to be an unpacking of those two claims. At the level of political economy, we can see that the post-war Fordist domestic reproduction was organized as a gift exchange through the social state’s decommodifying action. That is, the regulatory exclusion of particular social relations from markets, as a way to promote social stability. The aspects of life that were decommodified were health, national education, social security, and the mandating of a family wage—these were all state-initiated actions to keep the relations of the family outside of the market. This is not something that is suddenly simply occurring. It’s actually a very actively-constituted set of protections and exclusions which have also, of course, been dismantled by the feminist movement because it gave women a very particular position in this reproductive life.
It is interesting then to look at, if we go back again to the post-war period, in a parallel move to the post-war human tissue economy that was also organized as a state-subsidized gift economy. If we look at blood banking as the very first human tissue economy, an enormous amount of social institutional work—and now, still today, organ donation—is put into keeping those transactions outside of, frankly, market relations. And that’s still true, although again, less so in the United States.
So we have this situation where we have two gift economies: we have the gift economy of the tissue economy; we have the gift economy of the family, and this describes a particular kind of historical moment. But this situation begins to come apart in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Particularly with the oil shocks and the changes in the global economy that begin in 1973 and inaugurate the age of neoliberalism, we get the decline in the notion of a family wage and the disaggregation of employment from social protections—an increase in casualised, temporary, and outsourced labor that lacks the former securities of the male fulltime job in the vertically integrated Fordist firm.
We get the development of Third Wave Feminism. We see women flooding into the workforce and contesting the idea of the male wage, and one of the effects is that the labor of domestic reproduction ceases to be just a gift economy and becomes more and more a service economy. What I mean by this is that we increasingly see domestic labor organized, contracted out, and sold in the market where middle- and upper-class working women increasingly employ other women to carry out aspects of domestic care. (Saskia Sassen has done brilliant work on global women and the use of particularly female migrant labor to contract out work once performed by housewives). Nannying, cleaning, food service workers, and sex workers are all part of this new service economy to support these relations that were formally produced within the space of domesticity.
So reproductive labor becomes, frankly, labor, becomes transactional, market-driven, sometimes or often informal, but nevertheless, clearly a form of labor. We can say that a major difference between Fordist uncompensated reproductive labor, and the contemporary relations of reproduction is a de-nationalization of the reproductive sphere and its exposure to global precarious labor markets. This is a key part in what we are arguing: instead of reproduction being primarily something located within the space of a nuclear family, within the space of the nation and outside of labor relations; it is increasingly reproduced through the global circulation of migrant labor; and it’s increasingly reproduced through various kinds of market relations.
This is a very easily seen when we talk about the human surrogacy market—a clear de-nationalization of reproduction, where the site of reproduction moves offshore—you go outside of your country, specifically so that you can purchase reproductive services.
It is interesting that these circuits are often closely aligned with the geographies of labor migration, more generally. So, again going back to my Eastern European women example, they are a major part of the oöcyte vending population, but of course, they are also a major part of the migrant population throughout Europe, particularly as nannies, cleaners, or sex workers.
There are interesting and significant crossovers happening between these different two populations.
