(Re)Producing Social Justice After Neoliberalism

Political thought needs categories; political life defies them.

Because the categories we think with both enable and constrain our imaginations, the analysis of our categories of thought must always be integral to political theory and strategy. Bringing economic and sexual justice together as theoretical concepts, while engaging the associated movements for social change, requires that we put our conceptions of “economy” and “sexuality” under pressure. On the one hand, feminist scholars and activists have a long history of considering the social construction of these terms, and of arguing that they are deeply and complexly interrelated. On the other hand, we are engaged in scholarship and public debates that insist on a separation of the terms “economic” and “sexual”—seen as the proper objects of quite distinct analyses and political organization. We are trapped within the historical categories of liberalism—economy, state, civil society, and family—trying to emerge into another conceptual and political universe. ¹

The ideological work of these dominant categories of liberalism has been well analyzed by decades of scholarship. Feminist scholars have turned their attention to the broad impact of the public/private distinction as well. Meanwhile, we also find ourselves struggling with murky distinctions of our own: production/reproduction, production/consumption, or social/cultural/political/economic. Feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, queer and left activists and scholars together have most recently pointed out the ways that historical categories such as race, gender, class, sexuality, ability and religion have cut across the liberal domains, intersecting with each other in complex ways. All the while, it has been clear that even this notion of a complex intersectionality is inadequate to the task of demonstrating the shifting historical interrelations within which such terms define each other. None are self contained enough to simply “intersect” with the others. ²

As the dominant political and economic policy paradigm of neoliberalism shifts in the wake of global crisis, it is imperative that we seize opportunities to communicate, organize, strategize and theorize our way out of its cruel projects of expanding inequalities and concentrating power and resources. It is crucial that we demonstrate the ways that social formations of race, gender, sexuality, nationality and religion are central to economic processes and state actions, and are not simply population segments to be progressively included in the status quo. We need concepts and analyses that can capture the shifting relationships of the forces with which we contend, and that can illuminate them in ways that facilitate effective critique and a sense of new possibilities. We need a way out of either simply listing these categories and asserting that they intersect (or are imbricated), or just demonstrating their social construction and incoherence. Tall order, hey?

In the world of English language feminist politics, I would like to argue for the resurrection and reworking of an old socialist feminist concept—social reproduction. After its initial heydey in the 1960s and 70s, as a counterpoint to Marxist emphasis on the relations of production, the term was revived in the 1980s within feminist political economics, especially in Britain and Canada. Most recently, it has been put to interesting use by scholars in other fields such as geography, development studies, and international relations. ³

1. See Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Thought (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); and Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), introduction and chapter 1.[↑]
2. See Sandy Soto, “Bridging las Américas: Transnational Feminisms and Subjectivities (A Roundtable Discussion),” American Studies Association, Oakland, CA, October 2006; and Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 211-217. Soto clearly elucidates the limits of the concept of “intersectionality.” Puar proposes the Deleuzian concept of “assemblage” as a replacement for it.[↑]
3. For a brief history of the use of the term social reproduction, see Meg Luxton, “Feminist Political Economy in Canada and the Politics of Social Reproduction,” in Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton, edtiors, Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2006), pp. 11-44.[↑]