(Re)Producing Social Justice After Neoliberalism

Why social reproduction? Why now? The term has some very clear limits, as does its historical context, English language socialist feminism. It is associated with the goal of establishing a unitary theory, within a broadly pre-poststructuralist Marxist project, tied to the historically gendered categories of production/reproduction. It is embedded in socialist feminism’s often Euro-American centered politics, with a focus on class and gender that woefully excludes attention to the dynamics of race, sexuality, and religion. Historically, the roots of the terminology emerge from a moment before women of color feminism and queer and transnational politics had transformed our collective political horizons. Other potentially derailing blind spots include an emphasis on the social that can be interpreted to exclude the cultural, and a focus on social science rather than the interdisciplinary humanities. For all these reasons and more, it seems like a weak conceptual anchor for an analysis that might cope with the demands of global politics. ¹

In order to make a case for the continued usefulness of the term social reproduction, despite these clear historical limits, it is useful to examine some definitions. Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner’s 1989 definition is frequently cited:

[F]eminists use social reproduction to refer to the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, the ways in which the care and socialization of children are provided, the care of the infirm and the elderly, and the social organization of sexuality. Social reproduction can thus be seen to include various kinds of work—mental, manual, emotional—aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically defined care necessary to maintain life and to reproduce the next generation. ²

This definition embraces a wide range of practices, processes, institutions and industries, allowing linkages across the domains of the economic, political, social and cultural. More recently, other writers have worked to tie this concept of social reproduction to the historically specific operations of global capitalism. Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill of York University in Toronto edited a 2003 collection designed to foreground the contemporary processes linked to neoliberalism: the privatization of social reproduction and the intensification of exploitation. Drawing from a 2003 conference, “Feminist Political Economy in Canada and the Politics of Social Reproduction, ” also at York, Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton produced an edited volume highlighting the specific impact of neoliberal privatization—the imposition of responsibility for social reproduction on private households, where labor is unpaid or purchased, resulting in growing inequalities of gender, race and class. In her 2006 book Gender, the State and Social Reproduction: Household Insecurity in Neo-Liberal Times, Bezanson went on to argue that social reproduction is a primary site of contestation in a neoliberal era. ³

This work challenges the conventional formulations of liberal feminism and left political economy, using the concept of social reproduction to forge links across categories and domains. It also, directly or indirectly, critically engages the Althusserian conception of ideological state apparatuses, and Gramscian notions of hegemony. Other recent scholarship takes social reproduction into the further reaches of engagement with globalization studies, critical geography, and queer studies, and engages the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. Cindi Katz’s 2004 comparative study of the lives of children in globalizing Africa and the U.S., Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives, offers a definition that encompasses a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary concerns and preoccupations:

Social reproduction . . . encompasses that broad range of practices and social relations that maintain and reproduce particular relations of production along with the material social grounds in which they take place. It is as much about the fleshy, messy indeterminate stuff of everyday life as it is a set of structural practices that unfold in dialectical relation to production, with which it is mutually constitutive and in tension . . ..

. . . [S]ocial reproduction embodies the whole jumble of cultural forms and practices that institute and create everyday life and the meanings by which people understand themselves in the world. It is interesting and important, then, as the arena wherein which the future is shaped, the conditions of production are both made and naturalized, through an amalgam of material social practices associated with the household, the state, civil society, the market, and the workplace. Yet social reproduction is a critical practice in the sense that Henri Lefebvre understood everyday life. The possibilities for rupture are everywhere in the routine. If in the efflorescence of cultural forms and practices that make up social reproduction hegemony is secured, so, too, might it stumble. [emphasis added] ⁴

Katz goes on to emphasize the blurred boundaries between political economy, social reproduction and cultural life, including the media, mass culture, and religion.

There’s no reason to fetishize the term social reproduction per se, however. There are other terms that reference a similar conceptual universe. Neither M. Jacqui Alexander’s examination of morality and the state in Trinidad, nor Lisa Lowe’s analysis of immigration policy in relation to cultural production, for instance, employ the term social reproduction. Yet both focus on the broad complex interrelations of the categories of political thought that remain sundered in more conventional scholarship and politics. Both also centrally engage categories of race and sexuality in more expansive ways than the previously cited work. Other new scholarship on globalizing care chains, transnational adoption, and indigenous resistance to structural adjustment policies also centrally analyze processes of social reproduction in the context of global political economy, though these scholars do not generally employ the term itself. ⁵

1. Luxton for instance argues, in “Feminist Political Economy,” that political economy’s goal of studying society as a whole distinguishes it from poststructuralism, whose advocates do not endorse integrating all factors into one theory, but put forth fragments of provisional theories to deconstruct hegemonic systems (fn #9, p. 42-43). This is an old and familiar debate. This author is defending the earlier uses of the term social reproduction; I am arguing that the association with totalizing theory is a drawback that must be overcome by redefining the concept through engagement with the poststructuralist critiques that animate much contemporary cross-disciplinary feminist scholarship.[↑]
2. Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989), p. 383.[↑]
3. Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, editors, Power, Production and Social Reproduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Bezanson and Luxton, Social Reproduction; Kate Bezanson, Gender, the State and Social Reproduction: Household Insecurity in Neo-Liberal Times (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).[↑]
4. Cindi Katz, Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. x-xi.[↑]
5. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offenses Bill of Trinidad and Tobago,” in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, editor, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 133-152; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). See also Rhacel Parrenas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Laura Briggs, “Making ‘American’ Families: Transnational Adoption and U.S. Latin America Policy,” in Ann Stoler, ed., Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American Empire (Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 344-365, and Nancy Postero, Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).[↑]