Catherine Waldby,
"Citizenship, Labor, and the Biopolitics of the Bioeconomy:
Recruiting Female Tissue Donors for Stem-Cell Research"
(page 4 of 5)
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.
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