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]

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.[4]

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.[5]

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.[6]

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][7]

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.[8]

Ara Wilson's 2004 study, The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons and Avon Ladies in the Global City, introduces the term "intimate economies" defined as "the complex interplay between intimate social life and political economic systems in a context shaped by transnational capitalism."[9] Wilson uses "economies" rather than "economy" in order to accommodate the ways that a local kinship economy, folk economy and moral economy operate in relation to the global capitalist economy, thereby usefully denaturalizing and pluralizing the definition of a too often reified term.[10] Drawing from cultural anthropology to argue that economies incorporate social and cultural realms, and from social theory to show that social life is linked to economic affairs, Wilson deploys intimate economies in ways that resonate with the most expansive uses of social reproduction. She also incorporates a complex argument about the role of markets in shaping sexual possibilities—a crucially productive extension of the usual limits of that concept. Critiques of homonormative marriage politics within queer studies also pursue this extension, linking the lesbian and gay pursuit of domestic respectability to conformity with the demands of the neoliberal state and economy.[11]

Ultimately, the search for useful and flexible concepts is not only a project for scholars motivated primarily to explain contemporary political configurations and dilemmas. We need concepts that can help us intervene in them effectively. Right now, the separation of notions of economic and sexual justice, alongside parallel separations from racial and gender justice, leave us crippled in the face of neoliberal policy activists who are very skilled at creating false divisions, deploying substitutions and distractions, and generally forwarding their goals with category manipulations of all kinds. The U.S. public is induced to support aggression against Muslim and Arab populations through the deployment of images of "their" traditional gender and sexual mores vs. "our" modern egalitarian ways. Marriage is represented as a "values" issue, rather than a political and economic institution. Persistent racial inequality is represented as due to black family forms, rather than to political and economic histories and practices. Effective opposition to such political strategies requires clarity about the deep connections across the categories of political, economic, and everyday life. If feminists cannot illuminate the web of relationships between economic and sexual justice, for instance, there is no question that our opponents can manipulate them with relative impunity.

So there is a lot at stake, in our concepts as well as our theories, strategies and alliances. Perhaps a term like social reproduction can become expansive enough to illuminate the web of connections that is too flexible, shifting, complex and globally variable for the term intersectionality to capture. If it can't, then we'll need another one.

Endnotes

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. [Return to text]

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. [Return to text]

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. [Return to text]

4. 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. [Return to text]

5. Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, "Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989), p. 383. [Return to text]

6. 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). [Return to text]

7. Cindi Katz, Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. x-xi. [Return to text]

8. 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). [Return to text]

9. Ara Wilson, The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons and Avon Ladies in the Global City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 11. [Return to text]

10. For a historical denaturalization of the term "economy," see Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). [Return to text]

11. See, for instance, Anna Marie Smith, Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [Return to text]