Defining Social Reproduction

• In Event: Rethinking Kinship and the Family

Abstract

What is social reproduction? And where does it occur? My questions are provoked by the development of social reproduction theory in feminism, where the concept of social reproduction is used to account for the work that women do, waged and unwaged, outside and inside of the home, upon which the productive economy depends. Social reproduction feminism argues for a return to Marx and Marxism for a glimpse into the hidden abode of reproduction – the family – where the sexual division of labor and the exploitation of women’s work enables capitalist production and property. For thinkers like Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser, Susan Ferguson, and Tithi Bhattacharya, social reproduction is the work of reproducing the working classes, making sure that there are workers to do the work that the formal economy requires. And they see this work occurring primarily in the home, where the nuclear family is a basic unit of economic life.

Social reproduction feminism follows in a long tradition of seeing the family as an economic unit and integral to the larger economic order. It is a welcome reprieve from the bourgeois feminism of ambition and achievement, where the family figures as a moral support, but not as a labor relation. It is also a needed corrective to those tendencies within academic feminism to turn away from social institutions and class relations and toward individual subjectivities. These thinkers are right to return to the family as a primary site of social reproduction and a privileged object of feminist critique. Still – and this is the central argument I will pursue in the paper – this strand of feminism misses something crucial to the extent that it focuses exclusively on capitalism, the sexual division of waged and unwaged labor, and the patterns of economic exploitation at home. What it misses is the family as a political institution, where specific political experiences and relationships take shape and get reproduced. These experiences and relationships – those of rule, authority, command, and the real possibility of violence – underwrite economic systems, but they are not assimilable to a labor relation. This paper pursues an alternate concept of social reproduction, that hangs on a primary politicization that occurs in the home, a habituation to rule, authority, command, and violence, upon which the political order depends. This approach, following an earlier iteration of radical feminism, from Shulamith Firestone to Juliet Mitchell, attends not only to the relations between men and women but also between parents and children, and how the family serves as a basic unit of political life.

Author

• Robyn Marasco, CUNY, Hunter College