Reproductive Labor as Space-Making: The Settler Colonial Home (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Political Theories of Reproduction

Abstract

This paper asks how reproductive labor is not only central to the material and psychic sustenance of the home or “private sphere,” but also the reproduction of settler colonial space. Much feminist scholarship on reproductive labor situates domestic work as integral to making the home a site of familiarity, intimacy and safety. Other feminist political theorists have suggested how the home is a site of nation-building. Yet an underexplored question is how reproductive labor involves a racializing and “domesticating” of space that is central to creating and naturalizing settler colonial forms of belonging across an indigenous landscape.

Homes have historically been central to the geography of settler colonial place-making and the transformation of the land into a national home, whether through the building of literal houses and settlements, or the historic construction of borders that position indigenous populations as infiltrators and foreigners. Using the examples of the U.S. and Israel, I ask, if the transformation of an indigenous landscape into a national home for settlers is central to the naturalization of the settler colonial state (what some indigenous scholars have called “settler nativism”), then how might the reproduction of the home as a space of presumed intimacy, safety and (racial) familiarity be a central part of this project? I argue throughout that as a site of settler colonial place-making, (re)production of the settler colonial home has been integral to the ideological creation of spaces deemed “intimate” and “safe” at the family and national levels. Looking at the brief illustrative examples of mandate Palestine in the first decades of the twentieth century and U.S. home missions in the nineteenth century, I suggest that home-making and its reproduction are a form of domestication in its thoroughly colonial usage—a perceived “taming” of indigenous space inextricable from the civilizational missions central to European imperialism, and a way of naturalizing non-autochthonous belonging across an indigenous landscape.

In the third section, I suggest that, as an element of social reproduction, inheritance of private property under settler colonial governance situates settler emplacement as a matter of the family, safety, and the domestic. That is, reproductive labor is central to the ongoing logics of place-making under settler colonial capitalism. In conclusion, I examine how processes of home-making suggest how and to whom the construct of intimacy itself gets attributed. Drawing on anti-colonial and queer-of-color critique, I suggest how, in these two examples, bourgeois constructions of the home as a familial sphere of domesticity, safety and respite are inextricable from racial histories of colonial dispossession and slavery that suture private property to notions of heterosexual propriety. I conclude by discussing the implications of this critique of intimacy for feminist political theories of reproductive labor and a public/private divide.

Author

• Rachel Brown, Washington University in St. Louis