Innovation and the Crisis of Reproductive Labor (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Political Theories of Reproduction

Abstract

Innovation is a keyword of contemporary politics, yet the reorientation of law and policy around the promotion of innovation is a relatively understudied component of neoliberalism. In examining the logic of innovation, this paper reveals that innovation plays a crucial role in making solutions to social problems appear to be hindered by democracy and investments in public services. The paper unpacks the rise of innovation and its connections to the individualization and intensification of reproductive labor, which, as Joan Tronto argues, has been destructive of democracy. To understand and theorize the rise of innovation, the paper builds on the social contract critiques of Carole Pateman, Charles Mills, and Stacy Clifford Simplican, who together have revealed the gendered, racialized, and ableist expropriation and subordination endemic to the social contract tradition. I theorize the innovation contract in order to focus on the way that innovation has become a universal value and has been used to reconfigure the liberal social contract. Doing so both demystifies innovation and provides a useful way of modifying and updating social contract critiques to better address the contemporary character of expropriation and subordination, which is intertwined with the privatization of reproductive labor. The paper shows both that the rhetoric of innovation has been central to a variety of neoliberal reforms and argues that the logic of innovation has been so widespread and effective in part because innovation symbolizes the opposite of reproductive labor. The two movements—the hypervaluation of technological innovation and the devaluation of reproductive labor—work in tandem to increase burdens on individuals and expand corporate power.

Author

• Jennifer Denbow