Political Theories of Reproduction

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This session brings together scholars working on a range of intersecting issues regarding reproduction, the state, and the economy. “Reproduction” is a multi-faceted term that brings to mind the maintenance of particular orders through bodily labor and evokes questions of kinship and the terms of collective belonging. As such, reproduction serves as a way to unite the ideological work of politics and the economy with the work performed by particular raced and gendered bodies. Papers on the panel will consider the following topics: abortion rights under quarantine, the reproduction of capital, decolonial and indigenous feminist thinking about the reproduction of settler colonialism, and the neoliberal degradation of reproductive labor as the other side of the overvaluation of technological innovation. Considering both the material formations of reproduction and the importance of elements of time and history, these papers expand our understanding of how reproductive pasts connect to reproduction in moments of crisis and the possibility of reproducing new futures. Each paper takes reproduction as central to the concerns of political theory regarding issues such as rights, citizenship, belonging, the construction of the public/private divide, neoliberal expropriation, and the workings of American racial capitalism. Rachel Brown’s “Reproductive Labor as Space-Making: The Settler Colonial Home” considers how the domestication of space works as a crucial element of settler colonialism and engages in home-making as a domestic pursuit to reproduce orders of imperialism against indigenous populations. Jennifer Denbow presents “Innovation and the Crisis of Reproductive Labor,” to track the rise of innovation as a central political and economic value, naturalizing the expropriation, privatization, and devaluation of reproductive labor. Siddhant Issar also considers the work of neoliberal racial capitalism as a formation that relies on the reproduction of racial dispossession that intensifies in moments of national crisis in “Reproducing Racial Domination: Financial Expropriation, the Great Recession, and the Covid-19 Crisis.” The moments of dispossession characteristic of Covid-19 also guide Claire McKinney’s paper, “Necessary freedom: The contradictions of abortion in quarantine,” which considers the tension in discourses of abortion understood as an essential service and thus exempt from the quarantine restrictions and feminist claims of abortion access as a claim to freedom that ought to be preserved even as other freedoms were curtailed under stay-at-home orders. Foregrounding reproduction, whether in an analysis of the state’s management of reproductive bodies or through the lens of reproductive labor, these papers ask critical questions about the place of gendered and racialized bodies in historic and contemporary figurations of the nation and capital. The panel brings together scholars working in different traditions to reflect on the current state of political theories of reproduction and to push our theories in new directions.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Necessary Freedom: The Contradictions of Abortion in Quarantine (Pre-Recorded) - Claire C. McKinney, William & Mary

• Reproductive Labor as Space-Making: The Settler Colonial Home (Pre-Recorded) - Rachel Brown, Washington University in St. Louis

• Reproducing Racial Domination: Expropriation, the Great Recession, and Covid-19 (Pre-Recorded) - Siddhant Issar, University of Virginia

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

Chair

• Jennifer Denbow

Discussants

• Tamara Metz Reed College

• Annie Menzel University of Wisconsin