Disability and the Implicit Temporality of Care Work: Three Ableist Assumptions of Social Reproduction Theory

• In Event: 2320 - Section on Disability in Society Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 2 Section on Disability in Society Refereed Roundtables

Abstract

This paper uses disability as a lens to critically examine three crucial yet undertheorized assumptions underlying most theories of social reproduction, a Marxist feminist concept denoting the care labor and other processes that literally reproduce the productive worker’s labor-power, the key commodity from which capitalists profit. Many social reproduction theories implicitly draw on a temporal model of three abled life-stages, from child to working adult to elder, that are assumed to determine the amount and types of socially reproductive labor that a given person needs and can perform for themselves and others. After situating this framework within feminist theory, I examine the ableist assumptions underlying many theories of social reproduction. I first use the lens of disabled people’s lives to examine the assumption that every member of the working class contributes paid or unpaid labor to the capitalist economy. Second, I explore the axiom that by the end of their lives, all workers eventually contribute a net profit to capital via their productive and/or socially reproductive labor, after the costs of their own social reproduction and other needs are considered. In the third section, I subject a few assumptions about the way that humans experience and make use of space and time to the scrutiny of this disabled lens. I conclude that by employing this implicit life-stage model, much of the social reproduction literature reifies the underlying ableist logic of capitalism, frequently missing fundamental insights into the nature of labor, disability, health, and cisheteropatriarchal capitalism itself.

Author

• Courtney Frantz, City University of New York Graduate Center