PLEASE NOTE: Our website is still under construction! We are presenting this “soft launch” to correspond with the events of Feminists Against War and the Genocide in Palestine on November 2nd in Saint-Blaise, Paris (announcement coming soon!).
This website provides resources for organizers, scholars, and all others interested in developing an understanding of a theory and politics informed by the study of reproductive labor. While we draw extensively from the Wages for Housework movement, our goal is to establish a platform for dialogue and debate across traditions that understand “reproductive labor” or “social reproduction” as sites of urgent political and theoretical intervention and investment. We invite contributions in any language to the site’s archive and hope to make the materials as accessible as possible through translation.
In a classic Fordist model, the reproductive work of the home, predominantly performed by women, was paid only indirectly, primarily through income from the waged employment of a male spouse, and, to a lesser degree, dispensed through the welfare mechanisms of the state or various religious and secular organizations. In a contemporary post-Keynesian, digitized economy, however, reproductive labor is more directly exploited as all aspects of domestic and social life come to be monetized through both the ‘data’ consistently collected in any digitally networked activity and as the necessities of survival and sociality are increasingly channeled through web platforms.
“Social reproduction” under capitalism is by no means simply the reproduction of life. Though this is a straightforward point, it is one that can be easily overlooked and must be emphasized. Understanding the accelerated evolution and renewed exploitation of reproductive labor in recent decades requires considerable analytic efforts attentive to the various realms in which such labor is provided. While unpaid domestic work remains central to the analysis of reproductive labor, the issues of its lack of recognition and invisibility are present both in the so-called ‘private’ space (families and informal volunteer networks) and in low-paid reproductive labor, often performed under difficult conditions in public, private, and nonprofit social services, including low-paid in-home care work.
Below, we outline the various sections of the website. Please use the menu links to sign up for the mailing list, learn about ongoing research initiatives, explore a growing collection of historical documents and contemporary texts, stay up to date on upcoming talks and events, and watch member presentations.
