Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Day 1 Program

9:30 AM – Reproductive Work Today: Assaults and Resistance

Introduction

Annabelle Berthiaume, Assistant Professor | School of Social Work, Université de Sherbrooke (Canada)
Noemi Martorano, Postdoctoral Researcher | Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education, and Applied Psychology, University of Padua (Italy)
Maud Simonet, Research Director | CNRS, Université Paris Nanterre, IDHE.S (France)

9:45 AM – The Historical Temporalities of Reproductive Work

Leopoldina Fortunati, Senior Professor | Department of Mathematical, Computer and Physical Sciences, University of Udine (Italy)

In this talk, I propose to distinguish three historical phases of reproductive labor in order to show how capital has progressively and radically reorganized the reproductive sphere.

• • The first phase spans from 1945 to the late 1960s. It is characterized by the predominance of commodity production, which dictated the rhythms, modes, and time structures of the entire capitalist system and social organization, relegating reproduction to a subordinate role.
  • The second phase, from the late 1960s to the 1990s, is marked by successive waves of the feminist movement and women's struggles to reduce domestic labor. Capital responded by increasingly employing women in external jobs and by deindustrializing Western countries while relocating capital to regions with cheaper labor, such as China and former Soviet bloc countries. In this phase, the reproductive sphere becomes central within the capitalist system.
  • The third phase, from 2000 to 2024, is defined by the digital technologies through which capitalism integrates and subsumes more and more immaterial dimensions of domestic labor — such as affectivity, sexuality, education, sociality, communication, information, and entertainment — into a framework of automation and direct control.
     
     
     

10:30 AM – Theorizing Social Reproduction to Decolonize Approaches to Global Development

Alessandra Mezzadri, Professor | Department of Development Studies, University of London (UK)

In this presentation, I will reflect critically on Black and Decolonial feminist critiques to Early Social Reproduction approaches (ESRA) and Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), with the objective of mapping points of dialogue and interplay that may move us towards a common feminist horizon. First, I will sketch some of the continuities between ESRA and analyses focused on racial capitalism and/or on the racialisation of reproduction, in relation to understandings of primitive accumulation and value-generation, extraction and exploitation (Federici, 2004 and G. Bhattacharyya, 2018; Fortunati, 1981 and Morgan, 2007). Secondly, I will reflect on the linkages between SRT and intersectional feminism centering class. Based on the above, and in line with Premilla Nadasen (2023), I will argue that to be inclusive of gendered experiences worldwide, analyses of social reproduction must centre the home as well as the colony as the structuring forces of regimes of social reproduction. Overall, through ‘pluralising social reproduction approaches’ we can develop a theoretical and political agenda aimed at decolonising productivist approaches to global capitalism and development process.

11:00 AM – Break

11:15 AM – 1:15 PM – First Roundtable: Domestic Work – Invisibility, Uberization, Unionization

Moderated by Maud Simonet, Research Director | CNRS, Université Paris Nanterre, IDHE.S

Politically Organizing Single Mothers: A “Social Time Bomb”

Agnès Aoudaï, Co-president | Movement of Single Mothers (France)

Patriarchal society has not adapted to the reality of those who head 90% of single-parent families in France: single mothers. Stigmatized, they are also the first victims of successive reforms that affect society as a whole, especially the most vulnerable. Pension reform, changes to the RSA (minimum income support), immigration laws, and the dismantling of public services all have a devastating impact on the lives of single mothers. There are 2 million single mothers in France, and 45% of them live below the poverty line — a stark and damning reality.
Drawing on feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist demands that call for a profound transformation of society, single mothers have the potential to build a uniquely powerful resistance. They stand at the intersection of all the forms of oppression embedded in the current system.

Unionization: Domestic Workers’ Struggles Around the World

Giulia Garofalo Geymonat, Assistant Professor | Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy)

While the valorization of domestic work has often been at the centre of feminist analyses and claims, when domestic work becomes a paid activity troubles arise. Feminist organizations rarely engage directly in struggles for domestic workers’ rights, and domestic workers’ groups are often reluctant to define themselves as feminist. Through the study of domestic workers’ rights movements across nine countries, with a focus on the decade 2008-2018 and the ratification of ILO Convention 189, our research (Marchetti, Cherubini, Garofalo Geymonat, 2021) sheds light on some of the complexities of the relationship between these movements and feminist movements. Despite the fact that in many contexts there has been a disconnection between the two movements at the practical level, we found that domestic workers’ rights activists often seem to build their arguments on the same anti-capitalist interpretative frames used by feminist groups. Yet, remarkably, they expand them through an intersectional analysis so as to include racialized, lower-class, migrant and other minority groups, in ways which feminist movements have rarely accomplished.

In the Name of Women: The Uberization of Domestic Work

Nicole Teke, PhD Candidate in Sociology | IDHE.S, Université Paris Nanterre (France)

Home service platforms promote their domestic cleaning services as a way to reduce the customer’s "mental load," to "avoid arguments within couples," or to "relieve women after childbirth," presenting them as a solution to the crisis of reproductive labor. This model creates a two-tier system of reproductive work: a commodity for those who can afford it, and a burden for those who cannot.
This presentation aims to explore how these platforms target women by offering to resolve the issues of housework through a capitalist reappropriation of feminist discourse: positioning work as a source of empowerment that helps workers better balance their time, while offering clients the opportunity to offload this burden in the name of "marital peace" or "maternal exhaustion."

1:15 PM – 1:30 PM – Editorial Updates on Reproductive Work

With the bookstore El Ghorba, mon amour

1:30 PM – Lunch

2:15 PM – 4:15 PM – Second Roundtable: Social Services – Recognized Reproductive Work?

Moderated by Noemi Martorano | Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Padua, IDHE.S Nanterre

Commodification of Healthcare and the “Refamilialization” of Care in Belgium

Natalia Hirtz, Researcher | Group for Research on an Alternative Economic Strategy (GRESEA), Brussels (Belgium)

In Belgium, healthcare is one of the sectors most affected by budgetary cuts implemented since 2012. In this climate of austerity, two major processes can be observed: the deepening of management and work organization forms aimed at reducing costs and maximizing profits (typical of lean management), fostering a multifaceted process of privatization in the healthcare sector. Whether through the privatization of nursing homes (in Brussels, over 60% of nursing homes are owned by the for-profit private sector), the increase in co-payments (i.e., the portion of healthcare expenses borne by the patient), the reduction of hospital stays after childbirth or surgery, the merger of public and private hospitals (a 2019 reform), outsourcing of services in healthcare institutions, or the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care (pursued by the so-called reform 107), this trend towards privatization also implies that responsibility for such care is returned, in large part, to the family. In Belgium, it is estimated that non-professional care provided by a family member or close friend represents the equivalent of  150,000 full-time employees annually. This strengthening of free reproductive labor is essential for the billions of savings made in the healthcare budget in recent years. In a context where, instead of budgetary savings, there is a transfer of public wealth to private capital, can we argue that this increase in free reproductive labor involves an intensification of the extraction of surplus value from reproductive labor? And how does this transfer of work operate in the context of the reconfiguration of the family?

Social Reproduction and Colonial Care Chains

Sara Farris, Professor of Sociology | University of London (UK)

Since the early 2020s the UK has recruited hundreds of thousands of migrant care workers as it faces a huge care crisis where shortages in care are amongst the worst in recent history. An aspect of this current flow in labor mobility that has not received sufficient attention is the fact that the large majority of these migrant workers are women from former British colonies. While labor recruitment from the colonies is not new in British history as it regularly took place during colonial times and under the Commonwealth, it is worth noting that this new wave of migration involves mostly women to be employed in the socially reproductive sectors of health and social care. Based on research with migrant workers employed in private care homes in London, this paper aims to explore the specific implications of colonial relations for understanding the contemporary capitalist re-organization of social reproduction.

A Wage for Users: Toward a True Common Front

Camille Marcoux-Berthiaume and Gabrielle Laverdière, Activists | The Great Resignation, Montreal (Canada)

The professionalization of certain forms of reproductive labor, through the establishment of public social services and their subsequent gradual dismantling, has created a rift between users of those services and the workers who provide them. The degraded state of services and the acts of resistance by workers (strikes, work slowdowns) harm users to the extent that they sometimes lash out, verbally and even physically, at service providers. By recognizing that social services effectively put users (patients, informal caregivers, parents of students, etc.) to work, the demand for a wage for service users opens the door to a potential class reunification against those truly responsible for the miserable conditions endured by both groups.

4:15 PM – Break

4:30 PM – 6:30 PM – Third Roundtable: Informalization and Criminalization of Reproductive Work

Moderated by Annabelle Berthiaume, Assistant Professor | Université de Sherbrooke (Canada)

Laws of Social Reproduction

Prabha Kotiswaran, Professor of Law and Social Justice | King’s College London (UK)

Feminist scholarship on reproductive labour today spans many disciplines and has expanded its focus from unpaid domestic work within the home to include various forms of paid reproductive labour. In my presentation I want to offer a cross sectoral comparison of reproductive labour across the marriage-market continuum to include unpaid domestic work, paid domestic work, surrogacy and egg donation, erotic dancing and sex work through empirical research on these forms of labour in the global South context of India. Further I show how default legal categories governing these forms of labour shape women’s bargaining power within these sectors. However these legal categories are contingent and women within these sectors have vastly different stakes in regulation. It is only by investigating background legal rules through an empirically informed, legal realist and critical socio-legal approach lens and assessing the distributive effects of rule changes on all categories of women occupying varied caste, class, religious, age and occupational statuses can we reimagine alternate regulatory matrices that can help secure women’s prospects for economic justice. This in turn poses new and urgent conceptual and political challenges for social reproduction theory.

The Ultra-Right War Against Social Reproduction: A Brief Genealogy from Argentina

Veronica Gago, Professor of Social Sciences | University of Buenos Aires (Argentina)

I will argue about morality and cruelty to discuss how the far right in Argentine emerged as a challenge and reaction to the massiveness of grassroots feminist struggles (which, among other victories, won the legalization of abortion in December 2020). Thus we can understand the targeting of women and feminists responsible for community care in neighborhood soup kitchens as the opposite of “human capital” (the name of the new Ministry of Javier Milei`s government) as a way of promoting anti-feminism as a vector of reactionary politicization. Similarly, it attacks the popular economy for a reactive moralization of those who “live off” the state, producing the inversion of the scene that allows business people to not pay taxes and complain about public spending, while blaming the impoverished for the deficit.

Blow Jobs Are Real Jobs: Sex Work, Reproduction, and Organizing by Sex Workers in Montreal

Adore Goldman, Activist | Autonomous Sex Work Committee, Montreal (Canada)

This presentation will focus on the struggle of Montreal sex workers for better working conditions and the connections we make with analyses of social reproduction, both theoretically and practically. I will first discuss the influence of theories of the Wages for Housework movement on the campaign of the Autonomous Committee of Sex Workers (CATS). Then, I will talk about the activist research conducted by CATS over the past two years from the perspective of self-organization in our workplaces. Finally, the discussion will include current and future solidarity networks with other workers involved in social reproduction.

6:30 PM – Exhibition: “Calling on the Archive, Growing New Worlds. Materials for a Feminist Future of Social Reproduction”

Barbara Mahlknecht, Exhibition Curator, Artistic Mediator, and Doctoral Researcher | University of London (UK)

This archival installation brings together selected materials—documents, brochures, leaflets, and photographs—highlighting the richness and complexity of women's organizing in the 1970s around the struggle for "wages for housework." Focusing on the Italian context, the documents shed light on the nuances of various aspects such as motherhood, social services, education, and more. Records of conversations, theoretical analyses, communiqués, and strategic reflections trace the paths that led, for example, to the organization of the Mestre demonstration from March 8 to 10, 1974. Finally, posters emphasize the resonances of this campaign with contemporary feminist uprisings such as the Huelga Feminista in Spain and the Women's Strike Assembly in the United Kingdom.