Project Presentation

The organization of an international conference on reproductive work stems from the urgency, shared by many researchers, to update their analyses in light of recent mobilizations around social reproduction. These mobilizations, largely led by women, respond to the appropriation of reproductive labor both in the home and in the paid labor market by the capital system. Historically, reproductive labor has been denied recognition and disproportionately assigned to women—trends that continue to this day. Linked to domestic labor, the activities of social reproduction contribute to the reproduction of life and society as a whole and are thus part of the productive organization of the contemporary capitalist system (Fortunati, 2022).

The conference has a dual aim:

• to revisit the analyses of reproduction developed within the international Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s (Toupin, 2014),
• and to renew our understanding based on current research and ongoing struggles in this area (Berthiaume et al., 2021; Boisjoli & Simard, 2020; Federici et al., 2020; Simonet, 2022, 2024).

This conference will bring together researchers from Canada, Argentina, India, and several European countries including Austria, Belgium, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France. In addition to offering an original interdisciplinary exchange at an international level, the meeting of established scholars and younger researchers will foster intergenerational dialogue throughout the day.

Context

In recent years, social reproduction has received increasing scholarly attention due to the strategic role that the domestic sphere has assumed in the capitalist system (Dalla Costa, 2023; Federici, 2012, 2020). Over a few decades, this sphere has moved from a subordinate and dependent role in commodity production to a dominant one in which surplus value is extracted from reproductive labor not only indirectly but also directly—through digital technologies (Fortunati, 2023; Jarrett, 2016). This reorganization has put overwhelming demands on domestic labor globally, especially in caring for children and older adults, and revealed the impossibility for women to bear this disproportionate workload alone (Rai, 2024).

Understanding the accelerated evolution 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.

On the labor market, there is a growing expansion of unpaid work in areas related to social reproduction. Care sectors, social services, education, and the arts in particular increasingly offer precarious work conditions, disguised as passion, training, or volunteer work (Belley et al., 2018; Ihaddadene, 2021; Simonet, 2018). Sex work, meanwhile, remains criminalized in many countries, and restrictive laws continue to control people’s mobility and bodily autonomy without offering social protections or labor rights.

Families also face the increasing pressures of labor extraction. On the one hand, child care has become both more controlled and medicalized in order to supply a highly skilled labor force capable of working in increasingly complex productive environments. On the other hand, older adults’ care has become increasingly demanding, as significantly longer life expectancy implies additional years of intensive care, mostly provided by women. These transformations of reproductive work in both the labor market and so-called private sphere develop in an economic context marked by declining wages, exponential increases in debt, and the loss of purchasing power due to inflation.

To support this shift, the relationship between material and immaterial domestic labor has changed, with a notable increase in immaterial domestic labor supported by the spread of digital technologies in homes and private spaces. While material domestic labor has seen limited investment in technological research and development—mainly through a timid diffusion of cleaning, cooking, or lawn care robots (e.g., Roomba, Thermomix)—immaterial reproductive labor has undergone a massive adoption of powerful digital technologies such as computers and smartphones. These tools have subsumed and automated a significant part of immaterial reproductive work (communication, information, education, affect, sex, entertainment, etc.) (Fortunati & Edwards, 2024).

This social reorganization of reproductive labor has had various consequences, including the involvement of men, children, teenagers, and even older adults in sharing parts of the increasing workload. Think of the many grandparents who, once retired, must work full-time in the domestic sphere to allow their children and children’s partners to hold paid jobs. They pick up children from school or daycare, watch them until the parents return, care for them when sick, etc.

At the same time, numerous movements express an individual and collective refusal to carry the burden of social reproduction. This refusal is evident in transnational feminist movements that have mobilized through reproductive labor strikes to make this labor visible within the capitalist organization of labor (Gago, 2021; Federici et al., 2020). It is also reflected in parenthood, with drastically lower birth rates in Western countries, and in older adults’ care, where demands for state responsibility are increasing. When women have adequate financial means, they can often refuse this work only by purchasing low-cost reproductive labor sometimes from poor, racialized, immigrant, and refugee men and women (Farris, 2017; Vergès, 2019; Martorano, 2023), through a process of transnational transfer of reproductive labor (Parreñas, 2015). These different strategies for reorganizing reproductive labor—as well as state strategies to contain the cost of already provided services—will be analyzed during this conference.

Women’s refusal has been interpreted by some as a crisis in the reproductive sector (Coin, 2017), both at the domestic and societal level (Toupin et al., 2020). This crisis has made the sector dysfunctional for the global economic system, as the very foundations of society and its functioning have been shaken. The family unit, as the basic cell of capitalist society, has itself become a site of contestation over interpersonal relationships, binary sexual identities, and the sexual division of labor, to name a few examples. Becoming a space of experimentation and social resistance, where the "natural" link between women and reproductive labor is challenged, the family has undergone continuous redefinitions of social roles related to parenting, gender relations, and even the emotional dimensions of associated labor (Lewis, 2019).

Capitalist exploitation of reproductive labor and frequent neglect of women’s needs by political and labor organizations have inspired powerful movements of refusal. This resistance has taken numerous forms including challenges to basic structures of communal life—such as the family—rebellion against women’s continued subordinate status and widespread poverty. It has also meant a refusal to serve as a convenient target of male violence; a brutality itself rooted in the extreme violence of this economic system (Gago, 2021).

These shifts have deepened traditional divisions among women: between those who work “only” at home and those who work both at home and outside it—often in social reproduction sectors and even in other households; between mothers and non-mothers; between women of different nationalities, religions, and racial and ethnic backgrounds; between those who suffer violence and those who manage to protect their physical and mental integrity. By analyzing reproductive labor in all its forms, and the struggles to make it visible and recognized, we can better understand how today’s social, political, and economic organization operates. From this perspective, the conference ambitiously aims to analyze and discuss the different facets of reproductive labor in order to recompose them within an integrated global vision capable of laying a solid foundation for discourse on the current transformations in the reproduction sector.

References

Belley, S., Berthiaume, A., & Simard, V. (2018). L’exploitation n’est pas une vocation ! Pour la rémunération des stages et la fin du travail étudiant gratuit. Dans C. Robert & L. Toupin, Travail invisible : Portraits d’une lutte féministe inachevée (p. 143‑155). Les éditions du remue-ménage.

Berthiaume, A., Poirier, A., Simard, V., Tremblay-Fournier, C., & Simard, É. (2021). Grève des stages, grève des femmes : Anthologie d’une lutte féministe pour un salaire étudiant (2016-2019). Les Éditions du remue-ménage.

Boisjoli, S., & Simard, V. (2020). Grève des stages, salaire étudiant. Récit d’une mobilisation autonome, Mouvements, n° 103(3), 164‑174. https://doi.org/10.3917/mouv.103.0164

Coin, F. (2017). La crisi della riproduzione e la formazione di un nuovo “proletariato ex lege” Entrevue avec Silvia Federici. Dans Salari rubati – Economia politica e conflitto ai tempi del lavoro gratuito (p. 99‑106). Ombre Corte. https://www.infoaut.org/approfondimenti/la-crisi-della-riproduzione-e-la-formazione-di-un-nuovo-proletariato-ex-lege

Dalla Costa, M. (2023). Femmes et subversion sociale : Anthologie 1972–2008. Entremonde.

Farris, S. R. (2017). In the Name of Womens Rights : The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372929

Federici, S. (2012). Revolution at Point Zero : Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. PM Press.

Federici, S. (with Curcio, A.). (2020). Genere e Capitale : Per una lettura femminista di Marx. DeriveApprodi.

Federici, S., Kuehni, M., Simonet, M., & Merteuil, M. (2020). Travail gratuit et grèves féministes. Entremonde. https://entremonde.net/travail-gratuit-et-greves-feministes

Fortunati, L. (2022). L’arcane de la reproduction : Femmes au foyer, prostituées, ouvriers et capital. Entremonde.

Fortunati, L. (2023). Law and the Reproduction Sphere as the Place of a Double Production of Value. Feminists@law, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.22024/UNIKENT/03/FAL.1214

Fortunati, L., & Edwards, A. (2024). Domestic Appliances and Household Robots : The Changing Landscape of Housework and Family. Dans L. Fortunati & A. Edwards (Éds.), The De Gruyter Handbook of Robots in Society and Culture (p. 411‑428). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110792270-022

Gago, V. (2021). La puissance féministe ou le désir de tout changer (L. Nicolas-Teboul, Trad.). Les éditions de la rue Dorion.

Ihaddadene, F. (2021). Professionnalisation empêchée et bénévolisation du travail des tuteurs de service civique. Nouvelle revue de psychosociologie, 32(2), 147‑161. Cairn.info. https://doi.org/10.3917/nrp.032.0147

Jarrett, K. (2016). Feminism, labour and digital media : The digital housewife. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315720111

Lewis, S. (2019). Full surrogacy now : Feminism against family. Verso.

Martorano, N. (2023). Rifugiati/e al lavoro. Il sistema d’accoglienza come dispositivo di produzione e riproduzione di lavoratori e lavoratrici essenziali [Université de Padoue]. https://hdl.handle.net/11577/3497583

Parreñas, R. S. (2015). Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Rai, S. (2024). Depletion : The human costs of caring. Oxford University Press.

Simonet, M. (2018). Travail gratuit : La nouvelle exploitation ? Textuel.

Simonet, M. (2022). L’utilité sociale contre le travail. Leçons du travail gratuit et de ses luttes. Sociologie du travail, 64(1‑2), Article 1‑2. https://doi.org/10.4000/sdt.40913

Simonet, M. (2024). L’imposture du travail : Désandrocentrer le travail pour l’émanciper. 10-18.

Toupin, L. (2014). Le salaire au travail ménager : Chronique d’une lutte féministe internationale (1972-1977). Les éditions du remue-ménage.

Toupin, L., Dalla Costa, M., & Federici, S. (2020). La crise de la reproduction : Entretiens. Les éditions du remue-ménage.

Vergès, F. (2019). Un féminisme décolonial. La Fabrique éditions.