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 investment. We invite contributions in any language to the sites 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 waged employment of a male spouse, and to a lesser degree, dispensed through the welfare mechanisms of the state or various religious and secular institutions. In a contemporary post-Keynesian, increasingly in the digitized economy, however, reproductive labor is also more directly involved in value production, as all aspects of domestic and social life can be exploited through both the expenses of digital consumer goods and services and the ‘data’ constantly collected in any digitally networked activity.
“Social reproduction” under capitalism is by no means simply the reproduction of life; a straightforward point, but one that can be easily overlooked. 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menu links to sign up for the mailing list, learn about ongoing research initiatives, explore a growing collection of historical documents and contemporary texts, stay up to date on upcoming talks and events, and watch member presentations.
