increasing precarity of urban life and how this life is reproduced, in conjunction with the analytical framings used to examine them, has put the feminist intellectual and political project of social reproduction back on the urban agenda with a new urgency, engendering praxis and producing ideas that can be socially and epistemologically transformative (see, for example, Teeple Hopkins 2015; Buckley and Strauss 2016; Andrucki et al. 2018; Chattopadhyay 2018; Peake et al. 2018; Winders and Smith 2019).
Second, notwithstanding the decisive role of social reproduction, it has formed only the theoretical ‘constitutive outside’ of the urban since non-feminist urban theorizing began (as the ‘illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility’ Butler 1993, p. xi) (Peake 2016; Roy 2016b; Jazeel 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018). We ask how we can transition from treating social reproduction as a mere constitutive outside to being constitutive of how, where, when, and through whose labour the urban emerges. Hence, we see social reproduction as a real object of the urban – an empirical reality to be mapped, documented; a tableau that writes the urban even as it is written by it. Moreover, we consider the who, where, when, and how of social reproduction and the alternative social and spatial relations it produces to be historically contingent and only partially discernable through their specific relationship to the mode of production in which they are unfolding.
Third, our problematic also speaks directly to the imperative to decolonize feminist urban knowledge production, which is not free of hierarchical and imperial thought, produced within a social ontology shot through with whiteness and specific Western ideologies, values, and experiences. It is with this concern of decolonizing the epistemologies and ontologies of existing social reproduction analytical frameworks that we propose social reproduction qua method (Tanyildiz 2021), as a tool to think through the relationship between ontology and epistemology, which orients us towards how social reproduction is undertaken. As method, social reproduction is an attempt to explicitly connect some of the main aspects of critical feminist epistemologies – such as emphasizing the locatedness and partial nature of knowledge production and a willingness to continually scrutinize categories of analysis, embedded as they are in specific spatialities and temporalities – to feminist considerations of social ontology (cf. Ruddick et al. 2018). Foregrounding what social reproduction can do as an organizing lens at least partially frees us from predetermined sets of implicitly white and explicitly economically reductive analytical categories, providing a much-needed epistemological reflexivity. Such an intentionally open framework enables us to attend to the range of ways in which people shape the circumstances of daily life in relation to conditions of hegemonic capitalist production. This framework not only reveals how capitalist value-producing labour is predicated upon social reproductive labour – thereby providing a more robust analysis of the capitalist mode of production in its totality – it also moves us closer to understanding how the teleological philosophy of history put forward by the proponents of capitalism (and reproduced by capitalist social relations) is only rendered possible through the everyday constriction of a host of other histories and the social relations and subjectivities that can organize life differently. Social reproduction as method is useful then because it does not require us to invest in a specific epistemology and ontology, thereby recognizing the necessity for other epistemologies and ontologies in the conversation.
Expounding social reproduction as method requires elaboration of the relationship between social relations and the relations of social reproduction, as both separate and in relation to each other. Social ontology does not ask ‘what is’ as classical ontology does. What social ontology does is to investigate the conditions of the possibility of society, the social, and social relations. Put differently, it orients us towards examining the reality of society, the social, and social relations in a formative and integrative fashion. Social reproduction, on the other hand, provides us with the omitted underbelly of society, the social, and social relations. For instance, it shows us: how capitalism (despite its seeming omnipotence) cannot reproduce itself in a capitalist fashion; how capitalism (despite its constantly discarding people out of the wage-labour relation into the reserve army of labour) needs those very ‘disposible’ peoples for its futurity; how this reveals that (despite patriarchy, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression) women, people of colour, and other oppressed subjects are absolutely essential for the survival of society; and, therefore, how resistance and struggle for the liberation of these peoples are necessary for a better world. What social reproduction does is to give a fuller, more wholesome picture of the society we live in (Tanyildiz 2021). Such rethinking moves us away from considering social reproduction as a unitary theory of oppression towards comprehending it as a method that accounts for the historicities and spatialities of its variegated mobilizations, organizations, and praxes of the particular investigation under consideration. At the same time, forwarding social reproduction as method ensures that social reproduction does not assume another untethered epistemological salience and autonomy.
Social Reproduction
Most conceptualizations of social reproduction and its relationship to capitalist production, especially those within the field of feminist political economy, are derived from Marx’s use of the notion (1993 [1885]). Cindi Katz’s (2001, p. 711) now iconic understanding of social reproduction as the ‘fleshy, messy, indeterminate stuff of everyday life’ is deliberately broad and imprecise, as is its conception as ‘life’s work’ (Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2004). Other definitions, still laid out in broad brush strokes, are more cut-and-dry, along the lines of social reproduction as ‘the process by which a society reproduces itself across and within generations.’3 Yet others have had a preference for more detail. For instance, Brenner and Laslett’s (1989, pp. 382–383) now 30-year old definition of social reproduction is still much repeated:
the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, the ways in which the care and socialization of children are provided, the care of the infirm and elderly, and the social organization of sexuality. Social reproduction can thus be seen to include various kinds of work – mental, manual, and emotional – aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined care necessary to maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation.
It is feminist critiques of classical Marxism as well as feminist political economy analyses of social reproduction’s defining relations and categories – labour, work, home, gender, race, class, sexuality, the family, life, and value – that have led to the de-naturalization and problematizion of social reproduction. In 1969, a century after the publication of Marx’s Capital, Margaret Benston (1969) published an article entitled ‘The political economy of women’s liberation’ in the Monthly Review. For Western feminism, Benston’s pioneering piece placed ‘the politics of women’s liberation within an anti-capitalist framework’ and identified ‘domestic labor as the material basis of women’s structural relation to capitalist production and their subordination in society’ (Federici 2019). In doing so, Benston helped to inaugurate the field of the political economy of gender. The following decade saw a proliferation of work in this area of socialist feminism, which re-envisioned critical political economy as feminist political economy by opening its categories to epistemological scrutiny.4
Socialist feminist political economy’s most important contribution was the concept of social reproduction.5 A number of feminist scholars made important and wide-ranging contributions demonstrating that capitalism cannot reproduce itself capitalistically; rather, it downloads the burden of its own reproduction onto women in the form of unwaged work. This was an invaluable insight into how capitalism as a system of private property and exploitation worked in tandem with patriarchy, even though there was no agreement as to the actual nature of this relationship between these two systems of exploitation and oppression. The centrality of the concept of social reproduction, however, was so accepted and uncontested that it became synonymous with the field itself, coming to be known as social reproduction feminism
