Gender and Social Reproduction

Amy De'Ath

Recent key developments in critical theory by Cinzia Arruzza, Rosemary Hennessy, and Kevin Floyd have approached questions of gender and sexuality through the lens of ‘the cultural’. Building on the Lukácsian critique of reification, these critics have sought to revise and develop the outmoded field of ideologiekritik (especially its elaborations on the notion of ‘false consciousness’) with new analyses of how gendered social relations are defined by commodity exchange. In part, my aim is to show how insights and concepts from this work can help to extend and deepen a Marxian critique of gender and social reproduction in ways that may be especially useful for grasping, at a systemic level, what is often understood only in terms of gratuitous or symbolic violence. To present these insights and concepts at an angle somewhat askew from their original frameworks, most notable in this regard is Arruzza’s clarifying attention to the relationship between gender and the logic of capital accumulation and her emphasis on the production of gender as an active social process, and Hennessy’s concept of ‘outlawed need’, which provides a way to conceive of gendered social relations as a movement of negative dialectics.

At the same time, this chapter argues that any theory of social relations based at the level of exchange or circulation falls short of accounting for the relationship of gender to capital’s general laws of motion, and thus for gender’s continued existence (in this way, my argument resonates with Moishe Postone’s critique of what he calls traditional Marxism’s focus on ‘the sphere of distribution’, as opposed to ‘the form of labor (hence of production) [which] is the object of Marx’s critique’ (Postone, 2005: 69). Far from theoretical nitpicking, this point has significant consequences for social reproduction feminism because a focus on the reification of gender at the level of exchange necessarily excludes a consideration of how gender is produced through reproductive activities that, as we shall see, are defined by their unpaid and unsubsumed status – in other words, their dissociation from exchange.

Reproduction

The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, 2019

Amy De'Ath

With the revival of Marxist-feminist critique, the concept of "reproduction" has acquired a new sense of urgency in Marxist theory. Marx viewed reproduction expansively, as the process through which capitalist society reproduces itself both materially and socially. But he also missed a key stage in his theory of capitalist reproduction when he wrote that the worker reproduces himself, requiring only "a certain quantity of the means of subsistence, " as if by magic the commodities "he" consumed turned themselves into hot meals, ironed shirts or bathed babies. This chapter will highlight some of the central aspects of Marx's theory of capitalist reproduction, including his models of simple and expanded reproduction and his reproduction schemas from Capital, Vol. II, where he explains how capitalism requires expanded reproduction in order for accumulation to take place. Following this, it will briefly gesture to some of the other ways in which Marx's writings have informed theories of capitalist reproduction that focus on periodic developments in the capital-labor relation; systemic crises in capital's ability to reproduce itself; and the expulsion of labor from cycles of accumulation. Finally, it will address Marxist-feminism's substantial and recently sharpened critique, which demonstrates how the gendered labor of social reproduction--the reproduction of commodity labor power, but also of capitalist social relations writ large--constitutes the very ground upon which capitalist reproduction is built, as well as a key site of resistance to capitalist forces.

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx