#reproductive labor

[kashilascorner]

The fucking dishes... Again! Here are some thoughts, notes and concepts I think are useful to think about the grueling task of reproductive labor

[ifthisisawoman]

What else does reproduction in the Capitalocene look like?

It’s going back to work two weeks after you’ve given birth, worrying that your Caesarean scar is going to split open and your organs fall out (a quarter of American mothers are back to work with an a fortnight of giving birth).

It’s living on credit so you can afford to take time out of work to look after children. It’s two weeks of paternity leave, if that. It’s lying about why you have to leave work early to conceal the fact that you have children at home who need you. It’s rising living costs, including high rent and mortgage payments, that require two parents to work full-time. It’s financially penalizing care workers who take time out of full-time work through unfair, pension and taxation systems. It’s air pollution. It’s inequality of access to restorative natural areas, with children rarely playing in wild places.

It’s thousands of mothers wanting to incorporate work into their lives, but not being able to. It’s not having children because governments are failing to take the climate crisis seriously, or because wages have fallen, or because you won’t get any paid leave. It’s 4.3 million children in the UK living in poverty. It’s almost half of children in lone-parent families living in poverty. It’s almost half of children in black or minority, ethnic families, living in poverty. 

Lucy Jones. (2023) Care work and creativity in late-stage capitalism. Matrescence (page 251). Penguin Random House UK.

[radicalurbanista]

Women’s work is the original subsidy for capitalism. Reproductive labor is necessary for social reproduction [everything it takes for a labor force to replicate itself]: purchasing household goods, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, maintaining furnishings and appliances, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults, and maintaining kin and community ties. It involves manual, mental, and emotional labor. As more and more people have come to realize during the COVID-19 pandemic, every human being needs this kind of essential work to live. Yet, reproductive work rarely even counts as work at all. Patriarchy teaches that it’s the “natural” role of women, and so, where it is paid at all, it is underpaid.

Women still had their livestock, of course, which allowed them economic autonomy and success: In the 1870s, we had 15,000 sheep; in the 1920s, we had 500,000; and by 1931, we had 2 million. But the colonizer doesn’t want us to be successful, so the federal government conjured up a policy called The Navajo Livestock Reduction, purchasing, removing, and slaughtering our livestock (and arresting those who opposed it). They also set up a grazing system, which ensured we would not be able to grow our herds again and that system is still used today. While this killed the economic autonomy of the Navajo people, it particularly impacted the women because they owned those herds. Men were away working as laborers, while women and their families still relied heavily on the sheep economy to survive. Killing these herds ensured that Navajo women too would have to depend on the wage labor, decisions, and direction of Navajo men.

Where our culture has remained strong, it’s because of Navajo women. And our matriarchs still exist today. Indigenous women are strong leaders, today. People like Enei Begaye-Peter of Native Movement, Wahleah Johns of Native Renewables, and Eriel Deranger of Indigenous Climate Action who have not only dedicated their lives to protecting our homelands but are also advancing real world examples of a just transition away from extractive economies. It’s women like Lillian Hill of Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Project, Linda Black Elk at United Tribes Technical College, and Nicole Gonzales of Changing Woman Initiative who are learning and sharing our traditional knowledge for the health of our people. It’s women like Ethel Branch and Janene Yazzie of Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief who are supporting and keeping our people safe during the COVID-19 epidemic. And there are many others. Because that is our way. It is our job to take care of our home and homelands. And we continue to do that despite patriarchy’s goal to appropriate our autonomy, agency, and power as Indigenous women.

Jihan Gearon

March 11, 2021

Indigenous Feminism is our Culture | NDN Collective

Indigenous feminism, like all solutions to problems in Indian Country, is about decolonizing. It's about recognizing, naming, and discarding

[saltedlimes]

"Just as the socialist state seeks to eliminate the contradiction between the proletariat and the capitalists, it must also eliminate the contradiction between women and men. This is not undertaken by the elimination of men as individuals, but by the liquidation of their class function as exploiters who benefit from women’s uncompensated reproductive labor. This task is not accomplished by highlighting the non-antagonistic aspects of the contradiction between men and women, but by resolving that contradiction through the total restructuring of society and the elimination of the gendered division of labor."

-

Aly E, "On Women As A Class: Materialist Feminism and Mass Struggle"

[worklabournewsresearch]

The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew.

“As a scholar and activist, [Silvia] Federici is one of a cohort of thinkers who have, for decades, critiqued the way capitalist societies fail to acknowledge or support what she calls ‘reproductive labor.’ She uses this term not simply to refer to having children and raising them; it indicates all the work we do that is sustaining — keeping ourselves and others around us well, fed, safe, clean, cared for, thriving. It’s weeding your garden or making breakfast or helping your elderly grandmother bathe — work that you have to do over and over again, work that seems to erase itself. It is essential work that our economy tends not to acknowledge or compensate. This disregard for reproductive labor, Federici writes, is unjust and unsustainable.”

"When the lockdowns started, this growing malaise [about whose work is valuable] exploded into a crisis. First came the discussion of ‘essential workers,’ a category that, it was quickly noted, frequently corresponded with the most critically underpaid workers. Then came the acute realization among the middle and upper classes that their lives had run smoothly because they’d been able to subcontract domestic labor — and, critically, elder care and child care — to other people. After nearly a year of school closures, working parents are keenly aware of the amount of child care they rely on underpaid teachers to provide for eight hours a day. Without even the ad hoc systems for managing the constant work of child care (day care; grandparents; after-school programs; summer camp; babysitters), American parents have discovered that the requirements of caring for a family match or even exceed the requirements of the full-time jobs needed to support that family.”

“How might this year have looked different had the work we do to care for one another, ourselves and the world around us been valued at a premium? How would the future look different if, as Federici suggests, ‘we refuse to base our life and our reproduction on the suffering of others,’ if ‘we refuse to see ourselves as separate from them’?”

The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 17, 2021: “The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew.” by Jordan Kisner

Photo Source: Hamza, S. (2021). Silvia Federici [Photograph]. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/magazine/waged-housework.html

[wobblydev]

The work we do at home, cleaning, cooking, raising our children, all reproduces our society day after day. Without that work, everything would collapse, yet all that labor goes unpaid and is largely invisible. A cup gets produced but once. However, it is washed a thousand times. To learn more, read Silvia Federici's Wages Against Housework.

http://wobblydev.com/

[thatartblog]

Posters from See Red Women’s Workshop

[fursasaida]

please go off re: the Hochschild interview. Beck seems far too willing to grant Hochschild her precious horror at the evolution of the term (and seems to create new distinctions, mostly bad, about whether organizational labor is "just labor" instead of emotional labor), and I *need* someone to be annoyed with

Either you have gravely misunderstood me, or I am gravely misunderstanding you. While I don’t agree with every hard distinction being made by Hochschild in that interview, and I think the “it’s not emotional labor if it doesn’t bother you to do it” line she repeatedly asserts is untenable, I…was never objecting to Hochschild being against the evolution of the term. I am actually in agreement with her. (I also don’t have any idea what “organizational labor” means in this context.)

I have not read Hochschild’s book, so I don’t know how much or in what way she really theorized the concept. I think a lot of that interview is kind of dumb! But I was never mad at her for suggesting that people were using her term wrong. (In fact, if anything, I respect her integrity on the point.) I was and am mad at how other people are using it wrong, not because of any delicacy over her sensibilities but because this phenomenon represents the total triumph of a la carte liberal capitalist feminism. “Whatever makes me feel mildly inconvenienced is gendered oppression; gendered oppression is defined by the fact that it makes me feel inconvenienced rather than by economic or social roles and expectations; also, I have absolutely no concept that my domestic servants are people.” I mean, fuck me. 

At this point emotional labor, in the way it’s being used, seems to include and even displace the second shift, reproductive labor, and domestic labor, and I’m not okay with that. Those are useful terms for important concepts.The bedrock of a feminist analysis of patriarchy really cannot be emotional labor. It is a) untrue, b) without structure, c) mistaking the means of oppression’s concealment for the oppression itself. If reproductive and domestic labor were really just types of emotional labor (as it seems people are using the term, based on the examples to which Hochschild is objecting and some things I’ve read myself), then all we would have to do would be to retrain men to be more emotionally intelligent and equitable. I’m not saying this is not something that is needed, or that it is easy. But it is absolutely not a solution. It in no way addresses the economic and personal benefits of being male. PATRIARCHY IS NOT MADE OF OR ABOUT FEELINGS. IT WORKS THROUGH AND SHAPES FEELINGS. The fact that when I dated men I found it exhausting to manage their emotions does not explain the wage gap. But an economic and reproductive understanding of patriarchy does explain why I felt obligated to put in that work in my role as “girlfriend.” 

These cooptations always entail missing the forest for the trees. As with empowerment retreats, the problem is not that women don’t feel empowered. It is that they are, literally and materially, disempowered. These uses of emotional labor do the same thing: the problem is not that reproductive and domestic labor are emotionally demanding; it is that their burdens are assigned by gender. As in the jobs like flight attendant that “emotional labor” was coined to describe, the emotion is a dimension of other labor. There is very little labor that is only emotional. In the classical heterosexual nuclear family frame, a wife’s “responsibility” to make sure her husband comes home to a feeling of order, peace, and serenity is entirely predicated on her responsibility to maintain the household, care for the children, and do everything he is not doing so that he can go back to work for eight hours tomorrow. The emotions she is affecting, and her management of his emotions, are entirely tied to the function of reproductive labor she is already performing.

That it may feel taxing or annoying to be the one who remembers to schedule the kid’s after school activity does not make it emotional labor. It remains the labor of reproducing the workforce and the society at large. How one feels about it is simply a dimension by which the whole process is made to seem natural, or by which it can be revealed as not natural–just as a cashier’s smile and tone of voice is simply the lubricant for a transaction in which their employer is making money. The smile is not the constitutive part here! It is worth understanding the smile and understanding that it takes work to produce and maintain, like all other phenomena. It is worth understanding how the smile produces the illusion of happy workers, which in turn smooths over the actual facts of wage labor such that I do not leave the grocery store feeling that I have participated in the oppressive precarity of someone else (though I have). Just so is it worth understanding the projection of the smiling, contented, soothing wife as one that naturalizes her relegation to the domestic sphere and helps make invisible the labor she performs. But to argue that because one’s job entails smiling, wage labor is now a subtype of emotional labor rather than the other way around amounts to willful obfuscation. And by the same token, it is simply wrong to argue that because emotions are tied up in reproductive and domestic labor, the latter are effects of the former. It is exactly the type of obfuscation that goes along with an understanding of feminism that lacks any kind of structural awareness of class, race, etc., and which defines reality by the metric of individuals’ inner feelings. I just made a bet with myself and googled “Sheryl Sandberg emotional labor”; I won the bet. This is not a liberatory frame.