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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: Antipode Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
What does a feminist urban theory look like for the twenty first century? This book puts knowledges of feminist urban scholars, feminist scholars of social reproduction, and other urban theorists into conversation to propose an approach to the urban that recognises social reproduction both as foundational to urban transformations and as a methodological entry-point for urban studies.
- Offers an approach feminist urban theory that remains intentionally cautious of universal uses of social reproduction theory, instead focusing analytical attention on historical contingency and social difference
- Eleven chapters that collectively address distinct elements of the contemporary crisis in social reproduction and the urban through the lenses of infrastructure and subjectivity formation as well as through feminist efforts to decolonize urban knowledge production
- Deepens understandings of how people shape and reshape the spatial forms of their everyday lives, furthering understandings of the 'infinite variety' of the urban
- Essential reading for academics, researchers and scholars within urban studies, human geography, gender and sexuality studies, and sociology
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Antipode Book Series
Series Editors: Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota, USA and Sharad Chari, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Like its parent journal, the Antipode Book Series reflects distinctive new developments in radical geography. It publishes books in a variety of formats — from reference books to works of broad explication to titles that develop and extend the scholarly research base — but the commitment is always the same: to contribute to the praxis of a new and more just society.
Published
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Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50Edited by The Antipode Editorial Collective
The Metacolonial State: Pakistan, Critical Ontology, and the Biopolitical Horizons of Political IslamNajeeb A. Jan
Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in AsiaEdited by Jason Cons and Michael Eilenberg
Other Geographies: The Influences of Michael WattsEdited by Sharad Chari, Susanne Freidberg, Vinay Gidwani, Jesse Ribot and Wendy Wolford
Money and Finance After the Crisis: Critical Thinking for Uncertain TimesEdited by Brett Christophers, Andrew Leyshon and Geoff Mann
Frontier Road: Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian AmazonSimòn Uribe
Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets and Finance in Global Biodiversity PoliticsJessica Dempsey
Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the CaribbeanMarion Werner
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in CapitalismBrett Christophers
The Down-deep Delight of DemocracyMark Purcell
Gramsci: Space, Nature, PoliticsEdited by Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus
Places of Possibility: Property, Nature and Community Land OwnershipA. Fiona D. Mackenzie
The New Carbon Economy: Constitution, Governance and ContestationEdited by Peter Newell, Max Boykoff and Emily Boyd
Capitalism and ConservationEdited by Dan Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy
Spaces of Environmental JusticeEdited by Ryan Holifield, Michael Porter and Gordon Walker
The Point is to Change it: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of CrisisEdited by Noel Castree, Paul Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner and Melissa W. Wright
Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-SocietyEdited by Becky Mansfield
Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the AcademyEdited by Katharyne Mitchell
Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of InsecurityEdward Webster, Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout
Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society RelationsEdited by Becky Mansfield
Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the MayaJoel Wainwright
Cities of WhitenessWendy S. Shaw
Neoliberalization: States, Networks, PeoplesEdited by Kim England and Kevin Ward
The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global EconomyEdited by Luis L. M. Aguiar and Andrew Herod
David Harvey: A Critical ReaderEdited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory
Working the Spaces of Neoliberalism: Activism, Professionalisation and IncorporationEdited by Nina Laurie and Liz Bondi
Threads of Labour: Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Workers’ PerspectiveEdited by Angela Hale and Jane Wills
Life’s Work: Geographies of Social ReproductionEdited by Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston and Cindi Katz
Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working Class YouthLinda McDowell
Spaces of NeoliberalismEdited by Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore
Space, Place and the New Labour InternationalismEdited by Peter Waterman and Jane Wills
A Feminist Urban Theory for our Time
Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban
Edited by
Linda Peake, Elsa Koleth,Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz,Rajyashree N. Reddy &darren patrick/dp
This edition first published 2021
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The right of Linda Peake, Elsa Koleth, Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz, Rajyashree N. Reddy and darren patrick/dp to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Peake, Linda, 1956- author.
Title: A feminist theory for our time : rethinking social reproduction and the urban /Linda Peake, Elsa Koleth, Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz, Rajyashree N. Reddy & Darren Patrick.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2021. | Series: Antipode book series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020058509 (print) | LCCN 2020058510 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119789147(hardback) | ISBN 9781119789154 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119789185 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119789178 (epub) | ISBN 9781119789161 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminist theory. | Queer theory. | Sociology, Urban.
Classification: LCC HQ1190 .P43 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1190 (ebook) | DDC 305.42--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058509 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058510
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Cover design by Wiley
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Contents
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
List of Contributors
Series Editors’ Preface
Preface
Chapter 1: rethinking social reproduction and the urban
Introduction
Social Reproduction
Social Reproduction and the Urban
Making the Urban Through Feminist Knowledge Production
Infrastructures
Subjectivities
Decolonizing Feminist Urban Knowledge
Methodologies
The Limits of Social Reproduction
Coda: Social Reproduction and the Urban During a Pandemic
References
Chapter 2: sociability and social reproduction in times of disaster Exploring the Role of Expressive Urban Cultural Practices in Haiti and Puerto Rico
Introduction
The Hidden Transcript of Resilience and Its Social Reproductive Roots
Sociability, Expressive Cultural Practice, and Social Reproduction in the Caribbean
Social Reproduction and the Unbearable Subversions of Expressive Cultural Practice: Exploring the Power of Rabòday and Plena
The Possibilities and Limits of Expressive Cultural Practice to Transformational Change
References
Chapter 3: ‘never/again’: Reading the Qayqayt Nation and New Westminster in Public Poetry Installations
Introduction
Social Reproduction and the Urban in the Context of Settler Colonialism
Ask Again: Authorship and a Short History of the Qayqayt
Colonial Legibility and the Postmodern Media of Recognition
References
Chapter 4: gender in resistance: Emotion, Affective Labour, and Social Reproduction in Athens
Introduction
Protest and Resistance in Athens
Feminist Social Reproduction in the Context of Urban Activism
Placing Social Reproduction in the Anti-authoritarian/ Anarchist Commons
The Commons and the De-politicization of the Personal
Anarchist Commons: Performances and Cultures of Resistance and the Re-making of Safe Spaces
Politicizing Emotion: Dispossession and Empowering Practices of Social Reproduction in the Urban
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: ‘Sustaining Lives is What Matters’: Contested Infrastructure, Social Reproduction, and Feminist Urban Praxis in Catalonia
Introduction
Positionality and Praxis
Social Reproduction, Infrastructure, and the Urban
Contested Catalonia
#AguaParaEsther
Feminist Praxis
Reproducing the Urban Otherwise
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: global restructuring of social reproduction and its invisible work in urban revitalization
Introduction
A Landscape of New Inequalities in the Rustbelt and Its Social and Spatial Transformation
Social Reproduction and Its Global Restructuring
Relational Framing and Radical Feminist Urban Scholarship
Social Reproduction and Feminist Urban Scholarship
Outsourced Social Reproduction and Revitalization of Urban Space
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: from the kampung to the courtroom: A Feminist Intersectional Analysis of the Human Right to Water as a Tool for Poor Women’s Urban Praxis in Jakarta
Introduction
Methodology and Positionality
Water, the Urban, and Social Reproduction
The Privatization of Water and Anti-privatization Struggles in Indonesia
Solidaritas Perempuan Jakarta and Poor Women’s Rights to Water
Legal Challenges Against Privatization
Community-based Research on the Impacts of Privatization
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: re-imagine urban antispaces! for a decolonial social reproduction
Introduction: Linking the ‘Anti-Politics Machine’ and Socio-Spacio-Cide
The ‘Anti-Politics Machine’ in Palestine
Socio-cide: Spatial Militarization and Antispaces
Ramallah’s Tomorrow: Between Individualisms and Commons
Refiguring and Reconfiguring for Resilience: Takhayyali [Imagine] Ramallah
References
Chapter 9: forced displacement, migration, and (trans)national care networks: Practices of Urban Space Production in Colombia and Spain
Introduction
(Trans)national Care Networks, Social Reproduction, and Urban Space
War, Migration, and Care: Colombian Care Workers in Spain
Communitarian Mothers in Colombia
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: tenga nehungwaru: Navigating Gendered Food Precarity in Three African Secondary Urban Settlements
Introduction
Food and Social Reproduction in African Cities
The Consuming Urban Poverty (CUP) Project: Research Methods and Researcher Positionality
Urban Food Systems and Food Insecurity in Kitwe, Kisumu, and Epworth
Lived Urban Geographies of Food Access and Food Poverty in Kitwe, Kisumu, and Epworth
Marital Status, Household Form, and Gendered Occupations
Food Procurement and Access
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: infrastructures of social reproduction: Dialogic Collaboration and Feminist Comparative Urbanism
Introduction
Feminist Urban Scholarship and Comparative Urbanism
Thinking Comparatively Between Córdoba and London
Dialogic Collaboration
Situated Knowledge
Solidarity
Collaboration
Iteration
Gendered Urban Struggles in Córdoba and London
Subjectivation
Demands
Strategy
Infrastructures of Social Reproduction and the Urban
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 7
Table 7.1 Observations of Kampung Residents Regarding...
Chapter 10
Table 10.1 Hfiap Food Security Status by Household Type
List of Figures
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Eastern elevation: Plaza 88, New Westminster...
Figure 3.2 Eastern elevation, Plaza 88: Entrance to...
Figure 3.3 Southern elevation: Plaza 88. Poem by...
Figure 3.4 ‘Tented roof’, Plaza 88...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Illustration of the street network in a central...
Figure 8.2 A typical apartment building in Ramallah....
Figure 8.3 A view of Ramallah from alTireh...
Figure 8.4 A typical new neighbourhood in Ramallah....
Figure 8.5 Stormwater puddling in the antispace of...
Figure 8.5 Stormwater puddling in the antispace of a...
Figure 8.6a The first of two figures showing a...
Figure 8.6b The Second of two figures showing schematic...
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Location of the three cities in the...
Guide
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Series Editors’ Preface
Preface
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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List of Contributors
James Angel
Department of Geography
King’s College London
London, UK
Natasha Aruri
K LAB
Institute for City and Regional Planning
Berlin
Belinda Dodson
Department of Geography
Western University
London, ON
Canada
Emily Fedoruk
College of Liberal Arts
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis
Minnesota, USA
Friederike Fleischer
Department of Anthropology
Universidad de los Andes (Columbia)
Bogota
Columbia
Tom Gillespie
Global Development Institute
The University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
Kate Hardy
Division of Work and Employment Relations
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK
Meera Karunananthan
Blue Planet Project
Ottawa, ON
Canada
Mantha Katsikana
Department of Geography
York University
Toronto, ON
Canada
Elsa Koleth
The City Institute
York University
Toronto, ON
Canada
Faranak Miraftab
Department of Urban & Regional Planning
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL
USA
Camila Esguerra Muelle
Interdisciplinary Group on Gender Studies
National University of Colombia
Bogota
Columbia
Beverley Mullings
Department of Geography and Planning
Queen’s University
Kingston, ON
Canada
Diana Ojeda
Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Sobre Desarrollo
Universidad de los Andes (Columbia)
Bogota
Columbia
darren patrick/dp
Women and Gender Studies Institute
The University of Toronto
Toronto, ON
Canada
Linda Peake
Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
York University
Toronto, ON
Canada
Rajyashree N. Reddy
University of Toronto Scarborough
Toronto, ON
Canada
Liam Riley
Balsillie School of International Affairs
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, ON
Canada
Susan Ruddick
Department of Geography
The University of Toronto
Toronto, ON
Canada
Nathalia Santos Ocasio
Department of Geography and Planning
Queen’s University
Kingston, ON
Canada
Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz
Department of Sociology
Brock University
St. Catharines
Brock, ON
Canada
Series Editors’ Preface
The Antipode Book Series explores radical geography ‘antipodally’, in opposition, from various margins, limits or borderlands.
Antipode books provide insight ‘from elsewhere’, across boundaries rarely transgressed, with internationalist ambition and located insight; they diagnose grounded critique emerging from particular contradictory social relations in order to sharpen the stakes and broaden public awareness. An Antipode book might revise scholarly debates by pushing at disciplinary boundaries, or by showing what happens to a problem as it moves or changes. It might investigate entanglements of power and struggle in particular sites, but with lessons that travel with surprising echoes elsewhere.
Antipode books will be theoretically bold and empirically rich, written in lively, accessible prose that does not sacrifice clarity at the altar of sophistication. We seek books from within and beyond the discipline of geography that deploy geographical critique in order to understand and transform our fractured world.
Vinay GidwaniUniversity of Minnesota, USA
Sharad ChariUniversity of California, Berkeley, USA
Antipode Book Series Editors
Preface
As feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and queer scholars, our concern in this book is to show how social reproduction is foundational in comprehending urban transformation. Social reproduction is, of course, not just an analytical framing but also an organizing call for feminist scholars and our contention is that if we want an urban theory for our time, it needs to be feminist. Feminism is not simply a ‘discipline’, ‘theory’, or ‘ideology’, but a worldview, a lived praxis that provides a platform for engaged analysis.
The book’s origins lie in our belief in the necessity of feminist urban knowledge production, a belief further endorsed by our prior critical engagement with the analytical framework of planetary urbanization and our collective ruminations during and post this engagement on the nature of urban theory (Reddy 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018). Not least the considerable response to the theme issue of Society and Space (Peake et al. 2018) showed us that there was an audience desirous of troubling the hegemony of urban theory. Moreover, our approach of working as a team across hierarchies of junior and senior scholars, generations, genders, sexualities, institutions, and disciplines – a praxis we refer to as ‘the intergenerational social reproductive labor of knowledge production’ (Peake et al. 2018, p. 377) – had been fruitful and positive and we wanted it to continue. It was as much a pedagogical experience of reading and writing together, and sharing meals, as it was an exploration of our places within the academy and an intellectual foray into urban theory. And while Roza Tchoukaleyska left for Newfoundland, Elsa Koleth, a new post-doctoral fellow at the City Institute at York University, joined us.
Our Canadian location, although mediated by our own migrations from Australia, India, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, led us to put out a call for papers in 2018 on the theme of a ‘feminist urban theory for our time’ at the annual conferences of the Canadian Association of Geographers, the American Association of Geographers, and the Urban Affairs Association. Some of our contributors answered these calls for conference papers, while others are members of the GenUrb (SSHRC-funded) project (Urbanization, gender and the global south: a transformative knowledge network). Much has been written in urban scholarship by feminist and postcolonial scholars on global circuits of knowledge production and the privileging of Anglo-American scholarship. We recognize that sending conference calls to those attending North American based conferences not only reduces the geographic locations of the research reported but also heightens whiteness as a political and epistemological position and that this volume is thereby limited in its capacity to pluralize and broaden the epistemic community engaged in feminist urban theory. Nonetheless, our authors come from Colombia, Germany, Greece, Iran, Palestine, Puerto Rico, and South Africa as well as Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. And they report on research based in cities in Argentina, Canada, Columbia, Greece, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Collectively, the contributors explore how the urban can be understood through the light shone on the dynamics of social reproduction in people’s everyday lives and their interaction with processes of capitalist accumulation as they are actively reconfigured through the manifold processes of contemporary urbanization. They proffer the insight that a feminist social reproduction approach to the urban offers not only an engaged analysis of the variegated nature of the urban but also of the relationship between capitalism and the production of social difference. With a focus on the everyday urban contexts within which social reproduction takes place, the various contributions make visible the insidious, often unacknowledged, and seemingly innocuous ways in which lives are being transformed, highlighting the moral economies within which these contexts are normalized and rendered ordinary rather than unlivable.
As we wrote, the pandemic conditions that have gripped the globe in the most catastrophic and intimate ways have cast many of the processes discussed in this book into sharp and brutal relief. We are reminded once again of the absolute necessity of social reproduction for human survival, of the fragility of the infrastructures and bodies that make social reproduction possible, and of the grossly unjust systems of power that secure the social reproduction of the few through the disposability, expulsion, and annihilation of many others. Whether seen through the near collapse of health and welfare systems in urban centres already ravaged by austerity, the mass exodus of impoverished migrant workers back to rural villages, or the significant reductions in women’s participation in numerous labour forces, the prevailing crises of social reproduction around the world have been exacerbated exponentially in current conditions.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge the work undertaken by the contributors to this book, a number of them junior scholars, as well as their patience in revising various drafts of their chapters. We also thank Antipode’s book series editors, Sharad Chari and Vinay Gidwani, who started the process of creating this book with us and Nik Theodore who saw us through to the end, for their interest in our project and providing us with the opportunity to pursue it through to its publication.
Linda Peake, Rajyashree N. Reddy, Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz, Elsa Koleth, and darren patrick/dp
References
Peake, L., Patrick, D., Reddy, R., Tanyildiz, G., Ruddick, S., and Tchoukaleyska, R. (2013). Placing planetary urbanization in other fields of vision.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
36 (3): 374–386. doi: 10.1177/0263775818775198
Reddy, R.N. (2018). The urban under erasure: Towards a postcolonial critique of planetary urbanization.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
36 (3): 529–539.
Ruddick, S., Peake, L., Patrick, D., and Tanyildiz, G.S. (2018) Planetary urbanization: An urban theory for our time?
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
36 (3): 387–404. doi:
10.1177/0263775817721489
1 Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban
Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz (Brock University)Linda Peake and Elsa Koleth (York University)Rajyashree N. Reddy (University of Toronto Scarborough) darren patrick/dp and Susan Ruddick (University of Toronto)
Introduction
As we move through the 21st century, the changing geographies of urbanization, increasingly unfettered capital accumulation, unprecedented levels of migration, and crises of climate and viral pandemics, have added further urgency to the seemingly intractable question of which categories and methods are adequate to understanding and researching the urban. And yet, notwithstanding their increasing inability to explain 21st century urbanization and urbanism in their ‘infinite variety’, the 19th and 20th century economic compacts upon which mainstream and Marxist urban theory have been based – the nexus of urban land, circuits of capital, production, and agglomeration economies – remain in place. While it is still customary to approach the contemporary urban by recounting the shifts in the structures and agendas of capitalism and the impacts of these shifts on daily life, we contend it is not possible to think through the urban without considering the role and relations of social reproduction: which are neither subordinate to production, nor an embellishment; neither something to be ‘added to urban theory’, nor an after-effect to the analysis of processes of urbanization that was assumed adequate without it. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of the global crisis in social reproduction, large swathes of mainstream and critical urban scholarship continuously fail to recognize both the analytical interdependence between relations of social reproduction and production, and how this interdependence shapes social relations and urban futures. It has been left to feminist urban scholars, time and again, to call attention to the radical incompleteness of urban thought, decrying theory that writes life and lives out of time and place1 (see, for example, Kollontai 1977 [1909]; Burnett 1973; Hayford 1974; Lofland 1975; Mackenzie 1980; Markusen 1980; Wekerle 1980; Hayden 1983; Ferguson et al. 2016; Fernandez 2018; Kanes Weissman 2000; Rendell, Penner, and Borden 2000; Spain 2002; Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2004; Meehan and Strauss 2015; Miraftab 2016; Peake 2017; Pratt 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018). We offer this book with the hope that is amplifies and resonates with this long-growing feminist chorus.2
Our central problematic, then, is to ask how social reproduction might generate different ways of knowing and investigating the urban in its constitutive and regulative relations. We have argued previously (Peake et al. 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018) that in terms of their social ontology, urban geographies are geographies of living, yet urban theories have distilled this living to capital and wage-labour in processes of production. This filtering process is part of the hierarchical knowledge production in which the knower’s positionality is integral to theorizing and valuing subjectivity and experience. The dominant Enlightenment-bequeathed academic knowledge system of phallogocentrism – the privileging of determinateness and of the masculine (Derrida 1978; Cixous and Clément 1986 [1975]) – has sundered economic production and social reproduction, pitting them against each other as dichotomous opposites and privileging economic production over social reproduction. The dominant urban epistemology is thus one in which economic production and social reproduction have been historically presented as separate and different, both geographically and analytically, signifying domination and subordination, greater and lesser value, respectively. We start however from a problematic of the constitution of economic production and social reproduction as inseparable; they are two dimensions of one integrated system that are constructed, temporally and spatially, in processual relation to each other and marked by differentiation and struggle. We also start not with a notion of being ‘different’, but with social difference, which we understand conceptually as ‘relational connectedness’ (see Ware 1992, p. 119), whereby colonial, patriarchal, racist, and heteronormative disciplinary systems of domination and oppression play out through processes of production and social reproduction, attempting to determine who has the right to belong and the right to life itself. Finally, we argue that the potential for urban transformation lies both in the small slippages and seemingly prosaic aspects of everyday life, as well as in more exceptional events and encounters, organized and spontaneous struggles, and in the supplemental space of undecidability and indeterminacy.
The process of the urban coming into being through the relational connectedness of social reproduction and production is thus never fully complete. Only partially determined, this urban process is exceeded both by the struggle of contending classes within capitalist history, including its present, and by the social and political relations that reverberate within histories that can neither be sedimented as, nor absorbed by, the history of capitalism and its attendant structures of subjectivity. We argue that the enduring necessity of social reproduction constitutes an embodied openness to these different histories, an openness that is violently truncated by hegemonic regimes of exploitation and oppression. Tapping into this openness through the urban everyday, we can unsettle the apparent certitude of capitalist value-producing logic and its historical teleology. The urban, therefore, not only spatially conditions and mediates the unfolding of the capital-labour contradiction but it is also reshaped and reorganized in this process. Perhaps most importantly for our time, the spatial organization of embodied urbanization is open both to resurgent histories that resist the economy’s subsumption of life and to everyday struggles that make other lives and futures possible. These too often ignored aspects of the urban come into focus in this book – an urban that opens to radical histories and struggles of life-making through social reproduction, and a social reproduction that is not an end in itself, but a methodological entry point into understanding how people in their everyday lives shape and reshape the spatial forms of their lives.
How then do we understand social reproduction? First, we consider social reproduction as a real object of knowledge – that is as a conceptually generative construct and productive way of knowing the urban, and of understanding how urbanization is being reorganized and resisted. Writing amidst the vestiges of modernity – of people-making, public space, freedom, citizenship (already profoundly limited forms) – that are all but eroded, we ask how people’s agency, struggles, desires, hopes, and dreams, might be rethought in light of the erasure of the social wage and social contracts and their replacement by demonization, dispossession, and the downloading of responsibility for social life to ‘the individual’. This 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 (Ferguson 2020). Not only did this field gender classical Marxist political economy’s focus on production, but it also expanded conceptualizations of the modes of production, as well as historicizing and spatializing patriarchy, paving the road towards a more unitary theory of oppression.
In these earlier studies of the role of women’s domestic labour in the renewal of labour-power and non-workers, such as children, youth, and adults out of the workforce, the household as the socio-spatial unit of social reproduction was privileged. Contemporary feminists have moved beyond household-based analyses, investigating other sites and modalities of social reproduction, such as those of day care centres, schools, institutions of higher education and training, recreation centres, health centres, and hospitals. These studies were combined with those that explored the ways in which the relations of production are recreated through the inter-generational transmission of material, emotional, and affective resources, including through the nurturing of individual characteristics such as self-confidence, and the establishing of group status and inequality, such as through access to education. Intermeshing with these studies were those that encompassed human biological reproduction centering particularly on childbirth and the obligation of maintaining kin networks and relationships, such as those ordained by marriage, and thus the study of the social organization of fertility and sexuality (Kofman 2017) as well as social constructions of motherhood (Bakker 2007). More recently, scholars in the field have recognized that bonds of care are a central ethic and need within social reproduction, including nurturing in ways that keep people psychically, emotionally, and mentally ‘whole’. Social reproduction is, thus, heavily implicated in subjectivity formation in that it comprises the embodied material social practices of those engaging in both the material and emotional activities and relations that bring everyday life into being.
While the activities and relations of social reproduction in these studies have been prescribed and overdetermined as women’s work, this has been an exercise fraught with omission, not least in circumscribing who counts as ‘woman’. We concur that in many parts of the world women, whether in conjunction with the state, private sector, other family or community members, or on their own, are still central to processes of social reproduction that maintain human life – those that either must be done if people are to survive, or those that lead to improved living conditions or a greater sense of well-being. The epistemological turn of moving beyond the household has enabled a reorientation of social reproduction to the global capitalist system at large and to the multifarious ways in which the renewal of labour-power occurs, such as (ironically) through an increased engagement in the social reproduction of other households via intra- and trans-national migration by nurses, teachers, and live-in caregivers and the flows of remittances these migrants send back to their families. This expanded gaze has led to an increasing recognition that not all women participate in social reproductive work, at the expense of embodied others who do, most commonly across classed and racialized lines, and that other marginalized groups – for example, children, refugees, immigrants, modern-day slaves – regardless of gender, are also heavily engaged in such work.6
It is also the case that while embodiment has been a presupposition for the labour engaged in processes of social reproduction (and production) it is increasingly no longer a prerequisite. The costs of the social wage constitute a drain on the production of surplus value (especially shareholder profits). Capital’s retreat from the social wage has resulted in the increasing financialization and marketization of social reproduction, assigning it a market value (Bryan and Rafferty 2014). This embodied labour moreover can now be acquired flexibly for select slivers of time, on zero-hour contracts at minimum wages and below. Moreover, artificial intelligence (via various platforms that simulate social interaction) and automation are increasingly supplanting embodied labour. Being stripped of waged employment, the body can be ‘employed’ as an encasement of desirable parts and organs – such as hair, blood, kidneys – whereby ‘biotechnologically isolated, manipulated, and disseminated life is absorbed by capitalist processes’ (Floyd 2016, p. 61). For example, biotechnological developments in biological reproduction has led women from being a source of labour–power to becoming a source of living raw material through surrogacy. We understand this multifaceted process of eliminating labouring bodies broadly as a continuation of processes of enclosure.
As the conditions in which social reproduction takes place have become more precarious and attacks upon it have accelerated, its analysis (having fallen into a lull during the 1990s and 2000s) has once again risen to the top of many feminist agendas. With no room for race or other relations of oppression beyond those of class and gender in the early social reproduction analyses, there had been a theoretical divestment, until the most recent revival of social reproduction theory, which brings a rigor to hitherto unaddressed questions (Ferguson et al. 2016; Bhattacharya 2017). In the last decade, social reproduction theory has emerged as an attempt to offer a unitary theory of women’s oppression. Social reproduction feminists have critiqued earlier feminist political economy analyses for not focusing on ‘the multi-faceted complexity of real-world relations and political struggles, as well as the ways in which racial oppression intersects with gendered forms of domination and class exploitation’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 28). In order to avoid such theoretical fallacies, contemporary social reproduction feminists have reconceptualized their ontological presuppositions in regard to the nature of the social. They argue that relations of oppression that are racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized, ‘are not additional systems that just happen to coincide. Rather, they are concrete relations comprising a wider sociality, integral to the very existence and operation of capitalism and class’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 32). We further add that, to examine the constitutive role of racial difference as a historically sedimented formation, the conceptualization of social reproduction could usefully be brought into conversation with postcolonial urban theory. This is central not only to ensuring that our conceptualization of social reproduction is historicized but, as Ananya Roy (2016a) would argue, is also attentive to historical difference as constitutive of the urban.
Notwithstanding its intimate political and theoretical relations with earlier debates, and sometimes because of this, social reproduction theory is often mistaken as a mere synonym of either domestic labour debates or socialist feminism. And yet it is premised upon distinctive ontological and epistemological propositions in that it foregrounds the internal relationship between capitalist value-producing labour and its often omitted predicate, that is non-capitalistically produced social reproductive labour, by focusing on the latter’s necessary but contradictory relation to the capitalist pursuit of surplus value. Through shifting the analytical focus onto this internal relationship, social reproduction theory is able to: historicize the notion of patriarchy vis-à-vis specific modes of production and their attendant social formations; demonstrate that women’s oppression is not a pre-capitalist residue that capitalism merely picks up, but is integral to the very logic of capitalism as a system, and is necessarily reinvented as regimes of capital accumulation change; and argue that historically specific forms of patriarchy and capitalism are not external to one another, but, rather, are co-constitutive of each other.
Our understanding of social reproduction builds upon those of social reproduction theorists in that we do not consider it as a coherent stable construct over time and place, but as an historicized and spatialized construct, speaking to multiple layerings, subject to its own internal dynamics as it is buffeted between the use of labour and resources needed to live everyday life. It includes the embodied labour (paid and unpaid) in conjunction with the resources, such as those of land, ‘nature’, time, technology, and increasingly capital, that enable human and non-human life to occur, the emotional and material needs of everyday life to be met, as well as hopes and dreams for the future, and the material social practices that constitute the organization of daily life and life over generations to take place.7 It is about the process of the production of value – both use and exchange value – moulded through the spatialities and temporalities of the everyday and determined through differentiation and struggle.
Social Reproduction and the Urban
The feminist political economy analyses of social reproduction discussed above, and their recognition of the need to situate processes of social reproduction – in bodies, households, institutions, and processes of globalization – has yet to extend to the urban. Reorienting social reproduction from the household to the global capitalist system at large, not least because ‘the renewal of labour-power occurs in, and through, the policing of borders, flows of migrants and the remittances many send to their countries of origin, army camps, refugee camps, and other processes and institutions of a global imperialist order’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 31), social reproduction theory has tended to treat the urban merely as a spatial and empirical accoutrement. In this way, the question of space, spatiality, and spatial forms in contemporary social reproduction theory become naturalized to the phenomena under consideration. In other words, it is not that an urban spatial-blindness marks these theories; rather, urban space does not figure as an analytic category in the making of these theories.
Feminist political economy has yet to rethink social reproduction as a feminist urban problematic, namely that the urban is increasingly the site and urbanization is increasingly the process through which social reproduction takes place. Why do we argue this? Certainly we cannot ignore that the world’s population is now predominantly living in places called urban (such as towns, suburbs, cities, megalopolises, and so on). And we cannot overlook that, within the next few decades, it will be approximately two-thirds of the world’s population living in urban places, owing not only to rising rates of urbanization in Southern cities (through natural increase and the movement of the world’s rural population into urban places), but also to the reclassification of rural areas into urban ones.8 Our argument is driven primarily, however, by the realization that it is now urbanization, the engine of this growth and movement, that increasingly drives capitalism. Harvey’s voluminous work on the urban process under capitalism and the ‘secondary circuit’ of capital, has shown how surplus capital is turned into fixed assets of land and real estate (i.e. the built environment). Others have pointed to the increased embedding of the state into urbanization processes. Especially in Southern cities, urban land development – through infrastructure projects, real estate for local elites, and mega projects – are often now prioritized over the provision of jobs and industrial development (Schindler 2017; Goodfellow and Owen 2018). But it is arguably Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) thesis on urban modernity in crisis in The Urban Revolution, in which he theorized a trajectory of the replacement of the industrial city through a process of ‘complete urbanization’, that has best understood the role of the urban beyond capital accumulation and class-based struggle.
As we wrote previously (Ruddick et al. 2018), from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, Lefebvre followed the transformation of everyday life, to formulate a concept of the urban revolution, which he invested with two meanings. In the first, the urban revolution inverts relationships between the pre-capitalist rural and the ‘urban’ and subsequently the relation between capitalist industrialization and capitalist urbanization: ‘The “rural” no longer produces the “urban”, but the reverse. Moreover, the urban is no longer merely an effect of capitalist industrialization. Once produced, the urban does not depend on industrialization for its own continuity; it becomes capitalism’s opening to different labour processes through a reorganization of socio-spatial relations’ (Ruddick et al. 2018, p. 394). Lefebvre referred to urban society’s transcendence of industrial society as the engine of capitalism, as processes of ‘implosion and explosion’ and of concentaration and dispersion, in which cities could be understood as zones of agglomeration that themselves implode, fragment, and destruct while also extending their infrastructural reach deep into previously remote areas (Brenner 2014).
It is in the second sense in which Lefebvre uses the urban revolution – as a shift in the site of struggle from the factory to the everyday – that he opens a space for social reproduction and the urban as a ground for the formation of difference, ‘alluding to the potential for a new politics of urban revolution, which can transform everyday life in all its aspects’ (Ruddick et al. 2018, p. 394). Beyond Lefebvre, however, rarely have (non-feminist) critical analyses of the urban turned to the relationship between urbanization and social reproduction.9 And yet social reproduction is inexorably implicated in driving crises of capitalism (Briggs 2017). As Norton and Katz (2017, pp. 7–8) state: ‘A crisis of social reproduction occurs when existing social, political economic, or environmental conditions and relations can no longer be reproduced…. Likewise, a crisis of social reproduction occurs if the labor force cannot be reproduced in a given time and place or find the means to labor productively in a given setting.’ Crises of social reproduction, alongside climate and environmental crises, war, conflict, and the resultant poverty and lack of livelihoods, have resulted in the displacement of millions to and within urban places, either within their country of origin or beyond.10 Urban life, marked by unprecedented levels of migration and inequality,11 has led David Harvey (2014, p. 60) to note that: ‘The massive forced and unforced migrations of people now taking place in the world, …will have as much if not greater significance in shaping urbanization in the 21st century as the powerful dynamic of unrestrained capital mobility and accumulation.’ Not least, people on the move and the deepening of inequality from increasingly unregulated rounds of capital accumulation has loosened the relation between the state, capital, work, and labour, increasing the myriad ways in which lives are reproduced outside the wage. In the 21st century, migration, forced and unforced, is primarily a stake in a future, a stake in life itself.12
Following Lefebvre, we understand the urban as the conceptual knot mediating between the everyday ontological struggles of oppressed peoples, and the global spatial restructuring of hegemonic modes of production. However, rethinking the conceptual status of the urban as mediating does not confer it with an untethered epistemological salience and autonomy, thereby overriding the processes, lives, struggles, and subjectivities it is supposed to explicate. It is through social reproduction as method (as opposed to this epistemological autonomy), that the processes of urbanization, including its undoing, become ‘knowable’, albeit never entirely known, due to the urban’s undecidability. In this way, we argue that a contemporary consideration of the spatial organization of our social lives needs to investigate the ways in which the processes of urbanization themselves are in need of explanation through social reproduction.
Whether in situations arrived at through displacement or through decades of in-situ neglect, the capacity for the social reproduction of everyday urban life is being eroded, characterized by uncertainty, insecurity, and disposability. The rise of precarious labour is driven in part by the desire of corporations to keep down costs – that is monetized subsidies to social reproduction: zero-hour contracts, payment below the minimum wage, short-term contracts, in short the ‘gig economy’, increasingly characterize the world of work, underpinned by capital’s reduced commitment to the social wage and social contract. Simone’s (2009) research across multiple cities reminds us that ‘people as infrastructure’ is not a new phenomenon; informal employment has always been an inherent part of capitalist systems of production. Precarity and insecurity, however, are now the primary material and emotional conditions through which social reproduction is instantiated, whereby the devolution of responsibilities onto the individual is not imposed but rather has become an accepted norm as it articulates with other commonsense understandings and becomes entrenched in socio-spatial practices.
The practice of migration, and its growth globally, is also partially a manifestation of the financialization of society as migration has become a way for individuals to navigate risk in the absence of the state providing conditions for their social reproduction.13 In particular, the increasing financialization of social reproduction has influenced the ways in which urbanization takes place and is experienced. It is only slightly over a decade since the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States spread globally, generated by the restructuring of lending through the predatory pursuit of subprime mortgages, which centred on urban neighbourhoods, adding to the deepening of inequality, displacement, and austerity politics. There were a number of pressures directly related to the financialization of social reproduction, that increased vulnerability, not the least of which was to increasingly entreat low-income Latinx and African-Americans, who had previously been redlined out of the housing market, to monetize their home-space, as a retirement plan and investment. Wade (2009, p. 40) reports that in the United States in 2008 alone ‘more than 3 million houses were foreclosed in 2008, meaning that about 10 million people shifted into rented accommodation, vans or shelters’ (quoted in Feldman, Menon, and Geisler 2011, p. 12).
In the face of such devastation, we turn to the chapters in this volume to explore the social reproduction of everyday urban life. Building on feminist urban theories and social reproduction feminisms, the chapters shed light on different aspects of the relationship between the urban and social reproduction, within different contexts but always through socio-political action. In what follows, we outline how the book’s contributors address not only this relationship but also their irrevocable relation to questions of urban feminist knowledge production. We recognize themes that speak directly both to the production of the urban in relation to infrastructures, labours, and subjectivities, and the politics of this production, which engage the challenges of decolonizing feminist urban knowledge production and methodologies.
Making the Urban Through Feminist Knowledge Production
Infrastructures
The ethos of liberal citizenship in Western democracies finds one of its most crisp articulations in the presuppositions frequently relied upon regarding everyday urban life. As a benchmark of modernization, urban forms present people with ‘proper’ infrastructures through which an individual’s life-chances in the capitalist market prosper, thereby ensuring a ‘successful’ integration into the public life of civil society. However, as is now abundantly clear, the relationship between capitalism, modernity, urban forms, and the reproduction of people’s everyday lives is not as straightforward as this modernist narrative suggests. Even for those historical instances in the global North in which there is a resemblance to this narrative, feminist and postcolonial scholars demonstrate that it is invariably subtended by gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized operations of power. Increasing neoliberalization, austerity, and precaritization, both in the global South and North, has been creating other everyday lives for the majority of urban residents, for which no blueprint is available; neither infrastructure nor people’s access to it can be taken for granted. A number of the chapters in this volume collectively argue that it is the intrinsically agentic nature of the social reproductive work of those pushed into precarity that mediates between infrastructures and the urban, highlighting the centrality of social reproductive work in the making of the urban.
Before turning to these contributions, we briefly consider Mbembe’s conceptualization of ‘superfluity’ and Simone’s conceptualization of ‘people as infrastructure’ in order both to interrupt hegemonic ontologies of the urban and to situate the contribution of these chapters in an ontologically reflexive context of knowledge production. The work of Mbembe and Simone show us the limits of metropole capitalism’s teleological social ontology, reminding us how the social ontology of the urban of former colonies is formed differently and how, within this latter social ontology of the urban, people become infrastructure (see also Roy 2009).
In considering the spatialization of an African metropolitan modernity as an historically specific urban form, Achille Mbembe offers the concept of ‘superfluity’, referring to both ‘the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labour and life, people and things’ and ‘the obfuscation of any exchange or use value that labor might have, and to the emptying of any meaning that might be attached to the act of measurement or quantification itself insofar as numerical representation is as much a fact as it is a form of fantasy’ (Mbembe 2004, pp. 374–375). In this way, superfluity can facilitate a socio-spatial investigation within the interstices of political, economic, biopolitical, and psychic approaches to the urban. Drawing on Simmel, Mbembe argues that ‘the ultimate form of superfluity is the one that derives from the transitoriness of things’ (Mbembe 2004, p. 399).
