The Laws of Social Reproduction project is based at King’s College London and IWWAGE. View other publications from IWWAGE.
Feminist scholars have long demonstrated the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour, performed in bearing and raising children, maintaining households and socially sustaining male labour. Feminist economists have strived to get international agencies and national governments to redraw the “production boundary” to ensure the recognition of women’s unpaid labour.
Today mainstream international institutions, such as the World Economic Forum, OECD and private donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, acknowledge the need for women’s economic empowerment and note how their unpaid labour hinders their participation in the formal economy, particularly in the Global South. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5.4 in fact requires that unpaid care and domestic work be recognised and valued through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate. In the absence of commitment from states and international institutions to such systemic reforms, however, and the increased criminalisation of women’s economic choices, our research project takes as its point of departure the very theorising of the concept of social reproduction.
Anchored in the Global South context of India, our project broadly conceptualises female reproductive labour to include unpaid domestic work, but also abject forms of labour performed by women outside of the institutional domain of marriage and for the market, namely, sex work, erotic dancing, commercial surrogacy and paid domestic work. Placing varied forms of reproductive labour along the market-marriage continuum, our project not only demonstrates the law’s key role in producing and entrenching the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour in these sectors, it also offers a cross-sectoral comparison of the law’s highly differential regulation of these apparently disparate forms of female reproductive labour – sex work through criminal law, erotic dancing through licensing law, surrogacy and paid domestic work through contract law and unpaid domestic work through family and tort laws.
Drawing on feminist legal theory and deploying methodologies ranging from doctrinal case law analysis to ethnographies of women’s labour markets, our project problematises law’s jurisdictional boundaries over women’s reproductive labour and critiques the varied, even contradictory legal regulation of reproductive labour as well as the misguided law reform initiatives that undermine women’s economic agency. Given the current interest, nationally and internationally, in unpaid care work, our project will offer a timely intervention by proposing a holistic understanding of reproductive labour and exploring prospects for an alternate regulatory matrix to further women’s economic justice.
Normative: Articulates a materialist feminist theory of reproductive labour, revitalises feminist legal theory on the economy through a distributional analysis of the laws of social reproduction.
Empirical: Consolidates and supplements through new empirical research the study of the political economies and legal ethnographies of sex work, bar dancing, commercial surrogacy, paid domestic work and unpaid domestic work to improve women’s economic bargaining power.
Regulatory/Policy: Catalogues for each sector innovative economic models, legal and governance tools and policy proposals (including local experimental measures and radical blue-sky ideas) to enhance women’s economic bargaining power.
Political Impact: Shifts political sensibilities by dissolving discursive and policy silos between these sectors.
Find out more about the different fieldwork sectors the ‘Laws of Social Reproduction’ research project team will be working on.
Explore articles, advocacy and op-eds for each of the different research sectors in the ‘Laws of Social Reproduction’ research project.
Revaluing Unpaid Work: The Case of The Orunodoi Scheme In AssamThe 2021 state assembly elections offered a unique and unexpected opportunity for the recognition of women’s unpaid domestic and care work through the promises of unconditional cash transfers. Read the full article SC Order Grants…
Smitha Radhakrishnan, LuElla LaMer Professor of Women’s Studies, Professor of Sociology Commercial microfinance in India, a subprime credit industry that lends to over 35 million working-class women at interest rates of 20 to 26 percent, has experienced unprecedented growth in the last decade. These…
A conversation concerning the recent Supreme Court order in the Buddhadeb Karmaskar case recognising the right to dignity of sex workers. Several dalit, bahujan and adivasi feminists have disagreed with this framing of the Supreme Court on the issue of sex work. Hence we…
Some recent articles on masculinity, law, marriage and violence appear in anthologies including 50thAnniversary Commemorative Volume of Contributions to Indian Sociology (2019) and Men and Feminism inIndia (2018), and the journals Feminist Anthropology and QED. She is presently working on a monographabout the antifeminist…