Third Annual Lecture in the Laws of Social Reproduction

With the increasing financialization of the reproduction of life, the reproductive relation is shown, more than ever, to be the space of valorization and accumulation par excellence. This is due to the fact that in order for finance to be able to invade and colonize the sphere of social reproduction, first it must systematically dispossess the infrastructure of public services, common resources, and the economies capable of guaranteeing an autonomous reproduction (from peasant economies to self-managed economies, from cooperative elements to popular-communitarian ones). Above all, it is a dispute over the temporality of exploitation: finance implicates obedience in the future and, therefore, functions as an ‘invisible’ and homogenizing ‘boss’ of the multiple tasks capable of producing value. Many feminist scholars suggest that the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism has shifted to reflect an even greater global reliance on reproductive labor. This raises the question: Why is neoliberalism mutating in this way?

Speakers:

Verónica Gago teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is also Independent Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Feminist International (Verso 2020) and Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Duke University Press, 2017)

Kumkum Sangari is Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has been a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, Delhi University and Jadavpur University; and a Visiting Professor at University of Chicago, Central European University, University of London (SOAS), University of Erfurt and Ambedkar University.