ABOUT US

Feminist scholars have long demonstrated the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour, in the form of bearing and raising children, maintaining households, as well as socially sustaining male labour. Feminist economists have strived to get international agencies and national governments to redraw the “production boundary” to recognise women’s unpaid labour. 

Today mainstream international institutions, such as the World Economic Forum, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and private donors such as the Gates Foundation, all acknowledge the need for women’s economic empowerment and acknowledge how unpaid labour remains a barrier to women’s participation in the formal economy, especially in the Global South. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5.4 requires that unpaid care and domestic work be recognised and valued through the provision of public services, infrastructure, social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate. However, in the absence of explicit commitments by states and international institutions to such systemic reform and the increased criminalisation of women’s economic choices, our research project takes as its point of departure the very theoretical concept of social reproduction. 

Anchored in the Global South context of India, our project broadly conceptualises female reproductive labour to include unpaid domestic work as well as abject forms of labour performed by women outside of the institutional domain of marriage and for the market, namely, sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy and egg donation, 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 offers a timely intervention by proposing a holistic understanding of reproductive labour and exploring an alternate regulatory matrix that can further women’s economic justice. 

Placing varied forms of reproductive labour along the market-marriage continuum, our research adopted four frameworks of analysis: