About this event

Reproducing labor power to reproducing our struggle? A Strategy for a Revolutionary Feminism

Second Annual Lecture in the Laws of Social Reproduction

Tuesday July 13th, 14:00 - 16:00 BST (9:00 - 11:00 EDT, 18:30 - 20:30 IST)

Speaker: Professor Silvia Federici, Professor Emerita at Hofstra University

Chair and Moderator: Professor Samita Sen, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge

 

Speaker: Professor Silvia Federici

Professor Silvia Federici is an Italian and American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical feminist Marxist tradition. She is a Professor Emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, and an organizer with the wages for housework campaign. In 1973, she helped start Wages for Housework groups in the US.

In 1975 she published ‘Wages Against Housework’, the essay most commonly associated with the wages for housework movement. She is the author of various books including Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004),Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2020, 2012), Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018), Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018), The New York Wages for Housework Committee: History, Theory, Documents,1972-1977 (edited with Arlen Austin) (2018), Beyond the periphery of the skin: rethinking, remaking, reclaiming the body in contemporary capitalism (2020) and Patriarchy Of The Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism (2021).

 

 

This annual lecture is part of the Laws of Social Reproduction project led by Prof. Prabha Kotiswaran, and based at King's College London and IWWAGE Delhi

Feminist scholars have long demonstrated the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour, with feminist economists striving 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 acknowledge that women’s unpaid labour hinders their participation in the formal economy, particularly in the Global South. Nonetheless, there remains an absence of commitment from states and international institutions to such systemic reforms.

Anchored in the context of India, our project thus conceptualises women’s 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.

Drawing on feminist legal theory and deploying methodologies ranging from doctrinal case law analysis to ethnographies of women’s labour markets, this 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 prospects for an alternate regulatory matrix to further women’s economic justice.

For more information about the project or to join the network, please email Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk. The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No.772946).