A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time. Группа авторов

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