Roundtable discussion: World-culture and social reproduction feminism

Abstract

This dialogic roundtable discussion elaborates the possibilities opened up by the use of social reproduction theory in intersection with world-literary, materialist feminist, queer Marxist and world-systems approaches to literature and culture. In particular, contributors consider how the analysis of social reproduction might illuminate the politics of everyday life, the representational challenges accompanying the banality or ubiquity of women's work, the potential gaps of social reproduction feminism, and the aesthetic challenges accompanying or following from an interest in social reproduction. Topics covered include digital media as foundational operating mode of Hindu nationalism, the sexuality- and race-based exclusions of employment in higher education, Philippine literature as ‘reproductive fiction’, the Latin American novel vis-à-vis its registration of domestic service, the short story as bellwether for global issues surrounding women’s labour, and questions of complicity in the kinds of labour some women and sexual minorities enact for larger authoritarian, patriarchal projects. If women do much of the work of producing the everyday then we must also ask how women might re-make the everyday along more radical, and radically egalitarian lines.