Versions of History: The Handmaid’s Tale and its Dedicatees

Social Reproduction Feminism and World-Culture: Introduction

“…This work elucidates the relationship between economic exploitation and gendered oppression, developing understanding of how forms of daily and generational reproductive labour – whether in households, schools, care homes, hospitals or prisons – enable and underlie capitalist modes of accumulation. In line with earlier thinkers, such thought is premised on what Bhattacharya describes as a belief in the falsity of separating ‘activities to reproduce life (unwaged) and the activities to produce commodities (waged)’ (2017: 18) such that ‘the essence-category of capitalism, its animating force’, is actually human labour rather than commodities (2017: 19).…”

“…Social reproduction theory offers the potential not only for a critique of oppression and exploitation from above but also for a vital understanding of the particular forms of contestation that can arise from the contradictions of social reproduction. As Bhattacharya writes, social reproduction theory ‘exposes to critical scrutiny the superficiality of what we commonly understand to be “economic” processes and restores to the economic process its messy, sensuous, gendered, raced, and unruly component: living human beings, capable of following orders as well as of flouting them’ (2017: 19). Social reproduction is both necessary to capitalist accumulation and contradictory, since capitalism strives towards ‘relations that constrain – though for the most part do not fully extinguish – working class people's capacity to meet not only their subsistence needs, but also those physical, emotional and intellectual needs and desires that exceed that which capital is willing to pay for’, but ‘always and everywhere, the bodies and minds of workers can and do push back against the dehumanising dynamic they are part of’ (Ferguson, n.d.).…”

“…In a similar vein, discussions of America's escalating crisis of reproductive justice following the much-discussed 2022 overturning of Roe vs. Wade might have caused the country to be likened popularly to Margaret Atwood's notorious novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985). But, as some commentators have pointed out, the narrative tropes and subjectivities of Atwood's dystopia cannibalised the lived realities of enslaved women on the plantations of the American South (Berlatsky, 2017), never mind the fact that Black and Hispanic women are most likely to bear the brunt of current measures (Beecham, 2022). Meanwhile, as we write, the genocidal assault on Gaza in autumn 2023 by the racialised apartheid state of Israel seems aimed at annihilating the very grounds of social reproduction itself in occupied Palestine, destroying hospitals, schools, universities, and food and water infrastructure.…”