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Many people believe that markets in women’s reproductive labor, as exemplified by contract pregnancy, are more problematic than other currently accepted labor markets. The author calls this the asymmetry thesis because its proponents believe that there ought to be an asymmetry between our treatment of markets in reproductive labor and our treatment of markets in other forms of labor. The author aims to criticize several popular ways of defending the asymmetry thesis and to offer an alternative defense, based on the idea of equal status.

Transnational labor history—and labor history more generally—has focused overwhelmingly on commodified labor, but the vast majority of the labor performed by women historically has been uncommodified. Most of this labor falls under the rubric of reproductive labor, the “caring” work that generally includes child care, housekeeping, food provision (often including subsistence agricultural production), and the maintenance of critical community networks. This chapter examines debates at the 1975 United Nations International Women's Year Conference, where policy makers and activists alike agreed that these labors remained the most imposing obstacle to women's emancipation. In the end, however, the Marxist and liberal perspectives that dominated the conference focused almost entirely on how to incorporate women into the “productive life” of commodified labor, failing to address the more challenging problem of alleviating women's reproductive-labor burden.

This chapter examines the first element of reproductive masculinity: the assumption that men are secondary in biological reproduction. It analyzes the history of debates over men's role in human reproduction, from the ancients through to the twentieth century. Biological arguments were often used to justify a social division of reproductive labour between men and women, to assert men's power over reproductive decision making, or to justify women's primary natural responsibility for the work of bearing and raising children. The chapter suggests that biological knowledge of reproduction has been, and remains, inseparable from the social relations of reproduction and the social constructions of masculinity.

This chapter considers the transnational circuits of reproductive labor, particularly what is known as reproductive tourism, from the United States to India. Broadly speaking, “reproductive tourism” is a relatively recent term coined to describe the increasing travel across national boundaries by individuals seeking fertility services, including donor eggs and sperm, procedures such as in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy. Reproductive tourism is motivated by a number of factors, such as legal restrictions, long waiting lists for donors and surrogates, and expensive prices that can be greatly reduced by “shopping around” for services. Further, this chapter examines how notions of race and genetic determinism are mapped uneasily onto surrogacy in India. Intended parents benefit from the racial and economic “difference” between themselves and Indian surrogates.

Continues the dialogue between green and republican political thinking through exploring specific issues such as citizenship and the organization and management of the economy. It explains why contemporary debt-based consumerism ought to be of more concern for modern republicans, and, a fortiori, for green republicans in terms of the threats inherent in such relations of asymmetrical power. This chapter develops and defends one specific green republican policy, namely the idea of ‘compulsory sustainability service’. This is motivated, in part, by eco-feminist concerns about the gender inequality that results from existing, necessary reproductive labour, and also as a way to realize active citizenship and the fair contribution of all to the project of reducing unsustainability as a common good. It then proceeds to outline how pluralism is accommodated with a green republican vision, through an examination of the agonistic democratic politics favoured by republicanism, here taking as a guiding thought the claim that republicanism favours contestation over consensus.

This chapter aims to transcend the uncomfortable silence that exists between two strands of feminist materialism, i.e. historical materialism and new feminist materialism by offering a cross-materialist feminist analysis of the ways in which female bodily productivity is being mobilized in twenty-first-century bio-economies, Through a diffractive reading of historical materialist and new materialist feminist contributions I elucidate on the (dis)continuities between both perspectives on the use of women’s reproductive tissues in stem cell economies. By focusing on various themes such as reproductive labor, the nature-culture divide, and the position of biology and critique within feminist studies, I argue that old and new materialist feminist perspectives can cross-fertilize each other productively, if certain challenges are adequately addressed.

This chapter outlines the scholarly debate and theoretical architecture that underpin the rest of the book. In recent years, queer theory has come under fire for being outdated, even redundant, on the grounds that its interest in the fluidity of identity comes at the expense of political economic analysis. Contesting such claims, the chapter contends that queer theory is well suited to the study of global capitalism when pursued as a project that is both feminist and historical in approach. To this end, the author brings together the insights of Michel Foucault and Silvia Federici to develop a new framework for analyzing the intersections and contradictions between capitalism and sexuality. The chapter then explicates this framework through discussion of sex work as a particularly interesting and important site for applying the tools of queer political economy.

This chapter examines the materiality of reproductive labour in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. It shows the changing dynamics in motherhood, which ceased to be solely defined by the physiological processes of child-bearing and became an emotional and social responsibility. The chapter then introduces the model of ‘commodity production versus nature’, and also focuses on writing and reproduction, as well as the ways discourses of writing and reproduction are phrased in terms of nutrition.

This chapter analyzes the ILO’s Programme on Rural Women, which offered an alternative vision of development around the worth of subsistence and reproductive labor. Beginning in the late 1970s, its feminist staff moved beyond the findings of Ester Boserup on the gendered impact of development. They considered relations in the household, the centrality of women’s domestic and non-monetized work, and the significance of both for capitalist accumulation. Eschewing reliance on statistical data, program staff sought to decolonize knowledge by commissioning fieldwork and surveys by women researchers from the very places under investigation. The staff encouraged participatory action research that regarded rural women themselves as experts and empowered poor women collectively. The resulting studies, including ones by Lourdes Benería and Maria Mies, would define the field of women and development. But the program came into conflict with FEMMES, the ILO’s coordinating unit on women’s issues, over institutional domains, issue priorities, and the very meaning of equality. By the mid-1980s whether the conditions of the rural woman in the Global South would foreshadow wider precarity was unclear, but a general belief emerged that family labor created a barrier to full labor force participation.

Asking why it took a century for domestic workers to come under global labor standards, this introduction frames the ILO as a producer of social knowledge whose definitions cast the woman worker as a distinct category in law and social policy. It traces changes in the global political economy, introduces the structure of the ILO, and outlines subsequent chapters. Though not an explicitly feminist organization, legal-equality and labor feminists alike sought to use the ILO to advance their own agendas. Despite growing acceptance of formal equality, the ILO came up against women’s assumed responsibility for homes and families, including reproductive labor. By the 1970s, structural transformations rendered the male-breadwinner model inadequate, turning the ILO’s attention to the “informal” sector exemplified by women home-based workers in the Global South. With the unraveling of the employer-employee relation and legal protections, the woman worker in the early 21st century came to stand as a harbinger for a world of precarious, feminized labor—part-time, short-term, and low-waged—that the ILO seeks to combat through a “decent work” agenda, which includes improving unpaid as well as paid domestic work, both of which are essential for women’s labor force participation.

This chapter traces women's labor trajectories, studying interviews with fifty-two women in four Ecuadorian cities about their work histories, which all include stints of paid domestic work, periods of unemployment, and usually other jobs. The women's accounts explode common assumptions. Domestic employment has not been a stepping stone to more desirable jobs, but neither has it been the only job that these women have done. Their employment in private homes has been disrupted, temporary, sporadic, and anything but stable. Rather than mobility, the chapter found circularity: women cycling in and out of the informal labor market over the course of their lives, making employment decisions that are shaped by economic, health, and family crises. Their engagement in unpaid social reproduction affected both their choice to do paid social reproduction in the first place, and the way they managed that reproductive labor over time.

Adjusting to long-standing political economic conditions and the culture of migration in the Philippines, Filipino kin view their role of caring for their families in the Philippines as a form of care for a migrant family member, even though the migrant is not the direct receiver of care. To this end, the stories in chapter one follows the transnational care work within family kin networks to establish just how they reconfigure and make meaning of social reproductive labor in and from different places in a transnational arrangement. The unit of analysis in this chapter is the Filipino transnational family; following care work and its different permutations from the migrant abroad and from families in the Philippines. Further, the roles that extended and fictive kin play in the transnational family emerge as key contribution in shifting gender ideologies in care work.

Chapter 6 focuses on Laura Mulvey’s theoretical writings on film and her essay film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), which it reads in relation to the feminist collaboration between Kelly and Mulvey that took place at the height of Women’s Liberation in Britain. Like Post-Partum Document, Riddles of the Sphinx creates a hieroglyphic aesthetic that mines the feminist possibilities of repressed maternal desires and draws out their connections to British colonial history. Replete with images of writing, the consistent attention to text in Riddles is the means by which Mulvey represents the pleasures of the maternal bond and transfers them into a form of fetishisation that opens onto collaborations between women that move across the lines of race and class. By placing the hieroglyph and the colonial extractions for which it figures in the context of women’s atomised struggles with reproductive labour in late capitalism, Riddles writes collective feminist reading practices that might allow women to correspond across the divisions created by colonial, racial, and class hierarchies and therefore create what Mulvey identifies in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), as a ‘new language of desire.’

Chapter 8 provides a review of the many topics covered throughout the book and emphasizes how, notwithstanding some minor transformations, the organization of eldercare in Italy continues to rely heavily on the presence of im/migrant women workers. This presence is crucial not only for Italian families that without im/migrant women would be crushed by the growing demands of care placed upon them but also for the Italian welfare state that due to the work of these women is able to manage the current eldercare crisis without addressing the changes that have occurred and are occurring in Italian society. Instead of addressing the growing need of the Italian elders and their families with an appropriate discussion of the role of the welfare state and the restructuring of its services, the Italian state utilizes contradictory immigration policies to provide a market solution to the current eldercare crisis.

The coming-out story is a heavily-freighted, yet central narrative genre for gay/lesbian/queer self-fashioning. This chapter studies transnational films about South Asians centering on overt lesbian coming-out like Nina’s Heavenly Delights and I Can’t Think Straight in relation to films like Bend It Like Beckham, The World Unseen, and Chutney Popcorn, all of which narrativize how (un)familiar counter-hegemonic non-heterosexual or non-heteronormative female subjects refuse to forfeit the reproductive labours they perform within the space of the home, family and diaspora. Showing the space of the home and the traditions it embodies as culturally valuable, and therefore not to be forfeited by the female protagonist, but also oftentimes refusing explicit ‘lesbian’ identity, some of these films perform the vital function of providing a vocabulary for the (un)familiar woman to join conversation with non-heterosexual selving and of providing models for self-fashioning that are not heterosexual. This functionalist view of the coming-out narrative is particularly important in relation to a form like cinema that, whether mainstream or multiplex, has such a large field of circulation within South Asian public cultures.

As interned communities were barred from normative channels of communication and self-representation, this chapter argues that the life of paper facilitated distinctive forms of both individual and collective being, in the latters’ essential dialectic. Chapter Four analyzes how this dialectic operates through the letter’s dialogical form in ways that necessarily exceed dominant Anglophonic literary assumptions and processes. With attention to how interned communities thus turned to aesthetic practices to exist through and beyond the terms of “population management,” this chapter places the life of paper broadly within pre-existing Japanese aesthetic traditions and corresponding onto-epistemologies of presence, absence, and the work of art. Close readings of letters focus on how they communicate affect to produce alternate forms of knowledge and truth-value under historical constraint: ultimately creating an archive of material for the re-assertion of social bonds, sutured through difference and across generations.

This chapter opens with the arrival of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a Bolivian labor activist who emerged as the standard-bearer for Third World women frustrated by US feminists’ efforts to define the IWY agenda. Although organizers of both the intergovernmental conference and the NGO tribune had hoped to put “politics” aside in order to focus on “women’s issues,” Barrios de Chungara articulated powerful reminders that the two remained inextricably intertwined. Tribune discussions returned to the question of how women’s domestic labor burdens limited women’s opportunities, although discussions frequently turned to condemnations of Augusto Pinochet’s government in Chile. Those stressing Third World concerns, whether about human rights or about subsistence labor, argued that the issues highlighted by US feminists, particularly around reproductive rights and sexual liberation, distracted from more compelling concerns.