Reproductive Labour

This article explores the relationship of domestic labor and social reproduction in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chile, paying particular attention to the roles of children. Children figured as products of women's reproductive labors, but they were also themselves crucial members of a domestic labor force structured by age as well as gender. Drawing on classified employment ads, judicial cases, and the records of Santiago's main orphanage, the analysis highlights how the labor of childrearing and the labor of children existed within the same social field. Women's and children's domestic work, while increasingly distinct, mutually shaped each other. Children influenced employment opportunities and work arrangements for women, both mothers and childless women, and placed in vivid relief the tensions that pervaded women's remunerated and unremunerated labors. Women's work in turn shaped the fate of children. Ultimately, the analysis suggests that domestic and reproductive labor was a resource allocated not just at the level of the individual household but on a societal scale across social groups. Circulating through households of different class statuses and across rural and urban spaces, the labor of childrearing (including wet nursing and fosterage) and the labor of children (as servants and criados) was mobilized across dense social networks. Even as the circulation of this labor linked disparate social groups, it simultaneously differentiated them, materially and symbolically, thereby reproducing the multigenerational patterns of patronage and hierarchy that were constitutive of Chilean society. Finally, while domestic work is often associated with private spaces, the analysis finds that public beneficence institutions played an active role in training, subsidizing, and distributing it.

How can " self-knowledge through numbers " open up new spaces for feminist politics and interventions in health policy, personal data, reproductive rights and technologies? This paper analyses how discourses of women's empowerment and reproductive choice are articulated in relation to data collection today, by drawing from three areas of empirical research. The empirical work that I draw from in this paper includes interviews with the organizers of QSXX in San Francisco, Boston and New York, and media analysis of tech reviews and promotional material of various apps, as well as close reading of the interface of one such app, Kindara. I analyze the key discourses of the ideal gendered, self-regulating neoliberal subject, and how this subjectivity entails both a knowledge subjectivity and a data subjectivity. I then consider the counter-discourses articulated by feminists and, from this, I embark on a discussion about how the data gathered link to how we imagine possible futures and shape our everyday materialities. Through theoretical frameworks of biopolitics and reproductive labour (Dickenson, 2007; Thompson, 2005), I discuss how feminist and data futures are imagined, and how far data collection has the potential to make the voices of women heard, beyond the articulation of consumer demands about digital health.

Taming egg donors is a multi-sited ethnography of the egg donation industry in Spain. It elaborates the politics of decision-making, information, risk perception, labour, and selection that operate in the Spanish context. In this thesis, I delineate the multilevel processes in place to ultimately achieve the stabilisation of bodies and eggs for their entry into the global bio-market circuits. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Barcelona, I draw on the point of view and experience of both egg donors and clinicians. This polyvocal approach reveals the needs, struggles, and expectations of the participants involved and how they are orchestrated to produce the egg donation bioeconomy. The main argument of this thesis is that egg donation is a fragile process that needs careful methods of containment to effectively work. It is fragile in the sense that the process can fail at any point: the donor might not follow the rules properly; the drugs might not generate the expected effect; the risks cannot always be contained; the extracted eggs might not be mature enough; or the children born might not meet the expected health standards. I argue that these methods for containing women, which I describe as a process of taming, operate both at the structural level — where institutional discourses, socio-economic factors, and regulations converge — and at the micro level of clinical practices — through the building of particular relationships between clinicians, donors, and their bodies. First, I argue that the rationalities of becoming an egg donor are intimately linked with the precarious Spanish labour market, which makes egg donation an activity that is very similar to having a job for young women. Second, I show how the combination of the legal framework of egg donation as altruistic and anonymous and the information delivery practices in fertility clinics produce particular sociotechnical imaginaries among egg donors that ultimately prevent debates on reproductive justice. Third, I contend that fertility clinics have taming methods in place to assure that egg donors will make it until the end of the process. These techniques happen at the level of the selection and management of donors and attempt to contain behavioural problems and bodily misbalances. Fourth, I describe how clinics precariously attempt to stabilise donors’ genetic and ethnoracial pasts in objectifiable categories, a process that reveals key aspects of how health and race operate in the fertility industry. Finally, I contend that all these efforts reveal clinicians’ imaginaries, struggles, and anxieties in relation to the perceived stressful job of dealing with egg donors. Their uneasy presence in fertility clinics is highlighted by the sociotechnical imaginaries of clinicians about future of assisted reproduction, in which egg donors are expected to ‘disappear’ thanks to forthcoming technoscientific innovations. Through these arguments, thus, I analyse how the Spanish egg donation industry is orchestrated to contain women’s imaginaries, bodies, biographies, and eggs so that they can be converted and travel across the global bio-market circuits. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on tissue economies, reproductive labour, sociotechnical imaginaries, and Spanish extractive industries.

Karl Marx’s interest in servants extended only so far as to explain what they were not. They were not part of the working class; they were not producers of surplus value; and they had no place within the logic of capitalist modernity except as its by-product parasitic luxury. This was despite the fact that servants were the largest group of all waged workers at the time he was writing and remained the most common form of women's work up until the second world war. Many of Marx's followers continued to ignore servants in their analyses of class struggle. It is only today, in the wake of Marxist feminist re-framing of who 'counts' as the working class, that we are able to trace a long, if difficult, history of domestic workers' efforts to organise, transform the conditions under which they labour and disrupt accompanying power hierarchies.

In the digital age of migration, Chinese migrant entrepreneurial activities are increasingly undertaken online. Drawing on a case study of e-commerce developed by Chinese marriage-migrant women in Taiwan, this article investigates the digitized and emotional dimensions of entrepreneurship. It examines Chinese women's innovative use of the online social media platform WeChat in developing transnational networks and virtual commercial circuits to achieve their economic goals while adapting to their new host society. It considers the role of the emotions in business formation and in the commercialization of "contested" commodities whose circulations transgress trading rules and borders. This study contributes to the empirical literature on the transformation of migrant entrepreneurship, specifically by diasporic Chinese. Theoretically, the empirical case of digital entrepreneurship among Chinese migrant women invites us to consider the growing use of both virtual platforms and emotions in the making of migrants' commercial activities.

在数字化的国际迁移时代，中国新移民的创业活动越来越多地在网上进行。本文以在台湾的中国大陆女性婚姻移民的电子商业为案例，从性别和情感的层面来研究移民创业问题。文章考察了中国大陆女性移民如何利用网络社交媒体平台“微信”发展跨境网络和虚拟商贸回路以实现其经济目标，同时适应新的居住地社会。文章分析了情感因素对创业的影响及在“争议性”商品销售中的作用—这些商品的网上流通超越了交易规则和边界。本研究丰富了移民创业转型，特别是离散华人群体的创业转型的实证文献。从理论上讲，中国大陆女性婚姻移民的数字化创业的实证案例促使我们重新思考网上平台以及情感因素在移民商業活動中日益凸显的重要性.

Jelen tanulmány azt vizsgálja, hogy a zeneipar digitalizációja, amelyet a globális kapitalizmus viszonyai formálnak, milyen hatással van lokálisan a magyarországi női zenészek munkájára. A női zenészek munkáját feminista perspektívából vizsgálom, és annak járok utána, a genderviszonyok szempontjából hogyan jellemezhető a digitalizált zeneipar lokális szinten – ugyanakkor a globális zeneipar szempontjából is központi szerepet betöltő centrumországokon (Egyesült Államok, Japán, Németország és Egyesült Királyság) kívül. A zeneiparban folytatott digitális vállalkozás, valamint önmenedzselés feminista elemzésén keresztül egyúttal a digitalizált környezetben folytatott kreatív munka kritikájához is hozzá kívánok járulni.

This article offers a feminist critique of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2019. Fifteen years since the first proposed regulation of assisted reproductive technologies and surrogacy, the 2019 Bill leaves much to be desired. It reflects a limited understanding of the complexities of surrogacy, is discriminatory in its approach, is plagued by lack of clarity, is unrealistic and most importantly, does not include adequate safeguards for the surrogate. Women’s reproductive labour in performing surrogacy is valorized but not compensated. Even though the Bill may well accept some recommendations of the Rajya Sabha select Committee, its failure to address issues that we highlight will mean that if passed, it will be challenged in the courts on constitutional grounds. This will generate uncertainty for years, for many infertile couples and individuals who look to the law for streamlined regulation, defeating its main purpose in facilitating a novel mode of reproduction.

Participation in the labor market is one of the most important components of integration in the host country. This study is situated on two broad topics: female migration and labour mobility within the European Union. Throughout the research I will explore the nexus between both of them from a gender perspective. Therefore, the legal and political context of Romanians in Spain at the EU level is going to be drawn. The purpose is to understand and examine how institutional processes shape the migratory paths and labour trajectories of qualified Romanian women in Madrid, Spain. This research delves into the specificities and circumstances of the participants in order to understand their labour (im)mobilities as EU citizens and the influences of the institutional shifts and restrictions. Thus to analyze the further consequences on this collective. This dissertation questions at the same time the feminization and disqualification of „care labours‟. The research and conclusions will be built according to the central focus of this research, the life stories of nine Romanian women. Therefore, a qualitative research with an ethnographic approach has been conducted. Their narratives are supported by secondary nature interpretation of policies and literature.
Key words: EU citizenship, mobility, reproductive labours, labour mobility, Romanian, migrant women.

Este artículo se inscribe en el marco de los debates sobre los cuidados en la región e intenta reflejar tanto las dinámicas como las inercias que modelan en la actualidad la organización social del cuidado en Paraguay. El texto se divide en cuatro partes y una conclusión. El primer apartado presenta un panorama general sobre la distribución del trabajo de cuidados y su impacto en el mercado laboral, tomando en cuenta variables que muestran las situaciones diferenciadas que experimentan distintos grupos de mujeres. La segunda parte está dedicada al relevamiento de la noción del derecho al cuidado en Paraguay contemplada en algunos de los principales instrumentos del corpus normativo vigente en el país y posteriormente se concentra en las políticas de cuidados que integran la arquitectura institucional del Estado paraguayo. La tercera sección aborda la matriz de servicios de cuidados que se ofrecen en el ámbito privado y en la comunidad. Luego, el cuarto apartado presenta algunos de los principales debates que se producen en torno a la temática de los cuidados en Paraguay, recuperando las trayectorias históricas de estas posturas y caracterizando a sus principales actores. Finalmente, el artículo presenta conclusiones que resumen el análisis desarrollado.

The interest of feminism in ecological issues can be traced back over decades. In the history of the movement, social issues have had priority for a long time. However, the emerging ecological crisis of the recent years has shown that environmental issues cannot be separated from socio-cultural processes. This has made ecofeminist thinking increasingly popular. Yet there are questions about what the connection between femininity and the environment is exactly. The different branches of ecofeminism agree that there is a kinship between the two, which is most evident in the exploitation of their resources. Even though, the underlying roots of this supposed analogy are not self-evident. Is there an essential connection, such as the capacity to give life, or does it lie on historical conventions? What are we supposed to do with this analogy: should we make it visible, or should we deconstruct it? Finally, what benefit do we gain by discussing the ecological crisis within the framework of feminism? The study explores the answers to the above questions in the context of the social imaginary by applying psychoanalytic thinking. It also discusses how ecofeminism reveals the interconnectedness between reproductive, care, ecological, and climate crises through the critique of capitalist production.

Keywords: ecofeminism, ecocriticism, climate crisis, capitalocene, psychoanalysis, queer ecology

In the past three decades, as the economy of the industrialized countries has moved towards the growing Tech industry, middle-class women have found more opportunities to fill in white-collared job positions (McDowell, 2009). The increase in the rate of women’s participation in the labor market has made them less willing to do (or capable of doing) the housework and child/elderly care _ the tasks which are historically stereotyped as feminine (ibid). Therefore, a considerably growing trend in paid domestic labor is being introduced to formerly blue-collared and dominantly immigrant women (England, P.: 2005). The tasks which are regarded as “labor of love” and home as defined the place of “affection” are now commodified (McDowell, 2009; England, K.: 2010). The transformation of unpaid reproductive labor to paid reproductive labor as well as the transformation of home as a place of no-work to the place of production of surplus-value, not only affects women economically and socially but also intervenes in their identity formation.

This project takes a quick look at the situation immigrant women domestic workers experience, and how their embodiment of labor is affected through the transformation of unpaid reproductive work in their own home to the waged out-of-home reproductive labor. This study applies the lenses of feminist studies, sociology, geography and economics in the intersection of gender, race, and nationality to argue that to immigrant domestic working women such an economically transformative process generates double alienation due to the stereotypically genderized notion of the reproductive labor, as well as the racial/ethnic/transnational cultural conflicts.

En estas páginas ofrecemos una lectura en clave de la división sexual del trabajo de la bibliografía sugerida en el marco del Seminario Feminismos, Memoria y Resistencia, que parte del siguiente supuesto: el cuestionamiento al orden patriarcal que significó la presencia de las mujeres en las guerrillas y en los proyectos revolucionarios se “mesuró” al mantener la división sexual del trabajo y producir un “régimen de género” (Connell, 2002 citada en Dietrich, 2014) que asignó a las mujeres el trabajo doméstico, reproductivo y de cuidados complicando su acceso a posiciones de autoridad. Aunque hubo mujeres que lograron ejercer liderazgos, lo más común fue “la reproducción de muchas relaciones sociales de sexo de lo más tradicionales, en un proceso revolucionario que anunciaba su voluntad de forjar el ‘hombre y la mujer nuevos’” (Falquet, 2007:s.n.). Nuestro objetivo es que la revisión de algunos aspectos relacionados con la división sexual del trabajo en las guerrillas y los procesos revolucionarios haga explícito el valor producido por las militantes y podamos ver esas labores como vitales para el sostenimiento de las luchas emancipatorias del presente.

Resumo: O direito do trabalho, enquanto ramo jurídico que se pretende regulador da prestação do trabalho humano subordinado, acaba por refletir formas de desvalor naturalizadas, cristalizando juridicamente as desigualdades presentes no campo social ao deixar de fornecer, total ou parcialmente, proteções a determinadas formas de trabalhar. É o que acontece com o denominado trabalho reprodutivo. A importância do tema é incontestável, para que se pense na desvalorização social e jurídica atribuída a essa forma de labor, que, muitas vezes, sequer é entendida como trabalho, sendo inserida na esfera do afeto. Desse modo, sob o método jurídico-teórico, recorre-se às contribuições da denominada economia feminista, vertente de pensadoras que desenvolve estudos problematizando as construções clássicas acerca do que se entende por trabalho, no intuito de reformular o seu conceito, ampliando-o no sentido de criticar a marginalização econômico-jurídica dos trabalhos que integram a esfera da reprodução social. Ao final, são levantados elementos para o debate de uma possível juridificação justa do trabalho reprodutivo, que reconheçam sua centralidade social e seu valor.
Palavras-chave:
Direito do Trabalho. Trabalho reprodutivo. Cuidado. Economia feminista.

Abstract: Labor Law, as a legal branch that seeks to regulate subordinate human labor, ultimately reflects forms of social devaluation, legally crystallizing the inequalities present in the social field by failing to provide, totally or partially, protections to certain ways of labor. This is what happens with reproductive work. The importance of the theme is indisputable, to verify the social and juridical devaluation attributed to this form of labor, which is often not even understood as work and, consequently, inserted in the sphere of affection. Therefore, under the legal-theoretical method, we use the contributions of the feminist economy, a group of thinkers who develop studies by problematizing the classical constructions about what is meant by work: they propose that this concept should be reformulated, expanding it to problematize the economic-juridical marginalization of the work related to the sphere of social reproduction. Finally, elements are raised for the debate on a possible fair justification of reproductive work, which recognizes its social centrality and its value.
Keywords:
Labor Law. Reproductive work. Care. Feminist economy.

Art & Parenthood considers the social, material and aesthetic relationship that parenthood has to art-making. In spite of the enormous effect it has on a person’s life, in particular for those who bring a pregnancy to term, parenthood and child raising is often made invisible within the art world. This unique relationship has an overpowering and transformative influence, positively and negatively, on the act of creation and the material conditions of art-making for parents. This text was produced and distributed on the occasion of the exhibition "Art & Parenthood" (Unit/Pitt, Vancouver, CAN; 2016). This exhibition was an attempt to produce a platform for articulating these experiences, exhibiting art made about – or in the context of – parenting, and challenging the exclusions that separate children from contemporary art.

This paper examines the ways in which the digitalization of the music industries has impacted the work of musicians locally, in the semi-peripheral country of Hungary. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which the work of musicians is shaped by gender relations. It aims to critique the democratization discourse of the digitalization of musical production by exploring, first, the local policy and industry context of digitalized musical labor, and, secondly, the role of gender relations within the household in the labor and careers of musicians in Hungary.

Just because something is invisible, does not mean we should take it for granted. Instead, we can put these invisible topics on the table and openly discuss aspects through the lens of artistic practice and accidental encounter. This is what ruru buitendienst proposes during its cordial event, Editorial LIVE! as part of SONSBEEK '16.

By using Guy Standing’s formulation of the ‘precariat’, I want to invoke certain ideas in relation to the commercial surrogate in India who works in circumstances that are both exploitative, and render her extremely vulnerable. By looking at labour from the lens of precarity, this paper is keen on exploring the ways in which reproductive work is now increasingly being invisibilised, through the intervention of reproductive technologies and the invocation of specific social myths around gift-giving in surrogacy. 

In the process, the aim will be to reflect upon how commercial surrogacy is both a result of, and implicit in the insidious nature of global capital that has always depended on the exploitation of vulnerable bodies. For this purpose, the paper engages with the following elements of commercial surrogacy in India:

a. The turn towards altruism: in legal conversations and the bill on surrogacy, which is linked to the pursuit of capital through the invocation of the gift-giving rhetoric, and through the devaluation of labour. b. Transnationalism as globalized exploitation: that positions the Indian surrogate and her labour in an inferior position, and available for exploitation.

Through the analysis of existing literature, and ethnographic data, I seek to understand the role of surrogacy as labour that is complicit in a complicated plot involving capital and the reproduction of reproductive services.

A estas alturas es claro el impacto devastador y generalizado de la pandemia en los medios de subsistencia de las mujeres, quienes son las que más han visto afectada su participación en la fuerza laboral remunerada en México, representando el 84 por ciento de quienes salieron de la fuerza laboral entre marzo y abril del 2020. Podríamos seguir dando giros sobre la serie de cifras que continúan confirmando que muchas de las desigualdades por diferencias de género se han exacerbado a raíz de la pandemia. Pero esta vez me gustaría ahondar un poco más en la lucha continúa entre el hogar, los cuidados y el trabajo remunerado así como ahondar un poco en una serie de factores para una comprensión más profunda del alcance del trabajo de cuidados de las mujeres.
Versión Digital Disponible en: https://heraldodepuebla.com/2022/03/08/desigual-e-invisible-los-cuidados-en-el-tiempo-del-coronavirus/

How can " self-knowledge through numbers " open up new spaces for feminist politics and interventions in health policy, personal data, reproductive rights and technologies? This paper analyses how discourses of women's empowerment and reproductive choice are articulated in relation to data collection today, by drawing from three areas of empirical research. The empirical work that I draw from in this paper includes interviews with the organizers of QSXX in San Francisco, Boston and New York, and media analysis of tech reviews and promotional material of various apps, as well as close reading of the interface of one such app, Kindara. I analyze the key discourses of the ideal gendered, self-regulating neoliberal subject, and how this subjectivity entails both a knowledge subjectivity and a data subjectivity. I then consider the counter-discourses articulated by feminists and, from this, I embark on a discussion about how the data gathered link to how we imagine possible futures and shape our everyday materialities. Through theoretical frameworks of biopolitics and reproductive labour (Dickenson, 2007; Thompson, 2005), I discuss how feminist and data futures are imagined, and how far data collection has the potential to make the voices of women heard, beyond the articulation of consumer demands about digital health.

Au pairs have traditionally been thought of as middle-class young women from Northern Europe, who are having a fun gap year in a foreign country. This collection, the first dedicated to examining the lives of au pairs, reveals that this is far from the whole story. Au pairing is now a global phenomenon and au pairs are just as likely to come from Asia and Latin America as from Sweden or France. They are an increasingly important form of very low waged, often unregulated, childcare and domestic labour enabling tens of thousands of families to meet the demands of both work and home life. Despite the importance of the work that they do, au pairs are not recognized as workers and are often excluded from even the most basic protections, such as a minimum wage. As young migrants living inside their employers' homes they are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

This essay approaches reproductive labour, by providing a comparative study of advertisements, cinematographic productions and artistic proposals, from the 1940s to the present. The first part analyzes the strategies that Birgit Jürgennsen and Martha Rosler used to respond critically to the mystifyed image of women promoted by magazines and companies such as General Motors or General Electric, throughout the twentieth century. The second part explores, through the works of Raquel Friera, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Carmen Winant, the need to acknowledge the social magnitude of reproductive labor. The text ends by contrasting the confined space of the home with the open landscape. The images of the "ovulars" and Justine Kurland reveal the possibility of fabricating new narratives.

Paper presented at "Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance," October 10-12, 2019.
The domestic worker in early twentieth-century United States and the cleaner of the spaces of neoliberal capitalism are figures with which Saidiya Hartman and Françoise Vergès think the specificity of Black women’s labor. This paper brings their work into dialogue, arguing that it makes clear the need to consider reproductive and environmental justice together, in a way that exceeds liberal frames of justice. Both Hartman and Vergès situate these forms of socially reproductive labor in terms of the long history of a racialized and gendered logic of disposability, in which Black women’s reproductive labor was, and continues to be, of central strategic and ideological importance for racial capitalism. This logic ensures that the indispensable work of “the belly of the world” and “those who clean the world” is invisible and unacknowledged, and those who perform it are treated as waste (Hartman 2016; Vergès 2019). Vergès considers not only the poverty and oppression entailed by Black women’s labor in the “racial capitalocene”, but also the weathering effects of chronic exhaustion and stress, and the body burden of quotidian exposure to toxic chemicals and waste. Reflecting on the duration and diffuse effects of these conditions, I understand the womb as a site in which the environmental injustice of racialized and gendered labor becomes reproductive injustice. I close by comparing Vergès’ consideration of the 2017 ONET strike in France, and Hartman’s engagement with the general strike; asking how have and might Black women challenge the transnational and generational logic of disposability.

There are now more servants in Britain than in Victorian times. This explosion in paid domestic employment is part of a global trend. Women from countries such as the Philippines take on domestic jobs in order to support families at home, whilst students from Eastern Europe, the EU and Brazil work as au pairs in order to study English and improve their employment prospects. Rosie Cox's timely new work examines the reality of paid domestic labour in Britain today and explores the global trends that sustain this growth of domestic employment. She shows how the economy depends on women working outside the home, how it is the employment of domestic workers that helps make this possible and examines the experiences of both employers and employees who have joined this new global labour market.

The following is a working draft of a sub-chapter for my dissertation, which focuses on the critical, conceptual, and methodological resources of phenomenology for Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), which is a critical discourse related to Marxist feminism and feminist political economy. SRT focuses on the processes and relations in which labour-power is reproduced on a daily and generational basis. The overall goal of the chapter, of which this is a part, is a phenomenology of social reproduction, or rather an account of how oppression comes to be reproduced in everyday life in and through the structures of our bodily experience, and how this relates to overall processes of capitalist valorization. This is, of course, far beyond the scope of this paper, but it nevertheless is important to point towards.

What follows here is an analysis of two accounts of social reproduction in the phenomenological tradition: first, in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), and the second in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1989). I first identify the three forms of human activity of Arendt’s vita activa, and describe the relationships to time to which they correspond. While her account is fruitful for suggesting the multiple forms of time we take up and live out in and through our activities, there are nevertheless serious limitations to her account regarding the givenness of oppressive hierarchies in reproductive life; for this, I turn to Beauvoir, whose account outlines both the role and nature of oppression, but also the manner in which immanent, circular temporality comes to shape the reproduction of social relations. I conclude by suggesting that both thinkers, when committed together, nevertheless propose similar accounts of political action as future-oriented and intersubjective.

In the 1970s and 1980s, studies of the unpaid household and family labor of upper-class women linked this labor to class reproduction. In recent years, however, the topic of class has dropped out of analyses of unpaid labor, and such labor has been ignored in recent studies of elites. In this chapter, drawing primarily on 18 in-depth interviews with wealthy New York stay-at-home mothers, we look at what elite women's unpaid labor consists of, highlighting previously untheorized consumption and lifestyle work; ask what it reproduces; and analyze how women themselves interpret and represent it. In the current historical moment, elite women face not only the cultural expectation that they will work for pay, but also the prominence of meritocracy as a mechanism of class legitimation in a diversified upper class. In this context, we argue, elite women's unpaid labor serves to reproduce "meritocratic" dispositions of children rather than closed, homogenous elite communities, as identified in previous studies. Our respondents struggle to frame their activities as legitimate and productive work. In doing so, they not only resist longstanding stereotypes of "ladies who lunch" but also seek to justify and normalize their own class privileges, thus reproducing the same hegemonic discourses of work and worth that stigmatize their unpaid work.

At age twenty-three, novelist Doris Lessing (1919-2013) sat on the lawn under a toona ciliata tree and explained to her two children why she was leaving Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for London. This is the biography of the malevolent mother as remembered by the Over-Eye. What is relevant to surveillance and statecraft is extracted and magnified, the rest discarded.

The Over-Eye’s indignant disapproval is a psychosocial weapon in marshalling adherence to the home plot. Witness to Lessing’s story, this article considers the intersections of maternity, capitalism and psychoanalysis, and situates the matrescene as part of a collective memoir and critical historiography. Narrative passage and personal essay acknowledges intertextual and reparative reading, alongside the interrelationship of the personal and the public, as essential to interpretative critique and positive legislative political action.

Celem recenzji jest krytyczne omówienie głównych wątków w  monografii "Gender in the Post-Fordist Urban. The Gender Revolution in Planning and Public Policy" Marguerite van den Berg z  2017 roku. Autorka monografii analizuje miasto Rotterdam pod względem praktyk genderfikacyjnych, które, wedle badaczki, są zgodne z logiką postfordystycznego miasta.

Essay initially appeared as part of the publication accompanying the exhibition "One Missing Sock After Doing Laundry" featuring Elisabetta Benassi, Gabriele De Santis, Tessa Lynch, Iftach Gazit, Scott Myles, Jonathan Monk, David Shrigley, Santo Tolone, Alek O., and Alessandro Vizzini, curated by Giulia Colletti, in collaboration with CCA Glasgow, 2018