Week 5

Key Questions

• What are equality feminism and critical equality feminism? How do these feminisms fail to create an integrative framework that challenges the role of patriarchal capitalism?

• What is social reproduction feminism? How does it view patriarchy and capitalism as co-constitutive?

• How can queer and trans oppression under capitalism be articulated through a social reproduction framework?

Required Materials:

• Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection, "Marxism and Gender"

• Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction, "Renewing Social Reproduction Feminism"

Supplementary Materials:

• Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction, "Equal Work For and Against Capital"

• Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction, "Anti-Racist Feminism and Women's Work"

• Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction, "A Political Economy of 'Women's Work': Producing Patriarchal Capitalism"

• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation

• Jordan Kisner, "The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew."

• Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, "A Wage as a Lever of Power: The Political Perspective"

• Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, "Mobilizations around Women's Invisible Work in the Home"

• Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, "Mobilizations around Women's Invisible Work outside the Home"

• Endnotes, "The Logic of Gender"

• Virginia Guitzel, Transgender Marxism, "Notes from Brazil"

• Michelle O'Brien, Transgender Marxism, "Trans Work: Employment Trajectories, Labour Discipline, and Gender Freedom"

• Jamie, "Open Faggotry Works to Unify the Working Class"

• Sophie Monk and Joni Pitt, "Towards a Queer Crisis: On Capitalism and Compulsory Heterosexuality"

• Tatiana Cozzarelli, "Queer Oppression is Etched in the Heart of Capitalism"

• Nat Raha, Transgender Marxism, "A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction"

Exercise

Collectivizing reproduction is a critical component of any communist project. What might it look like to upend the system of privatized reproduction that is the source of exploitation and oppression for so many cis women, queer and trans people, disabled people, and children? Would it require the abolition of the family? Take a moment to write down a vision of communist social reproduction.