3.1 Introduction

Social reproduction is a core, cross-cutting conceptual and methodological approach in feminist thinking, one that anchors the feminist agenda of challenging the status quo and reversing structures that perpetuate oppression and exploitation. What is social reproduction? The notion of social reproduction has multiple meanings and is part and parcel of several foundational debates in feminist scholarship. In the broadest terms, social reproduction is “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” as well as “a set of structured practices”, as vividly put by Cindi Katz (2001b: 711), that are needed for the reproduction of both life and capitalist relations. In other words, it encompasses all the work, unpaid and paid, and the socio-cultural practices, institutions and sectors that are essential for the regeneration of our lives and society. The ebb and flow of social reproduction interpretations map key trajectories in feminist thinking, not only in political economy but also in sociology, geography, economics and other social sciences. The roots of the concept in Marxist-feminist approaches explain why debates on social reproduction initiated in the 1970s were then sidelined in later decades but are now experiencing renewed interest among feminists. Such conceptual roots also explain why the social reproduction literature remains fundamentally concerned with correcting and enriching our understanding of capitalism. In essence, social reproduction is about reclaiming a feminist reading of capitalism.

In this chapter the meanings of social reproduction are explored (section 3.2), and the key debates are discussed by linking early and more recent perspectives, as well as Global North and Global South views. Section 3.3 addresses the debates on value generation, from the domestic labour debate of the 1970s to contemporary social reproduction theory (SRT) and its critics. Section 3.4 analyses the tendency of capitalism to squeeze and devalue social reproduction through processes of privatization and the generation of chronic crises of social reproduction. Section 3.5 discusses how social reproduction approaches can be deployed to understand work, non-work and labour processes. Section 3.6 provides an analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic as a crisis of social reproduction.