Description
Early feminist work on social reproduction sought to theorise the relationship between patriarchy and women’s oppression under capitalism and, in so doing, render visible (largely cis and heterosexual) women’s unpaid work within the household. Yet this scholarship also paid close attention to matters of sexuality and to the key role of sexual and other intimate labour in the daily and intergenerational reproduction of capitalist life. This paper argues that feminist IPE should return queerly to these debates. Informed by queer of colour scholarship on “racialised heteronormativity”, it aims to (re-)centre the normative family as a key site of violence, oppression, and exclusion within capitalist social relations. This framing illuminates the intimate links between different forms of gendered, racialised, and sexualised inequality in the global economy, including those affecting queer and trans subjectivities, and how these inequalities are produced and reinforced at the level of people’s everyday lives. To harness these insights, however, feminist IPE must relinquish the cis- and hetero-normative attachments that shape some accounts of gender and social reproduction within the field. The paper concludes that a queer social reproduction approach is especially useful in the current conjuncture, where the rise of the populist radical right has been facilitated, in part, by its promotion of the “traditional” (i.e. white, heteropatriarchal) family against a backdrop of converging economic, ecological, social, and political crises.
