Full bibliography

Feminist theories of social reproduction are theories of the gendered nature of power and domination. This seems axiomatic, and the recent upsurge of interest in social reproduction in human geography (Casolo and Doshi, 2013; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2016; Hopkins, 2015; Jackson and Neely, 2015; Kofman, 2012; Pimlott-Wilson, 2015; Rioux, 2015) in part relates to the continuing urgency of the need to understand the relationship between social difference and the exercise of power in the contemporary space economy. The elision of reproductive relations and the gendered norms that undergird them from accounts of economic and political crisis, despite decades of feminist research and activism, continues almost unabated. This elision reveals as much as it obscures, shining a light on the politics of knowledge production inside and outside of the academy and bolstering the sense among proponents of the upsurge of feminist theory and social reproduction – myself included – that ‘theory as usual’ is not an option. The conjunctural crisis affecting political economic and ecological foundations of contemporary societies does not sit above the epiphenomena of social relations and related social infrastructures, although there is little to acknowledge their fundamental interrelationship in many accounts of crisis. At the same time, however, the landscape of what we might broadly characterize as ‘feminist theory’ is highly variegated, with ongoing tensions among those who identify with post-structuralist, radical and political economic traditions. Nancy Fraser has famously characterized these tensions as struggles over redistribution versus recognition, where the latter is identified with (oft-conflated) post-structuralism and identity politics. JK Gibson-Graham, on the other hand, has associated Marxian political economic approaches (including the concept of social reproduction) with capital-centrism and deep-seated androcentrism. Feminism is itself a house divided. These divisions are perhaps inevitable on a terrain as broad and uneven as feminism. Nor is a unified, monolithic feminism necessarily desirable. The conceptualization of power is itself a key site of differentiation within feminist theory and research. Fraser, a feminist theorist and political philosopher of the Critical Theory school, has received relatively little attention in human geography – far less than one of her main sparring partners and interlocutors, Judith Butler. But, as I argue in this chapter, her body of work is a rich, if not unproblematic, resource not only for feminist geographers but for all of us who are, or should be, interested in how power, inequality and justice are interrelated with reproduction of and through difference.

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