Social Reproduction and the Time-Geography of Everyday Life

AbstractIt goes without saying that feminist International Political Economy (IPE) is concerned in one way or another with the everyday – conceptualised as both a site of political struggle and a site within which social relations are (re)produced and governed. Given the longstanding grounding of feminist research in everyday gendered experiences, many would ask: Why do we need an explicit feminist theorisation of the everyday? After all, notions of everyday life and everyday political struggle infuse feminist analysis. This article seeks to interrogate the concept of the everyday – questioning prevalent understandings of the everyday and asking whether there is analytical and conceptual utility to be gained in articulating a specifically feminist understanding of it. We argue that a feminist political economy of the everyday can be developed in ways that push theorisations of social reproduction in new directions. We suggest that one way to do this is through the recognition that social reproductionisthe everyday alongside a three-part theorisation of space, time, and violence (STV). It is an approach that we feel can play an important role in keeping IPE honest – that is, one that recognises how important gendered structures of everyday power and agency are to the conduct of everyday life within global capitalism.

Download Full-text

ELECTRIFICATION, URBAN LIFE AND THE ROLE OF WOMEN

Revista Geografares ◽

10.7147/geo.v1i31.33576 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 1 (31) ◽

pp. 6-29

Author(s):

Odette Seabra

Keyword(s):

Everyday Life ◽

Urban Space ◽

Social Reproduction ◽

Electric Energy ◽

Urban Life ◽

Energy Utilization ◽

Technological Innovations ◽

Job Market ◽

Role Of Women

Technological innovations have significantly changed the society in many ways. This paper analyses the major changes caused by the development and the spread of electric energy utilization in the production of urban space, in labour, in the organization of family and households, in everyday life and in the role of women, such as the changes brought to the households as an outcome of the introduction of everyday technologies in them, as well as in the role they play, whether in the job market, in the artistic and political vanguards and in the fight for rights, as well as in their role of household management as the person responsible for maintaining the conditions of social reproduction of their families. This debate is supported by the notions of modern, modernization, modernity and utopia, while highlights the contradictions and inequalities that remain and permeate the life of the working class in the cities.

Download Full-text

Queering social reproduction: Sex, care and activism in San Francisco

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/0042098020947877 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 004209802094787

Author(s):

Max J Andrucki

Keyword(s):

Collective Action ◽

Everyday Life ◽

San Francisco ◽

Urban Space ◽

Social Relations ◽

Social Reproduction ◽

Public And Private ◽

Urban Activism ◽

The Social ◽

Sex Practices

In this paper I ask what is at stake when we move past static ontologies of the ‘gayborhood’ as a form of commercial and residential concentration in decline to theorise gay urban activism as a mode of queer social reproduction, through which queer caring labour ‘redeems’ the dislocations of the neoliberal city structured by oedipalised and capitalist social relations. Through well-documented formal and informal collective action, queers in the urban West have organised in response to health crises, exclusion and systemic threats of violence. Returning to socialist feminist imaginaries of care beyond the ‘social’, and to Guy Hocquenghem’s often-overlooked theory of the sociality of the anus, this paper draws on excerpts from the film Milk, the poetry of Thom Gunn and a discussion of gay men’s volunteering to examine San Francisco as a queer urban space constituted through a network of encounters, crossings, intimacies and labours enacted through the mundane caring practices of everyday life. I ask in what ways we can think of gay urban space as continuously made and remade through non-monogamous sex practices that perform the messy marrying of public and private, and erotic and platonic.

Download Full-text

The Prism of Everyday Life: Towards a New Research Agenda for Time Geography

Transport Reviews ◽

10.1080/01441647.2010.484153 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 31 (1) ◽

pp. 25-47 ◽

Cited By ~ 102

Author(s):

Tijs Neutens ◽

Tim Schwanen ◽

Frank Witlox

Keyword(s):

Everyday Life ◽

Research Agenda ◽

Time Geography ◽

New Research

Download Full-text

For feminist geographies of austerity

Progress in Human Geography ◽

10.1177/03091325211065118 ◽

2022 ◽

pp. 030913252110651

Author(s):

Sarah Marie Hall

Keyword(s):

Everyday Life ◽

Social Reproduction ◽

Economic Conditions ◽

The Political ◽

Feminist Critique ◽

Economic Relations ◽

Marginalised Groups ◽

Everyday Experiences ◽

The Uk ◽

Voice And Silence

Austerity policies and austere socio-economic conditions in the UK have had acute consequences for everyday life and, interconnectedly, the political and structural regimes that impact upon the lives of women and marginalised groups. Feminist geographies have arguably been enlivened and reinvigorated by critical engagements with austerity, bringing to light everyday experiences, structural inequalities and multi-scalar socio-economic relations. With this paper I propose five areas of intervention for further research in this field: social reproduction, everyday epistemologies, intersectionality, voice and silence, and embodied fieldwork. To conclude, I argue for continuing feminist critique and analyses given the legacies and futures of austerity.

Download Full-text

Die Entgrenzung von Arbeit und die Transformation raumbezogener Orientierungen – Eine Annäherung in der Region Halle/Leipzig

Geographica Helvetica ◽

10.5194/gh-68-105-2013 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 68 (2) ◽

pp. 105-116 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

G. Montanari ◽

K. Wiest ◽

S. Wörmer

Keyword(s):

Everyday Life ◽

Household Survey ◽

Time Geography ◽

Residential Areas ◽

Scientific Debate ◽

Reflexive Modernity ◽

Temporal And Spatial ◽

Depth Interviews ◽

Different Levels ◽

Work And Life

Abstract. Major trends in society like flexibilisation, blurring of boundaries between life spheres and subjectification of labour come along with new requirements in individual's everyday life. In the scientific debate it has in contrast hardly been discussed how these trends affect different levels of society beyond social strata like the creative class. Referring to the concepts of reflexive modernity and time-geography the focus of this article is on temporal and spatial aspects of societal change and its effects on everyday life. Based on in-depth interviews and a household survey carried out in different residential areas in the region of Halle-Leipzig the paper points out how blurred borders between "work'' and "life'' affect individuals' space-time activities between new opportunities and new constraints. Here an inner-city neighbourhood and a community in the urban sprawl between Halle and Leipzig are under consideration to highlight different strategies to deal with weakening associations between activities, place and time emerging in different settlement structures.

Download Full-text

Breaking with the Family Form: Historical Categories, Social Reproduction, and Everyday Life in Late 1950s Rural China

positions asia critique ◽

10.1215/10679847-9286740 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 29 (4) ◽

pp. 869-894

Author(s):

Alexander F. Day

Keyword(s):

Social Science ◽

Everyday Life ◽

Social Reproduction ◽

Rural China ◽

The Political ◽

The Real ◽

Social Forms ◽

Real Material ◽

Material Conditions ◽

Political Economic

Abstract This article explores the way PRC historians use analytical categories by looking at the emergence of a divide between production and the social reproduction of labor (all the work that goes into producing and raising laborers) that transformed and structured rural everyday life during the Mao period. Everyday life is historical, produced in different ways under different material conditions, structured and shaped by social forms in motion. Thus, it is not an analytical frame through which historians can view the real content of the Mao period underneath the thin veneer of Maoist high politics and its categories. This article therefore argues that everyday life, far from a sphere resisting the impositions and dictates of the state, is fully implicated in the political-economic structuring of society. This is a call to not simply replace an earlier social science focus on the political economy of the PRC with a bottom-up or empirical view of everyday life, recognizing that everyday life is already a structured terrain. Rather than bringing in social science analytical categories from the outside or searching for an empirical real view from below, we need to investigate the emergence of categories and social forms from the real material limits and tendencies of a rapidly changing PRC society.

Download Full-text