A shift from home to the market: The marketization of reproductive labor in India

Commercial surrogacy marketizes life's work. In the era of neo-liberalism, women's work, which is often intimately performed within a heterosexual marriage in exchange of support, now remains a principal avenue to earn money. This form of feminization of labor has led to the emergence of markets for women's reproductive capacities. The present study stems from my ethnographic journey into the lives of the women who work as surrogate mothers in India. The narratives presented in the paper emerge from my prolonged fieldwork in Anand, Gujarat. It engages with the experiences, understandings, and the voices of these women, who I term reproductive laborers, in order to examine the notion of putting one's reproductive capacities in this intimate market for money.

Recognizing careworkers’ contributions to improving the social determinants of health: A call for supporting healthy carework

Workers engaged in reproductive labor—the caring work that maintains society and supports its growth—contribute to societal health while also enduring the harms of precarious labor and substantial work stress. How can we conceptualize the effects of reproductive labor on workers and society simultaneously? In this commentary, we analyze four types of more relational and less relational careworkers—homeless shelter workers, school food workers, home care aides, and household cleaners—during the COVID-19 pandemic. We then make a case for a new model of societal health that recognizes the contributions of careworkers and healthy carework. Our model includes multi-sectoral social policies supporting both worker health and societal health and acknowledges several dimensions of work stress for careworkers that have received insufficient attention. Ultimately, we argue that the effects of reproductive labor on workers and society must be considered jointly, a recognition that offers an urgent vision for repairing and advancing societal health.

Women’s Equality and the COVID-19 Caregiving Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, but did not create, the caregiving crisis in the United States: for most people, it was already a major ordeal to provide reproductive labor. The caregiving crisis was less visible before the pandemic because it was suffered unequally, in part due to the different positions of American women. Some women paid other women to do care work, women received differing sets of benefits from federal and state governments, and some women got far more support from their employers than did others. Pandemic-induced shocks, including the closure of K–12 schools and childcare centers, and reduced access to domestic workers and elder care workers, seemed to have triggered a closer alignment of perspectives and interests among diverse women. Although women’s demands for support seem to have pushed the Biden administration to propose more expansive family policies, stereotypes and norms that marginalize care work and care workers within families and across the economy also need to change to achieve equality for women.

The Racializing Womb: Surrogacy and Epigenetic Kinship

In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the womb is often figured as a holding environment that brings the child of commissioning parents to fruition but does not shape fetal identity. This article probes the racial imaginary of such a figuration—what I term the “nonracializing womb”—where gestation is seen as peripheral to racial transmission. Drawing on feminist science studies frameworks and data from interviews with parents who commissioned surrogates, this article traces the cultural politics of the nonracializing womb, positioning it as an index for broader understandings of race, reproductive labor, and kinship that hinge on nuclear and biogenetic forms. It then problematizes this figure of gestation by engaging emerging research on environmental epigenetics, which offers a lively model of pregnancy as shaping fetal biology, blurring the lines between surrogate and fetus. I argue that epigenetics offers a resource to reimagine gestation as a racializing process, by theorizing race not as solely genetic, but as relational, socio-environmental, and forged through distributed kinship lineages.

“Platformization” beyond the Point of Production

Outside of the literature focusing on the platformization of specific “informal” feminized and racialized sectors, especially care and domestic work, in which reproductive labor has been traditionally carried out, there is a dearth of research on platforms from long-term and intersectional perspectives that go beyond the mere male/female balance. This essay, based on ongoing research and founded on a series of interviews with ride-hailing and food-delivery platform workers in London and Paris, explores the impact of digi-talization in two male-dominated sectors. It shows how reproductive labor weighs on the lives of platform workers, determining their tactics, strategies, and working patterns.

Unequal Reach: Cyclical and Amplifying Ties Among Agricultural and Oilfield Workers in Texas

What kinds of ties do agricultural and oil and gas workers form in the field, and how do they use them later on? Why do they use them differently? Scholarship highlights how weak ties can link people to valuable information, while strong ties can be critical for day-to-day survival. Yet many mechanisms affect how workers form and use social networks over time and space. Drawing on 60 interviews and observations with agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas, I examine how both groups form strong ties of fictive kinship when living together in the field far from home—pooling resources, sharing reproductive labor, and using the discourse of family to describe these relationships. Then I examine how they use these ties very differently later in practice. Oilfield workers often use their fictive kin ties to move up and around the industry across space, time, and companies: amplifying ties. In contrast, agricultural workers renew the same strong ties for survival from season to season, maintaining cyclical ties. The comparison highlights how industry mobility ladders, tempos, and geographies affect how workers can use their networks in practice. While both agricultural and oilfield workers become fictive kin in situations of intense proximity, structural differences give their networks unequal reach.

Analisis Peran Gender Suami Dan Istri Dalam Rumah Tangga Penenun Kain Songket (Studi Kasus Di Kelurahan Tuan Kentang Kecamatan Seberang Ulu 1 Kota Palembang)

This study aims to analyze and describe gender equality in the household of female songket weavers in Tuan Kentang Village, Seberang Ulu 1 District, Palembang City. This study uses Harvard Analysis. The method used in this research is qualitative research methods. Data collection methods are observation, in-depth interviews and documentation. There are 7 informants in this study. The activity profile includes a description of the reproductive, productive and social division of labor. The access and control profile includes a description of the level of equity in access to resources, access to benefits, control over resources and control over benefits in the household. The results showed that, the household activities profile of women weaving Songket fabrics in Tuan Kentang Village is dominated by activities that are gender biased or have not provided equality for women (including the division of productive labor and the division of social labor). Meanwhile, the division of reproductive labor has a gender perspective in which control of benefits is carried out jointly between male and female. The access and control profile of resources and benefits in the household is generally responsive or women have a high degree of equality in access to and control of resources and benefits.

Wetnurse Politics in Spenser’s View and Jones’ Arte and Science

This essay places Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) into conversation with John Jones’ 1579 nursing manual Arte and Science in order to contextualize Spenser’s medical solution to Irish rebellion. For both, the Irish wetnurse, who controlled the political system of fosterage undermining England’s agenda in Ireland, is central to the corporate identity of a conjoined Anglo-Irish kingdom. A View’s relationship to Jones’ text reveals the vexed ontological landscape of England’s early imperial self-fashioning, which linked the re-engineering of the genetic nature of colonial bodies to the management of women’s reproductive labor.