Life's Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (original) (raw)

2006, Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Work pervades my home, often aggravatingly so, but also in comfortable ways. It's always nice to escape the office some days. According to the editors of the compilation Life's Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction, this intimate situation is a condition of modernity and of neoliberal capitalism. The work and home spheres snarl, but in such everyday, banal, and what they deem ''commonsense'' ways, that the modern subject simply internalizes the norm of homework. Indeed, the editors and chapter authors insist that this harkens a wholly new neoliberal subjectivity. Work (waged and not) constitutes subjects; subjects are workers. The editors' goal in compiling these nine chapters is to argue that reproductive work is as founding a process for capitalism and capitalist subjectivity as is wage labor. This argument is not new of course; generations of feminist Marxists have likewise maintained that labors of love, what are often considered reproductive ''nonwork'' to those focusing too sharply on production, are central to capitalist economies. Indeed, feminists have shown that social reproduction is conceptually bound to, but not separate from, production. What editors Mitchell, Marston, and Katz seek to add is that the binary of the two forms (i.e., work and nonwork) are indistinguishable in our times (p. 3). The spatial and subjective classifications of work/nonwork are merged into ''life's work.'' This contention raises the need, as the editors show, of reconceptualizing the subjectivity of workers, of social re/producers. For certainly worker-subjects must themselves remake the murky overlays of identities and their spaces. The editors emphasize the issue of subjectivity and highlight the importance of theorizing interspatiality and practice. With subjectivity, the editors also insist a coterminous condition of state and economic devolution: the state and employers have each lessened their responsibilities to the worker. The result? A constant worker who accepts this identity, and who seems to accept as well the devolution of the state and economic regime. This devolution, the editors suggest, has become ''the accepted norm through time as it infiltrates and articulates with other commonsense understandings in society'' (p. 4). The chapter contributors flesh out the details and scenarios of the editors' framing in their more empirically based chapters; the studies are predominantly qualitative. As with most edited collections, the chapters are