Epilogue: Pandemic Politics and the Repoliticization of Reproductive Labor
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Published:September 2024
The epilogue considers what the political, corporate, and activist responses to the coronavirus pandemic reveal about the innovation/reproduction binary. Corporations are looking to capitalize on this moment. For example, the company CareRev is positioning its digital platform—which uses an Uber-style business model to offer on-demand nurses to hospitals—as the solution to the problems in nursing, such as nurse burnout. Rather than fundamentally altering the structure of labor, such fixes threaten to exacerbate the stratification of reproductive labor and worsen the working conditions of care workers. The epilogue also argues that some political responses to the crisis, alongside long-standing activism and social movements, point the way to a future in which reproductive labor is properly valued. The epilogue turns to the concept of interdependency to show how we can revalue care and call for social responsibility for reproductive labor.
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