For a book about reproductive labor, surprisingly little of the history charted in my book Reproduction Reconceived takes place in the home (Matthiesen 2021). That was in some ways the point. I had wanted to explore how increasing inequality and precarity at the end of the twentieth century forced different people's family making into various societal margins. In the process, I found that maintaining family under violent systems like mass incarceration or for-profit health care produced new, historically specific forms of reproductive exploitation outside of the home. Inspired by both Sarah Haley's (2016: 160) notion of the “domestic carceral sphere” produced by Jim Crow capitalism and social reproduction theory that looks to the many institutions that reproduce the working class, I deliberately sought to stretch the 1970s Marxist feminist insight that the most important shop floor was the home, not the factory.1 What forms did...
The Discipline Of Family: Queering the History of Reproductive Labor
Sara Matthiesen is associate professor of history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University. Her first book, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (2021), shows how incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, disease, parentage laws, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. It received the 2022 Sara A. Whaley Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. She is currently working on a history of the multiracial, feminist activism that opposed state and medical control of abortion throughout the era of choice.
Sara Matthiesen; The Discipline Of Family: Queering the History of Reproductive Labor. GLQ 1 October 2024; 30 (4): 541–545. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11331042
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