Seminar: Conversations on Social Reproduction

Placing heterosexuality and women’s appropriation by men at the core of social reproduction’s analysis

WHEN: Friday 8th November 2024, 12pm – 1pm (GMT) / 5.30pm – 6.30pm (IST)

WHERE: Online Online (MS Teams)

Seminar Speaker:

Jules Falquet is Professor in Philosophy at the Paris 8 - St Denis University, and a member of the LLCP (Studies and Research about Contemporary Philosophy’s Logics Unit). She works in a feminist perspective on Social Movements resisting Globalization (mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean), Women’s Migration and Neoliberal transformation of Labor, Violence, and Epistemology (Interlocking systems of oppression, Decolonial feminism, French materialist feminism), guided by a Wittigian and intersectional perspective.

Abstract:

In this seminar, I will first sketch the bases of French materialist feminist analysis of social reproduction. I will present the concept of "structural social relations of appropriation" of women by men, that create both men and women as antagonic sex classes(Guillaumin, 1978). This private and collective appropriation has concrete manifestations, that I will also present, insisting on the physical responsibility for the well being of all members of the husband’s group, including the adult male himself. I will also insist on the concept of ‘‘straight mind’’ developed by Monique Wittig (1981) to designate the ideology of "sexual difference’’. I will explain how Wittig conceptualized heterosexuality as a political system that organizes household, family and community. Indeed, the logics of household, family and community’ and their concrete practices are scarcely discussed as heterosexual and organized around women’s appropriation by men in social reproduction theory. I will also highlight racial, class and colonial logics of heterosexuality.

Then, I will explain why it is necessary to replace the analysis of heterosexuality and of women’s appropriation as I defined them, at the core of social reproduction theorization. Care theories, indeed, lack of an analysis about the care work produced by the spouses for healthy, adult husbands, under-covered by ‘‘love’’. Then, I will show that not only bosses and capital, but husbands and men as a sex class, get very concrete and direct benefits from women’s domestic and community work. Finally, I will analyse the central question of social reproduction: ‘‘the producer’s production’’. I will demonstrate that it can be analyzed as procreational work undertook by women and organized through ‘‘straight bind’’ —the concept I propose to shed a new light on the whole process.

The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946).

For more information about the project, please email Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk.