Around midsummer this year, my partner and I will welcome our first child into the world. I have thought long and hard about whether or not to say anything in this newsletter, committed as we are to our privacy. But, ultimately, it is becoming harder and harder to write every week without referencing our decision because it inflects not just my thoughts but also my research.

Last summer, I began formulating the idea of a reproductive economy in contrast to a productive one: an economy that would prioritise reproductive labour, and each person's capacity to contribute reproductively. By reproductive labour I, in no way, mean genetic reproduction. Rather, I mean creating the conditions for human beings and our more-than-human kin to flourish.

Perhaps my subconscious is always a couple of steps ahead of me, because just a few weeks later I realised I was no longer afraid of motherhood. My work investigating how to best protect Earth's body had spilled into a desire to nurture and care for her body, and then transformed into a profound need to nurture and care for the bodies I love. This has informed every relationship I have, and opened me up to introducing this new, and wonderful, relationship in my life. Understanding the importance of reproductive labour, understanding it as the trellis which supports Life, negated previous fears I had held dearly about losing my identity or my time or my freedom through motherhood. It helped me understand how much we all engage in reproductive labour every day, taking care of our friends and nurturing our families and tending the soils. It helped me to feel that purpose is found in that very inter-relationality.

But actually becoming pregnant brought a narrower focus into view: motherhood, and its often tense relationship with women's liberation. For many feminists in the Minority world, entering the productive economy was understood as the path to female emancipation. But if productivity is the key to our liberation—an implicit bias which underpins political ideologies from capitalism to fully automated luxury communism—who is doing the necessary reproductive labour to support a "productive" society? Even in "fully automated luxury communism", which envisions liberating all people from work and equitably distributing resources through a robot class, that reproductive labour may no longer be offset down the gender or racial hierarchy to be performed by some invisible woman, but it will still be offset through the exploitation of Earth's body. 

How, then, do we come to value – rather than seek to escape – reproductive labour?

A Brief History of Minority Feminism

Minority feminism has consistently—and critically—been devoted to liberating women from reproductive slavery. Reproductive slavery takes different forms around the world (and is making a stunning comeback in the United States) but boils down to men controlling women's bodies as a site of reproduction and labour in order to reproduce society. This goes beyond merely having children. Capitalism is inherently dependent on extracting free labour from certain groups so that other groups are freed up to become produce economic output for the economy. Simply: reproductive labour is the invisible work that keeps people alive so that they may then go out into the world and make money. Silvia Federici, who I interviewed, gives an excellent account in Caliban and the Witch of how this enclosure of reproductive labour in the Middle Ages instigated the witch trials and an enormous regression in women's autonomy: For the elite to be capitalists, most men had to be wage slaves, and all women had to be slaves. 

Over the past 500+ years, then, we've had this contrast between productive labour and reproductive slavery. It is perfectly understandable why Minority feminism first sought to liberate women from that slavery. However, their analysis was, arguably, ahistorical. Minority feminism conflated reproductive labour with reproductive slavery, and productive labour with agency. This was probably because women who were writing feminist pamphlets in the 18th and 19th centuries also belonged to an elite class who employed others to do their reproductive labour for them. It was seen as something to escape from (and still is today in many circles). 

This was the environment Simone de Beauvoir, godmother of modern feminism, was writing in. Her famous book, The Second Sex, paved the way for both second-wave feminism and, latterly, queer theory, which has subsumed much Minority feminist thought over the past two decades. I haven't yet finished reading de Beauvoir's offering but, while there are some true insights and beautiful turns of phrase, often it reveals her own thinly-veiled misogyny towards women. She describes women as the most fragile of all females, warns against women being left "misshapen" by pregnancy, and describes the process of gestation as a bodily revolt from which the woman gains no benefit. Importantly, de Beauvoir contrasts not just productivity against reproductivity, but individuality against reproductivity.

De Beauvoir essentially claims that the female body is a vessel against which the male body asserts itself, through which the species affirms itself, and by which the woman experiences terminal subjugation. She casts women's virtue as shaking off the demands of the female form, demands she insists mirrors society's, as if both society and the female body are in lockstep to oppress the very possibility of "woman" in order to exploit her. Women, she writes, are alienated, over and over again in the course of their lives, from their bodies until the sweet release of menopause, wherein "she is freed from the servitudes of the female...she is no longer prey to powers that submerge her: she is consistent with herself."

De Beauvoir was consistent in this philosophy throughout her life. She rejected the institutions of marriage and motherhood, and wrote widely on how both served to enslave women to men and the species more broadly. With her lover, Sartre, she remained committed to the theory of existentialism which broadly claimed our lives have no meaning or purpose other what we ourselves can generate. But, for her, the authenticity of making meaning through mothering was questionable: In a time of true reproductive slavery, would a women's choice to have children ever be freely made? Better to commit oneself to one's absolute individuality, as both Sartre and de Beauvoir did, and produce a life worth living.

This follows neatly on from the philosophy of the Enlightenment which promoted Man's intellect above all else, rejecting the limitations of the corporeal form which were overcome every decade with new technological leaps which granted Europeans huge control over their environments. And it was only this environment which could have birthed existentialism, one in which human beings' inter-relationality to the world was shrouded by the industrialisation of convenience, so that all one's material needs were met, if one were rich enough, by invisible reproductive labour, enabling "great minds" to surpass their biology and even society, until they themselves were the sole captain on the ship of adventure known as life, sailing towards yet undiscovered shores of purpose.

This mentality held true throughout the second-wave feminist movement, where women’s liberation from domesticity was granted through access to the workplace. And while it certainly liberated many women from the home in the Minority World, it did so at a time of global trade and neo-colonial economic policies which ensured a steady influx of cheap goods and labour. The movement didn't free women from reproductive slavery—it offset that work to invisible workers of the Majority World so that women in the Minority World could enter into the workforce and create economic output. Poor and racialised women aren't the only victims: Earth's body, too, is raided to provide for us what we don't have time to provide ourselves. She is exploited to produce civilisation, just as women are exploited to maintain it.

The Feminism We Need Now

Civilisation is the myth that just won't die, and the emancipatory politics of Minority feminism insist on reaching women in every corner of the world to liberate them from their gender roles and make them equal and participating citizens. This extends to eco-feminism. There are eco-feminists who invoke a metaphysical relationship between women and Earth to promote care-giving and mothering as essential qualities in environmentalism. These writers and activists are often based in the Majority World, like Vandana Shiva. On the other side are Minority eco-feminists who reject this position as eco-maternalism, warning it affirms sexist notions about women's place in society. In Beyond Mothering Earth, scholar Sherilyn MacGregor insists that rather than focus on arguments which "celebrate women’s caring for people and the planet", we should instead define a new political identity, a "feminist ecological citizenship". This identity “has the potential to be a positive political identity that allows women to express their gender-related concerns for environmental quality but that does not forever tie women (in general) to the private sphere of care and maternal virtue.”

I think McGregor's argument against permanently tying women to "the private sphere of care and maternal virtue" is sound. The problem I have with it is assuming that care belongs to the private sphere alone. In this way, she contrasts reproductive labour with citizenship, making the two seem mutually exclusive—a neat continuation of de Beauvoir’s assertions that women’s individuality was ultimately and absolutely restricted by the demands of reproductive labour. What this argument fails to grasp is that for the vast majority of human existence, reproductive labour was not contained to one side of the sex binary. Prior to structural inequality, almost everyone's labour was reproductive, for everyone actively participated in the care of their environment, maintenance of their relationships, and furthering of their culture. Who hunted while who gathered becomes a question of little importance when each task is considered fundamental to society's well-being and survival.

Perhaps this is where the breakdown of the gender binary needs to get to: Not the erasure of difference but the uniformity of purpose, with each person actively contributing what they can to the sustenance of their community and environment. To me, this is a feminism of reproduction—or, to play on the concept of regenerative economies, a regenerative feminism.

I believe reclaiming reproductive labour is critical to liberating women and Earth from the demands of patriarchal productivity. I watch with enormous curiosity as young women flock to the Right and abandon feminism, aware they find something about Leftist discourse alienating. I have spoken to mothers on the Left who feel there is little place for them to politically identify with what they consider the most important task in their lives: raising their children. And my eyes have been opened by my own partner who, from the very beginning, never considered the sex binary of reproductive labour to be valid, given he was raised by a father whose culture dictates that men do all the cooking and cleaning. Through these conversations, I have come to see that what we will each provide as parents will be one and the same. And, through grasping parenting as a collective reproductive labour — shared not just between us, but also our friends and families — the idea of motherhood and fatherhood has become expansive rather than restrictive.

When I first started Planet: Critical, I couldn't imagine growing my own food or living in community, let alone becoming a mother. All that work seemed too bound by space and time, it seemed like too big a demand, too limiting on what I most cherished, my freedom. Now I crave being close to the body of the Earth and the bodies of those I love. Now I look forward to devoting my days to nourishing those bodies as well as their minds. Now I no longer see any tension between that vision and my work. In fact, my research as a radical feminist is what got me here: the greatest work we can do is creating the conditions of flourishing so that those we love, and the wider world, may live meaningful lives. 

So, instead of pitting females vs citizens, what if everyone’s reproductive labour was the foundation of citizenship? What if our collective political identity was founded on the sustainable regeneration of a healthy and fulfilling society? What if our focus was not economic productivity, but ensuring the future’s stability for our communities, including those of our more-than-human kinfolk?

There is enormous room for intellectual pursuits in such a world, as the rich politics of equitable indigenous societies show us. There is more than enough room for literature and art, and medicine and travel. There is also room for defence movements and agitation. What there is no room for is abuse and domination and exploitation. There is no room for the profit motive, nor inequality. Above all, there is no room for the illusions of the individual: we do not generate ourselves single-handedly; we become, together. 

Liberation lies in the ties that bind us.

I'll be taking some time off this summer to welcome our child, and, to that end, we are both working long days at the moment so that Planet: Critical and Planet: Coordinate will keep running during those months. I'll have more info on that closer to the time, for now just know that the podcast and newsletter will not be interrupted, and all our films for Planet: Coordinate will be published before midsummer.