Historical Materialism 24.

2 (2016) 38–60

brill.com/hima

Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction

Feminisms
Toward an Integrative Ontology

Susan Ferguson
Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario
[email protected]

Abstract

Seeking to capture the multi-layered, contradictory, nature of subjectivities and social

positions through a framework which insists upon the complex, dynamic nature
of the social, intersectionality feminism has inspired Marxist-Feminists to push
the social-reproduction feminism paradigm beyond a narrow preoccupation with
gender/class relations. Yet even its most politically radical articulations stop short
of fully theorising the integrative logic they espouse. This article explores the roots of
this under-theorisation, and suggests that a more fully integrative ontology informs
certain formulations of social-reproduction feminism. In understanding the social as
constituted by practical human activity whose object (the social and natural world)
is organised capitalistically, social-reproduction feminism highlights the dialectical
relationship between the capitalist whole and its differentiated parts. The challenge
for Marxist-Feminism is to embrace this dialectical approach while building on the
insights of intersectionality feminism to more convincingly capture the unity of a
complex, diverse social whole.

Keywords

social-reproduction theory – intersectionality feminism – feminist theory – integrative

ontology – Marxism

I would like to thank Johanna Brenner, David Camfield, Nancy Holmstrom and Meg Luxton,
as well as the Historical Materialism special-issue editors and anonymous reviewers who
have all pushed me to clarify and improve my analysis; and I am, as always, deeply grateful to
David McNally for our on-going conversations and his patience in helping me decipher and
see more fully the relevance of Marxist dialectics.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341471

Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 39

Anti-racist feminist theories of intersectionality evoke an inclusive, integrative

image of the social, one that has inspired many rich, nuanced accounts of the
ways distinct, sometimes contradictory, power relations weave in and through
everyday experiences. Such a complex reading moves feminist theory well
beyond abstract essentialism and analytic binaries. Yet, since intersectionality
feminism’s earliest formulations, critics and supporters have questioned the
framework’s theoretical coherence – challenging, in particular, its success
in clearly conceptualising and articulating the logic by which multiple and
contradictory forms of oppression relate to each other and to the social totality
they comprise.1 That is, many working within the intersectionality-feminism
paradigm acknowledge the difficulty of theorising the ways in which distinct
partial relations of gender, race, sexuality, and so on comprise an integral,
unified whole.
Feminists adopting a social-reproduction perspective have also struggled
to articulate and explain the differentiated-yet-unified experience of multiple
oppressions. They have tended to conceptualise the social narrowly, often in
structuralist terms that privilege relations of gender and class above others.2
And those who do consider the racialisation of social-reproductive labour only
rarely attempt to offer a coherent explanation of how and why racial (or other
oppressive) dynamics are internally related to class exploitation.3 Without
excusing this apparent resistance to theorising social relations other than class
and gender, I want to turn our attention to the potential for social-reproduction
feminism to move beyond its inherited limitations, as well as those of the
intersectionality-feminist framework, in order to offer a coherent account of
a complex social whole. Briefly, in historicising the work it takes to reproduce
human labour-power, and positing it as essential to capital’s existence but not
directly under capital’s control, social-reproduction feminism broadens and
complicates our understanding of labour, conceiving of it as a ‘concrete unity’,4
an ontological category that captures – and a lived experience that mediates
and produces – a richly differentiated, historical, and contradictory totality.
This multi-dimensional concept of labour (or human practical activity)
invites a dialectical understanding of the social that can move us beyond the
narrow rigidity of structuralist accounts without encountering the theoretical

1 See Anthias 2012; Davis 2008; Dhamoon 2011; Kerner 2012; Nash 2008; Simien and Hancock
2011; Zack 2005.
2 See Ferguson 1999, 2008; Luxton 2006; Luxton, Ferguson, Schein and Carty 2014.
3 For distinct approaches to racialising social-reproduction feminism, see Arat-Koç 2006;
Bakker and Silvey (eds.) 2008; Ferguson and McNally 2014; and Hennessey 2013.
4 Sayers 1985, p. 16.

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40 Ferguson

conundrums posed by intersectionality feminism. It allows us, in other words,

to develop a rigorous integrative theory of the social.5

A Critical Appraisal of Intersectionality Feminism

The historical provenance of the term ‘intersectionality feminism’ – if not

the concept – is generally traced to legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw.6 Her
1989 book, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, capped a decade
in which activists and scholars had been troubling the false essentialism,
structuralism and binary thinking that characterised much ‘second wave’
feminism.7 Intersectionality feminism appeared to offer a solution: here was a
framework flexible enough to accommodate any number of oppressive forms
while also acknowledging that distinct oppressions reinforce and contradict
each other. And it accomplished this without capitulating to a postmodern
fragmentation or textualisation of the social. From this perspective, one could
‘grapple with the messiness of subjectivity’8 as it is understood to take shape
within a complex field of social relations in which each and every axis of
oppression converges with and diverges from every other axis of oppression.

5 Not all Marxists agree that it is possible to conceptualise the social in its totality. Capitalism,
they remind us, is and must be a fragmenting experience, and there simply is no standpoint
from which the entirety of the social comes into view (see, for example, Gibson-Graham 1996).
While there is much to such claims, they are easily accommodated by the Hegelian-Marxist
conception of a totality which is reconstructed in thought by means of its mediations. That is,
to conceive of a dialectical totality is to emphasise its dynamic, its coming-into-being, to see
it not as a ‘thing’ but as ‘a process of totalisation that unifies (without suppressing) the partial
totalities constitutive of it’ (McNally 2015, p. 142, emphasis in original). The existence of the
social whole cannot therefore be ‘seen’ or ‘captured’ in its totality, but it is nonetheless a
mediating ‘presence’ or ‘dynamic’ relating to and within discrete aspects of the (fragmented)
social – if it were not, one would have to ask: fragments of what? And it is this ontological
status of the totalising process that Hegelian-Marxist dialectics strives to grasp.
6 The multidimensionality and simultaneity of oppressions was arguably first articulated by
Sojourner Truth’s famous challenge to the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. While
the Cohambee River Collective is usually credited with its more modern articulation, the
concept of intersectionality is developed by African feminist Awa Thiam in her 1978 book,
La Parole aux négresses (see Mianda 1997).
7 The history of Second Wave feminism is complex, with greater breadth of politicisation
than is often suggested. See Vogel 1995, pp. 100–10, for a critique of ‘straw feminism’. Still,
mainstream and Marxist feminisms of this era did struggle (and failed) to theoretically
account for racialisation and sexual difference.
8 Nash 2008, p. 4.

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 41

Unlike most Marxist-Feminist theories, intersectionality feminism refuses to

name any given social axis as foundational, or primary. The relations of class
do not necessarily determine the shape and logic of women’s experiences, any
more than do the social relations that attend sexuality, gender or ability. At the
same time, class is not to be ignored.9
Today the concept of intersectionality is considered a ‘cornerstone of
feminist discussion and scholarship around the world’.10 Descriptively flexible
and deeply resonant, it is frequently invoked as a ‘buzzword’ or ‘heuristic
device’.11 Yet its ubiquity has not prevented critics (largely within its own
ranks) from undertaking an on-going project of ‘explication, interrogation and
development’,12 posing questions about its methodological and ontological
coherence: How does one identify which oppressions are salient, and under
what social conditions? Are oppressions best conceived as identities or social
positions? Are oppressions irreducible, expressions of distinct ontologies?
How precisely do the various axes of oppression intersect? Is there some social
force that compels and shapes that interaction? If so, what is it, and why?
According to Yuval-Davis, responses to these questions divide proponents of
intersectionality feminism into two ‘camps’.13 The first adheres to an ‘additive’
or ‘cumulative’ model in which existing oppressions intersect under certain
historical conditions to produce a ‘multiply-burdened’ subject.14 Crenshaw
belongs in this ‘camp’, portraying the social in spatial terms in which, to use
her example, the crossroads of Colonialism and Patriarchy Streets represents
a node of multiple oppressions. Identities and experiences here emerge from
socio-specific spaces and times that cannot be reductively explained by any
singular, over-arching logic.15 Rather, understanding their distinct oppressive
dynamics, and articulating the means and goals of resisting oppression, requires
concrete socio-historical investigation and informed political judgement. Such
an approach reveals otherwise-hidden power relations and can, as Crenshaw

9 While the intersectionality framework creates the theoretical space for class to be
considered, its advocates often treat class as a narrow economic category, and many fail
to consider it all together.
10 Ackerly and McDermott 2012, p. 367.
11 Davis 2008, p. 68.
12 Ackerly and McDermott 2012, p. 367. See Davis 2008, p. 75, for a snapshot of the literature.
Also see Butler 1990; Bannerji 2005; McCall 2005; Nash 2008; Winker and Degele 2011.
13 Yuval-Davis 2006, p. 195. The term ‘camp’ is in scare-quotes because each ‘camp’s’
adherents do not rigidly subscribe to and/or defend the distinctions Yuval-Davis draws.
14 Nash 2008, pp. 6, 7.
15 I return to the question of causal explanation, determinism and over-arching dynamics
below.

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42 Ferguson

and her co-authors have recently suggested, ‘create a connection around

shared experiences of discrimination, marginalization and privilege’.16
Because much of the work adopting this model focuses on ‘locating practices
that injure multiply marginalized subjects’,17 analysis tends to reside at the
micro-level, featuring empirical investigations revealing which oppressive
relations are at play, and how and why these exert influence in any given socio-
historical moment. Broader dynamics informing the emergence and on-going
systemic reproduction of oppressive relations are not generally acknowledged
or examined. That is, these accounts rarely ask why or how oppressive relations
shape the distinct nodal experiences and identities in the ways that they do –
whether there is anything specific to their socio-historic positioning that limits
the range of possible configurations. Rather, Colonialism and Patriarchy Streets
appear as independent, pre-existing, trans-historical strands of reality. They
are positioned as parts of an ostensibly empty, abstract field that somehow
(due to certain historical contingencies perhaps) come into contact with each
other. The question of a systemic logic conditioning particular configurations
of multiply-oppressive experiences simply is not investigated. Ironically, this
image of the social reproduces precisely that which Crenshaw originally sought
to correct: an essentialised understanding of specific oppressions. Patriarchy
and colonialism may intersect, and even affect each other at their points of
intersection, but they are conceived as ontologically distinct systems.18 They
combine to create a wider reality, but are not themselves constitutive of
and constituted by that reality. The social whole thus retreats from view,
significant only as a vessel or neutral field containing the sum of its distinct,
intersecting parts.
How we conceptualise the social matters in developing effective political
strategies.19 The complex and differentiated social totality advanced by
intersectionality feminism suggests that a transformative politics requires
cross-movement political solidarity – a position that is regularly counter-
posed to crude Marxist arguments to prioritise a narrowly-construed class
politics over movement politics. Yet an additive model fails to show a logical,

16 Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays and Tomlinson 2013, p. 206.

17 Nash 2008, p. 12.
18 See Dhamoon 2011, p. 233; Nash 2008, pp. 6–7; and Yuval-Davis 2006, pp. 195–8, for
elaborations on these criticisms. See Carbado et al. for a partial rebuttal (Carbado,
Crenshaw, Mays and Tomlinson 2013, p. 308).
19 Bilge 2013 cautions against theoretical hair-splitting, seeing it as a sign of a politically-
neutralising hegemonic feminist academicism. While her concern is well-placed, striving
for theoretical clarity is not necessarily depoliticising.

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 43

historical necessity for the solidarity it espouses. Instead, it can only rely on
moral appeals to respect differences and acknowledge ‘shared experiences of
discrimination’. A more compelling case for solidarity requires a conception
of the diverse-yet-unified nature of power, one that illustrates how oppressions
which sometimes contradict each other also systematically uphold an unfree
and punishing world. By explaining that oppressed subjects share more than
just experiences of discrimination – that they collectively constitute (and thus
can collectively challenge) an over-arching set of power relations – a robust
theory of the social whole reveals a socio-material logic for political solidarity.
The second ‘camp’ within intersectionality feminism goes some way toward
theorising power in these terms. Rather than positioning oppressive relations as
pre-existing, distinct-yet-merging and -diverging structures, the ‘constitutive’20
model proposes that oppression is an internally relational process. ‘Race, gender,
sexuality, and class, among other categories, are produced through each other,
securing both privilege and oppression simultaneously’.21 They do not pre-exist
in any fixed form, but are continuously (re)inventing themselves in relationship
with each other. In this case, the imagery of enmeshment in which distinct
oppressions inhabit each other supplants street-map metaphors, and the
analytic goal shifts from describing the complexity of oppressive experiences
to explaining their emergence, dynamic and reproduction.22 Moreover, some
within this ‘camp’ highlight the social totality, stressing that power resides not
just within the various partial relations, but across them, evidence of their
integral connections. ‘Distinctive systems of oppression . . . [are] part of one
overarching structure of domination’, writes Patricia Hill Collins, adding that
‘each system needs the others in order to function’.23
Theorising these broader power relations is a priority for those aiming to
re-politicise a paradigm they fear has been de-radicalised by academic and
mainstream feminism. Dhamoon, for instance, cautions against the tendency
to impose categorial stability and to reify any particular configuration
of differences, urging a focus ‘on what the interaction [among practices

20 Yuval-Davis 2006, p. 195.

21 Nash 2008, p. 10.
22 See, for example, Yuval-Davis 2006, p. 195. Crenshaw and others who take an additive
approach will describe oppressions as interdependent, but this is asserted rather than
explained.
23 Hill Collins 1990, p. 222. Hill Collins uses the term ‘interlocking’ to evoke the necessary
relation of systems of oppression in the broader social context (as opposed to the more
contingent ‘intersectional’ historical moments).

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44 Ferguson

of gendering, racialisation, etc.] reveals about power’.24 The analytic task

is to account for the ‘movement among multiple interactions and across
time, dimensions and levels’, in a way that can represent ‘the larger picture
in which differences are connected’.25 Similarly, Floya Anthias insists that
any given social moment is ‘embedded in relations of hierarchy within a
multiplicity of specific situational and conjunctural spheres’, and suggests that
a ‘translocational lens’ can highlight the wider ‘landscape of power’ without
losing sight of the immediate spatial and temporal context. She rejects
the notion of ontologically distinct social ‘systems’ which ‘intersect’ while
nonetheless retaining an understanding of the particularity of oppressions,
insisting that gender, race or other relations are ‘salient’ or have ‘an effectivity’
in and of themselves within this landscape. At the same time, each is ‘mutually
interactive’ and impossible to disassociate in actuality.26
Here we encounter open-ended conceptions of the social that appear to
avoid the difficulties of the additive perspective. Gender, race and class are
not static relations, pre-existing within an abstract social field, but practices
and processes we inherit, experience, and create anew within a constellation
of broader power relations. And the analytic gaze moves between the everyday
processes in and through which we reproduce reality and that wider social
context. Yet, despite its promise, this constitutive approach also struggles to
explain the social logic of the relationship between particular, interdependent
oppressions and the social totality they comprise. That totality is, in other
words, under-theorised.
Some within the constitutive ‘camp’ simply default to the same fragmented
notion of the social running through additive accounts of intersectionality
feminism. Yuval-Davis represents this tendency when she insists that
‘Blackness’ is ‘enmeshed’ in gender and class, but all partial relations are
ultimately discrete systems that cannot be reduced to other social divisions.27
True, oppressions are irreducible in the sense that they are not identical. But
to simply insist upon their irreducibility – without postulating or exploring an
internal relation between these parts and the social totality – is to fail to return
these conceptual categories to the messy-yet-unified experiential realm.28

24 Dhamoon 2011, p. 234.

25 Dhamoon 2011, pp. 238–9.
26 Anthias 2012, p. 130.
27 Yuval-Davis 2006, p. 195.
28 To clarify, I am not suggesting that subjects experience the world with any sort of necessary
coherence. Their experiences however are unified in the sense that we all concretely live
in and through the same totality of social relations. As a result, we do not experience,

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 45

It produces, in other words, a one-sided and abstract accounting of reality,

treating that which is analytically discrete as actually discrete.
Others in this ‘camp’ who explicitly account for the wider social context
are similarly one-sided in their understanding of power. Here broad power
relations are comprised of ever-variable configurations (or ‘matrixes’) of
partial relations, reproduced in the absence of any essential or systemic logic.
Dhamoon, for instance, refers to the ‘larger picture in which differences are
connected’ as ‘represent[ing] the shifting, messy, indeterminate, dynamic,
and multilayered movement of difference making’.29 Anthias comes closer to
naming – and thus identifying the social logic of – the broader relations at play.
Warning against a ‘methodologically nationalist approach’, she urges attention
to the ways in which different oppressions are situated in a geo-political
world that is itself hierarchically organised. As such, a translocational (or
transnational) analysis reveals complexities otherwise hidden – for example,
that ‘migrants returning to their homelands may achieve class benefits as they
display relative wealth to poorer villagers’.30 Yet it is unclear what precisely
animates this wider power. Her readers learn only that translocational power
comprises ‘multiple and complex social fields [pertaining] to both material
and discursive facets of social relations’. These fields are ‘conjunctural’, and
produce ‘no standard outcomes’.31
To be sure, insistence upon the changing, open-ended nature of the social
whole advances us beyond mechanically-determinative and functionalist
social theory. But because they conceive of power as diffuse and unknowable,
such formulations can only gesture toward an integrative logic, asserting its
existence but never identifying the actual unifying social forces involved.32
As such, these formulations risk reproducing that which intersectionality
feminism set out to critique: a fragmented and textualised conception of

for example, woman-ness and whiteness in one moment and space, and then gay-ness
and dispossession in another, even if certain specific relations are existentially more
significant than others in any given time and place. Such differentiations are significant
in our lives, but they are not lived separately.
29 Dhamoon 2011, pp. 238–9 (emphasis added).
30 Anthias 2012, p. 132. Anthias does not explicitly equate ‘translocational’ with ‘transnational’,
but is unclear about what else might constitute the former.
31 Anthias 2012, pp. 133 and 131.
32 Those, like Anthias, who propose that the logic is ‘conjunctural’ (Anthias 2012, p. 131) have
not resolved the issue: they may offer compelling explanations of particular moments,
but the social totality in this view thus comprises a collection of apparently random
historically-contingent spaces and times.

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46 Ferguson

reality.33 Without some understanding of how the social whole shapes the
parts which comprise it, it is unclear why and how oppressions interact in
the ways that they do, and why they change across broad historical periods
in the ways that they do: why, for instance, gender oppression in a specific
site and era takes the form of exiling women from places of work and into the
private sphere, while in another place and time it draws women away from
their homes and families to supply a low-wage domestic-labour job market –
why there is continuity and change over time.
As far as political strategy is concerned, acknowledging wider power
relations appears to ground the call for political solidarity in a socio-material
logic. However, so long as these relations are indeterminate – so long as the
social whole exhibits no systemic logic – that call has no necessary subjects or
direction.34 It is only when an essential integrative dynamic can be identified
as inflecting diverse relations that a potential pluralistic revolutionary subject
is revealed and positioned as the agent capable of overturning the matrixes of
interlocking power that dominate it.

Dialectics and Determination

A feminist framework that refuses the reductionism of the totalising logic of

an earlier era and mode of theorising has its obvious attractions. But it is useful
to take a closer look at that logic before rejecting all possibility of accounting
for a determinative social totality. The charge of economic class reductionism
is appropriately levied when a mechanical causality is invoked to explain the
social world in terms of the workings of capital. In this perspective, distinct
oppressions are understood to exist because (and are considered important
only insofar as) they are directly functional to capitalism. And ‘capitalism’ or
a narrowly-defined class logic is understood as a discrete social relation, its
laws of motion externally imposed upon all other relations.35 A dialectical
understanding of determination, however, is not concerned to identify simple
causality or functionality, and rejects the notion that the whole is external to
its parts. Rather it enquires into the ways in which aspects of the social (which
are themselves reciprocally determined, or co-constituted) relate within a

33 See Davis 2008. As well, Dhamoon’s ‘matrixes of meaning-making’ (Dhamoon 2011) seem
to see power primarily in discursive terms.
34 This may be why Dhamoon, for instance, seems to reduce politics to an intellectual
enterprise of ‘deconstruction’ or ‘critique’ (Dhamoon 2011, p. 239).
35 See McNally 2015.

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 47

historically given context, aiming to reveal the underlying logic that structures
those relations. This is a logic that resides in the whole. That is, at the same
time that partial relations (of class, gender, race, among others) determine or
constitute each other as well as the social totality, that totality exhibits its own
logic of reproduction. And it is this logic which structures or determines – in
the sense of exerting real pressures and placing real limits on, even if it does
not fully subsume – all its constituent partial relations.36
The social is thus a historically changing, open-ended totality, whose
reproductive logic resides in all its parts, even if its parts are not necessarily or
purely functional or reducible to the whole. In contrast to the intersectionality
paradigm, Bannerji writes, a ‘more complex [dialectical] reading’ involves
seeing the totality reflected in every aspect of the social, ‘where each little
piece of it contains the macrocosm in its microcosm “as the world in a grain of
sand” (William Wordsworth)’.37 Wider social relations, she explains elsewhere,
‘are embedded in the design of the whole society that we live in. They in-form
the overall social formation, what Marx called “the mode of production”
shaping and modifying specific life forms’.38 This is a unified (capitalist) whole,
but one that is also differentiated and contradictory. Distinct oppressions are
not reducible to each other, but their differences are expressed in and through
(and sometimes exceed) a shared logic. Understood dialectically, a totalising
narrative does not, therefore, rule out recognising, understanding and
explaining difference among its constitutive parts, and co-constitution within
a total process. It posits those parts as integral to the social reproduction of
the whole, a whole that is only ever constituted in and through a concrete,
real, history. ‘Capitalism’ as a simple abstraction does not actually exist.39
There is only concretely racialised, patriarchal, colonial capitalism,40 wherein
class is conceived as a unity of the diverse relations that produce not simply
profit or capital, but capitalism. While we can (and do need to) think about
discrete relations to understand difference, they are distinct only in the
abstract, in thought. An integrative theory is incomplete unless it moves from
this abstraction to naming the social logic informing the relations’ actual,
concrete, unity.

36 Williams 1977, pp. 83–9.

37 Bannerji 2005, p. 146.
38 Bannerji 2014, p. 128.
39 As McNally explains, ‘wholes are understood to be empty and lifeless when conceived in
abstraction from their parts’ (McNally 2015, pp. 135–6).
40 This list is of course partial.

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48 Ferguson

Intersectionality feminism does not differentiate between dialectical

and non-dialectical conceptions of determination and totality, leading its
proponents to either discount or under-theorise the integrative logic of the
social totality. Both ‘camps’ resist assigning any systemic organising principles
to the wider social whole: oppressions intersect and inhabit each other, but
they do so apparently randomly, without any necessary logic. Explaining how
and why diverse experiences interconnect in certain ways and not in others
is not simply a historical task (as some suggest).41 It is also a theoretical one
that requires abandoning arithmetic, and instead conceiving of the social
whole as something greater than the sum of its parts. It is only when we can
grasp and name the social logic and dynamism of the totality qua totality, that
we can understand how or why its parts are mutually constituted in ways
that regularly reproduce certain relations and social patterns or tendencies,
and regularly rule out others.

Theorising Integral Relations: Social-Reproduction Feminism

Social-reproduction feminism has a far more modest profile than inter­

sectionality feminism. Yet it too has many iterations, with the theoretical rigour
and explanatory power of the perspective sometimes abandoned in favour
of largely descriptive accounts. Nonetheless, those formulations of social-
reproduction feminism which view the social through the lens of the daily and
generational labour undertaken to (re)produce it provide a promising way to
theorise the integral unity of the diverse, differentiated social relations that
intersectionality feminism foregrounds. At the heart of social-reproduction
feminism is the conception of labour as broadly productive – creative not
just of economic values, but of society (and thus of life) itself. It comprises
‘the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, responsibilities and
relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis,
and intergenerationally’.42 This is not ‘labour’ as it has been understood in
mainstream economics and vulgar Marxism. Rather, it is the ‘practical human
activity’ that creates all the things, practices, people, relations and ideas
constituting the wider social totality – that which Marx and Engels identify
as ‘the first premise of all human history’.43 Gramsci, who labels this ‘work’

41 See, for example, Nash 2008, p. 13; and Anthias 2012, p. 131.
42 Laslett and Brenner 1989, p. 382.
43 Marx 1964, p. 111; Marx and Engels 1932, Volume 1, Chapter 1. If this expansive understanding
of labour is indeed a premise of history, its internal differentiation (over time and across

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 49

(thereby differentiating it from ‘labour’ for capital), emphasises the ontological

significance of Marx’s and Engels’s insight: it is ‘the discovery that the relations
between the social and natural orders are mediated by work, by man’s
theoretical and practical activity . . . [that] provides a basis for the subsequent
development of an historical, dialectical conception of the world, which
understands movement and change . . . and which conceives the contemporary
world as a synthesis of the past, of all past generations, which projects itself
into the future’.44 In other words, in partaking of practical human activity we
(all) partake of a wider reality – both in the sense of expressing that reality, and
helping to create it anew. Work – broadly conceived – is the ontological premise
of an integrated (albeit diverse) unity.45 And while the significance of this has
not always been evident to social-reproduction feminists, the paradigm equips
us with the necessary concepts and language to make it evident.46
In beginning from an expansive – yet differentiated – notion of labour (or
work), social-reproduction feminism is not simply expanding the concept
of labour in order to draw attention to and valorise a sphere of activity and
set of relations that have hitherto been naturalised and largely neglected.
It is – crucially – advancing an argument about the internal relation between
reproductive and productive labour.47 This argument was articulated early
on by Lise Vogel in her 1983 book, Marxism and the Oppression of Women:
Toward a Unitary Theory. Vogel insists that not only is the working-class family
the dominant social site for the reproduction of labour-power, but that it
is the interdependent (albeit contradictory) nature of the relationship
between the household and the workplace which ensures that women’s

space) needs to be explained. An exclusive focus on any particular form of labour (value-
creating, or domestic, or peasant, for instance) risks occluding the wider picture.
44 Gramsci 1971, pp. 34–5.
45 Marx goes on from these early writings to stress the many-sidedness of labour, between
modes of production and within capitalism: concrete and abstract; productive and non-
productive; labour in general and valorisation in particular.
46 Marx uses the term ‘social reproduction’ to refer to the over-arching regeneration of
capitalism: the institutions and processes that allow ‘productive’ relations to flourish as
well as the direct production-relations themselves. Social-reproduction feminists tend
to use the term to refer only to those processes outside of direct production-relations
that are necessary to capitalism’s survival (generally speaking, the generational and daily
reproduction of workers). My usage moves between the two, but strives for clarity of
meaning with descriptives such as ‘overall’ or ‘total’ when referring to the Marxian usage.
47 Thus the task is not to reduce labour-in-general to one or another form, but to show the
complex unity of all forms within the social whole, in this case within a capitalist social
whole.

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50 Ferguson

oppression under capitalism will persist. Women’s oppression ‘pivots on the

social significance of domestic labour for capital – the fact that the production
and reproduction of labour-power is an essential condition undergirding the
dynamic of the capitalist system, making it possible for capitalism to reproduce
itself’.48 The maintenance of capitalist social power thus hinges on finding
ways to regulate social reproduction in general, and women’s bio-physical
capacities to reproduce the next generation in particular.49
This is not a functionalist argument: capital’s need for the social re­produc­
tion of labour does not necessitate the family form and women’s oppression
(in the sense of causing it to come into being). At one level, capital is agnostic
about how it ‘gets’ the labour it exploits, and thus other forms of social
reproduction (namely labour-camps, slavery, migration, prisons) are available
to it, or can be imagined. But the fact of capital’s need does explain why a highly
effective institution – the privatised household – is trumpeted and reinforced
(through sexist legislation, educational systems, social-welfare practices, for
example), and thereby entrenched in capitalist societies (as much as it was
inherited from pre-capitalist societies and reshaped through time). It is this
essential relationship between the productive and reproductive needs of a
capitalist social formation, and not a transhistorical patriarchal impulse, then,
that forms the critical socio-material condition making women’s oppression
possible and probable under capitalism. Put another way, the continuity of
women’s oppression across different historical junctures and locations is thus
explained by the specifically capitalist differentiation between reproductive
and productive labour, and its impulse to privatise the former.
Later social-reproduction feminists developed and expanded this insight,
exploring the state’s role in upholding and complementing the family.50
In demonstrating that state, household and market are integrally linked (in
contradictory but necessary ways) in the process of reproducing the capitalist
social formation as a whole, social-reproduction feminism is a powerful
analytic framework that avoids the difficulties of an additive account. As
Luxton writes, ‘By developing a class analysis that shows how the production
of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated
process, social reproduction does more than identify the activities involved
in the daily and generation[al] reproduction of daily life. It allows for an
explanation of the structures, relationships, and dynamics that produce those

48 Ferguson and McNally 2013, p. xxv.

49 See Luxton 2006 for a lucid explanation of the intersection of the sex/gender system with
the social-reproductive needs of capital.
50 For example, see Picchio 1992.

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 51

activities’.51 That is, it moves us well beyond mere descriptions of reality.

It allows us to identify and explain the ways in which a capitalist totality
inflects our institutions, interactions and relations, and why alternative
practices that challenge capitalist priorities are difficult to sustain. Capitalist
logic is thus determinative in the dialectical meaning of the word: the logic
of accumulation and dispossession invites certain gender relations and not
others, even if those relations can exceed that logic. At the same time, those
gender relations – reciprocally determinative of, and determined by, racial and
other relations – constitute capitalism. They are among the actual social forces,
the lived reality, through which the logic of accumulation and dispossession
operates.
Marx too begins from a comprehensive conception of work or ‘practical
human activity’ in his analysis of capitalism. But even while he insists that
such activity is always and everywhere embedded in the social – ‘all production
is appropriation of nature by the individual within and through a definite
form of society’52 – he proceeds to explore the systemic sociality of only one
form of work, labour for capital. Noting its essential relation to capital, he
goes on to largely ignore reproductive labour’s role in capitalism’s overall
reproduction, labelling it a natural consequence of the ‘worker’s drives for
self-preservation and propagation’.53 It is because his interests lie so starkly in
developing just one side of this ontology – that of value-creating labour – that
the full rich diversity of labour and labouring bodies is sidelined from Marx’s
theory of capitalism. Social-reproduction feminism restores that diversity,
developing the conceptual apparatus to understand labour as a differentiated-
yet-shared experience, a concrete, diverse unity.
This theoretical advance hinges on identifying not just different forms of
labour, but on emphasising and troubling the connection between different
forms of labour and the differentiated bodies performing that labour: if we
are to account for the nature of the process by which society is reproduced,
especially generationally reproduced, we need to be attentive to the fact that
labour is a concrete, embodied experience. Bio-physical differences between
male- and female-sexed individuals are thus hugely important. This is not a
biologically deterministic argument. Rather, bio-physical differences abide
within a ‘definite form of society’ that is characterised by a capitalist mode
of production, which in turn puts a premium on regulating the reproductive
labour on which capital’s on-going existence depends. This somewhat crude

51 Luxton 2006, pp. 36–7.

52 Marx 1973, p. 29.
53 Marx 1976, pp. 275, 716.

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52 Ferguson

biological distinction is understood socially, in and through specific gender

relations that tend to reinforce or uphold capital’s reliance on privatised
reproductive processes precisely because of capital’s overall domination of
the social.
That domination is assured because we must ‘work’ (in Gramsci’s sense)
to reproduce ourselves and the world, but we cannot freely access the means
of that reproduction since capital has dispossessed the vast majority of the
means of subsistence (as well as of the means of producing in general). As
a result, all that we do to reproduce the world is necessarily conditioned by
capital’s requirements. Yet capital’s domination is not absolute. Precisely
because people do retain some control over their bio-physical and social
reproduction, other interests and relational dynamics can and do compete
with the capitalist imperative. Struggles for access to abortion, childcare, better
wages, and healthy drinking water, for example, reshape relations between
workers and capital, and those among workers themselves. If successful, they
chip away at patriarchal and other forms of relations; if they fail, they tend to
reinforce such relations. What remains remarkably constant in the capitalist
era, however, is the relegation of reproduction to a private sphere, and the
attendant regulation of women’s bodies that this engenders. While capitalism
did not ‘create’ women’s oppression, it certainly provides the socio-material
conditions and rationale for sustaining it (albeit in historically distinct and
changing forms).54
Labouring bodies, of course, are not just differently sexed and gendered. They
are also differently racialised.55 But because racialisation, unlike gendering,
cannot be even partially explained in terms of biological or genetic differences,
we need to consider what else it is about labouring bodies that might be relevant
in unpacking the relation between capitalism and racism.56 With much of this
work still ahead (see the important contributions in this volume), I offer only
programmatic comments here. As I have suggested elsewhere, it seems helpful
to think through the fact that labouring bodies are differentially spatialised
in both a geographical and social sense.57 We are all born and all work to

54 While precise forms of oppression can and do change – in response both to capital’s
shifting forms as well as workers’ own personally and socially-evolving priorities and
expectations – a fulsome analysis of oppression must be able to account not just for
the historical or conjunctural logics at play, but also the ways in which these relate to the
wider systemic logic that conditions all that is possible.
55 Not to mention differences of sexuality, age, ability, and so on.
56 Miles 1989, p. 70.
57 Ferguson 2008; see also Katz 2001.

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 53

reproduce the world in socio-historically, geographically specific locations.

And while in the abstract such differences are of little consequence, they
come to mean a great deal concretely because these locations are unequally
caught up in capitalism’s ever-expanding, uneven, dynamics. Put another way,
the capitalist drive to dispossess and accumulate unfolds within and between
nations that are already hierarchically ordered, reinforcing, reproducing and
reshaping that ordering in the process. Depending upon which spaces different
bodies occupy within this hierarchical world-system, they have greater or lesser
access or entitlement to quality education, healthcare and neighbourhoods, to
safe workplaces and commutes to and from work, to basic rights and freedoms.
As a result, people’s labour and lives are differently valued within capitalism
from the beginning – and capitalist relations draw on, and help to reproduce
and reshape, those differences largely through political, economic and social
means of racialisation and racism. At the local, national and international
level, the state helps manage that reproduction and reshaping. Immigration,
citizenship and other social policies, backed up by police and military power,
operationalise and legitimise racialised practices of inclusion and exclusion.58
In other words, the socio-geographic location of bodies – and the labour
involved in socially reproducing those bodies – matters: ostensibly similar and
equal bodies become different, and differently valued, bodies within capitalist
societies. Existing discourses and practices of racialisation and racism are
reshaped to help justify and systematise this inequality, just as new such
discourses and practices are invented.59
The argument here is not that racism simply responds directly to capital’s
needs for labour-market differentiation. Rather, the fact of capital’s relentless
need for disenfranchised workers whose own subsistence costs can be kept
as low as possible, means that racism is readily reproduced in and through
differentiated markets in human labour, which the state helps manage.60 As
with gender relations, people’s struggles to control the conditions of their
own reproduction can and do alter racial relations – racialised or migrant

58 See Ferguson and McNally 2014 for a discussion of these dynamics with respect to
neoliberal capitalism’s growing dependence on migrant labour. See also Arat-Koç 2006
and Hontagneu-Sotelo and Avilla 2000 on transnational motherhood, as well as Glenn
1992 and Colen 1995 on domestic service.
59 Processes of dehumanisation involve complex psycho-social dynamics as well. See
Hennessey 2013; Wright 2006; Chang 2000; Roediger 1991; and Palmer 1989 for discussions
of the ways in which these help constitute and are constituted by capitalist social
relations.
60 To be clear, the inquiry here is not into the origins of racism, but into its on-going
reproduction.

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54 Ferguson

communities can gain better lighting, housing and bussing, and street protests
can lead to changes in policing. Such gains (which are frequently about
chipping away at spatial and social differentiations) can lead to policy and
regulatory changes that more fairly respect human life and dignity, thereby
altering racial relations. But the fact that our means of social reproduction are
organised capitalistically – that workers have no direct or communal access
to shelter, subsistence, healthcare, and so on – sets definite limits on those
changes. These limits are seen by some Marxists as evidence of the need to
subsume racial or gender struggles to ‘class’ struggles. But a social-reproduction
feminism approach emphasises and urges precisely the opposite: that the
internal connection between production and reproduction renders such
struggles integral to the class struggle.
Because it historicises the production of labour-power, social-reproduction
feminism has the potential to highlight not only the gendered rela­tions
through which that labour-power is produced; it can also explore the rela­tions
producing a labour-power that is differentially degraded and dehumanised.
That is, it directs us to explore the ways in which the relations of race (as well
as other oppressive relations that contribute to the dehumanisation of life) are
constitutive of actual historical capitalism, while also asking how specifically-
capitalist class relations constitute racial relations.

Why a Capitalist Social Formation?

Intersectionality feminism has pushed Marxist-Feminism to acknowledge

a much more complexly-organised social totality. And where it insists
upon the co-constitution of social relations, it begins down the path of
dialectical reasoning in which, ‘relations are internal to each other . . . so that
when an important one alters, the factor itself alters’.61 The work of many
intersectionality feminists, in other words, points toward the Marxist-Hegelian
conviction that everything is socially mediated. However, they have yet to
make – and in some cases, see no need to make – a convincing case for the
systemic interrelation of these wider relations to the partial relations that
constitute, and are constituted by, the totality. In attending to labour as an
embodied, spatially-located practice underpinning the reproduction of that
totality, social-reproduction feminism offers a possible theoretical resolution –
one that is based on the conception of labour as a diverse unity. It is diverse in
its gendered, racialised, sexualised (and so on) nature. But as part of the human

61 Ollman 1971, Section iii.

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 55

practical activity that reproduces social life, each of these discrete moments is
also complexly unified insofar as every differently-constituted labouring body
participates in the reproduction of a shared social reality, and is an expression
of that social whole. This insight puts us on a sounder ontological footing
than that of intersectionality feminism – one that eschews additive logic and
indeterminate conceptualisations of power for a more systemic and concrete
representation of the social. There is no labour (or ‘work’) outside of gender,
race or ability, just as there is no gender, outside of race, labour or sexuality.62
While many intersectionality feminists would agree with such a statement,
a social-reproduction feminist perspective completes the dialectical journey
by identifying a capitalist logic in and through which the parts of the whole
are integrated. It makes no claim to describe the experiences of racial,
gendered or sexual oppression more effectively than intersectionality-feminist
accounts, or to provide transhistorical explanations. But social-reproduction
feminism can more convincingly explain how and why such experiences are
integral to the social whole – how and why the social totality ensures that
oppression will persist and be reproduced.
To say that the social totality is a capitalist social totality is to suggest that the
logic and imperatives of accumulation and production for profit over need –
one specific set of social relations among many – dominate (in the sense
of exerting pressures on and setting powerful limits to) all aspects of social
reproduction. That domination results from a historical process marked by
enclosures, slavery, witch-hunts and pogroms, as well as political revolutions,
whereby the labour that produces the means of production and subsistence
becomes both dispossessed and organised capitalistically. Capitalist social
relations play such a pivotal role in shaping the means and processes by which
people organise their lives outside of the specifically economic wage-labour/
capital relationship because (i) the vast majority of people cannot access the
means of producing their own subsistence except by selling their labour in
the service of capital or other forms of market dependence; and (ii) capitalist
profit and accumulation is crucially dependent on the availability of ‘free’
wage labourers for that exploitation.63 While social-reproductive labour is

62 Ollman points out that, for Marx, this mediation includes individual subjects: ‘Man [sic],
just as much as he may therefore be a particular individual . . . is just as much the totality –
the ideal totality – the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present
for itself’ (Ollman 1971, Section vii).
63 However crucial, the dependence of capital on ‘free’ labour is not absolute. Capital
also depends upon unfree labour, and the distinction between the two forms of labour
is easily blurred. Exploring the ways in which the social reproduction of unfree labour is

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56 Ferguson

partially autonomous in respect of capital’s domination (and is so to varying

degrees), there is no labour in modern society entirely outside of capital, and
no capital outside of (socially differentiated [re]productive) labour.64 We
see the structuring relation of capital to social reproduction insofar as those
processes are provisioned by the market in consumer goods, which is usually
accessed by wages and other market-derived incomes earned by one or more
members of the household.65 That is, just as capital needs a (privatised) social-
reproduction process, that reproduction process needs capital. People can
and do find creative non-market solutions to their social-reproductive needs
as well, including cooperatives, communal forms of living, and so on. But
these are either exceptions that, by their marginal status, prove the rule, or
ways of literally ‘making do’ or ‘getting by’ – necessitated by the fact that the
means of life are not communally owned but instead monopolised by owners
of capital.
To speak of a social whole dominated by the capitalist dynamic – a capitalist
social formation – is not to say that the economic wage-labour relationship
unilaterally causes racial or gender oppression.66 It is to suggest, rather,
that all social relations are integral to a complex social formation, which is
broadly organised in accordance with capital’s drive for accumulation and
profit: an over-arching capitalist imperative structures, in important though
not absolute ways, all the partial social relations and processes through which
people participate in the daily and generational reproduction of themselves
and others. This imperative is not absolute, because social reproduction can
exceed it (for example, through non-market fulfilment of needs) and because
social relations are constituted in and through various oppressions, some of
which, of course, predate capitalism.67 But it is nonetheless determinative in

organised can only further shed light on the internal relation of race and colonialism to
capitalism. See LeBaron 2014.
64 In other words, not all productive labour is organised capitalistically. Subsistence-based
economies are to be found in every corner of the globe. But even these are conditioned
by capitalist relations: precisely because capitalist relations are dominant globally,
subsistence economies are necessarily bounded by their subaltern status.
65 See LeBaron 2010 on the on-going restructuring of this relationship to accommodate
neoliberal models of capital accumulation.
66 The position I am advancing here hinges on differentiating class (as a partial category)
from capitalism (as a totalising social formation). But even as a partial category, class
is not a pure abstraction. As I have argued throughout this paper, it is dialectically
constituted by other partial relations. So to say that capitalism is a class-system is to say
that it is equally a gendered, racialised, heterosexualised, etc., system.
67 All earlier oppressions, however, are reorganised within the capitalist mode of production.

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Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms 57

that it imposes pressures and limits, so that only certain relations and processes
(but not others) ‘make sense’, and are reinforced and sanctioned socially (in
law, institutional practice and symbolic representation) and individually, even
as they are also always contested.
Two key political lessons follow. First, the building of genuinely new
possibilities that better align with human freedom requires transforming the
socio-material foundations on which we produce and reproduce the world.
This means disrupting the capitalist impulse to privatise social reproduction,
and (re)appropriating and (re)collectivising the means of subsistence for
all. Second, if social relations are internally related, a change in one alters all
others. Thus, there is no compelling reason to prioritise so-called economic or
workplace-based struggles in the fight for a better society. Any struggle within
the realm of social reproduction – be it anti-racist, feminist, anti-colonial,
or be it over education, healthcare, transportation – that promotes human
need over capital’s interests can chip away at the capitalist social formation.
Insofar as the internal relation of all oppressions with each other and with
the capitalist totality is politically highlighted, such struggles can advance a
class (as opposed to sectoral) consciousness, an awareness of the unity of the
diverse relations that produce capitalism and society.68 And insofar as these
struggles are successful, and capital (through the state usually) is compelled to
assume fuller responsibility for the costs of its reproduction, the socio-material
foundations of oppression and exploitation can be weakened. Of course,
the wage-labour/capital relationship must ultimately be overturned if the
capitalist dynamic that dominates social reproduction is to be done away with.
This does not require, however, prioritising workplace struggles over others.
It simply puts a premium on finding ways to build meaningful solidarity that
links (rather than subsumes) anti-racist, feminist, and all social-reproductive
struggles to workplace-based resistance – a solidarity that rests not only on
appeals to respect differences, but on the compelling socio-material logic that
shows how oppressive relations shape, and are shaped by, the wider totality
they comprise.

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