Feminist scholars have long demonstrated the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour, performed in bearing and raising children, maintaining households and socially sustaining male labour. Feminist economists have strived to get international agencies and national governments to redraw the “production boundary” to ensure the recognition of women’s unpaid labour. Today mainstream international institutions acknowledge the need for women’s economic empowerment and note how their unpaid labour hinders their participation in the formal economy, particularly in the global South. Sustainable Development Goal 5.4 requires that unpaid care and domestic work be recognised , reduced and redistributed through nationally appropriate policies. This project retheorises the very concept of social reproduction. Anchored in India, the project conceptualises female reproductive labour to include unpaid domestic work but also abject labour performed by women outside of of marriage and for the market, namely, sex work, erotic dancing, commercial surrogacy and paid domestic work. Placing varied forms of reproductive labour along the market-marriage continuum, the project demonstrates the law’s key role in producing and entrenching the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour in these sectors, and offers a cross-sectoral comparison of the law’s highly differential regulation of these disparate forms of female reproductive labour. Drawing on feminist legal theory and deploying methodologies ranging from doctrinal case law analysis to ethnographies of women’s labour markets, the project problematises law’s jurisdictional boundaries over women’s reproductive labour with a view to developing a holistic understanding of reproductive labour while exploring prospects for enhancing women’s economic justice.
