A Critical Phenomenology of Social Reproduction
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Authors
Schipper, Adam James
Date
2025-07-18
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Critical phenomenology , Social reproduction theory , Marxist feminism , Family abolition
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Abstract
This dissertation proposes a critical phenomenology of capitalist social reproduction. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is an account of oppressive contemporary family and household forms in the broader dynamics of capital accumulation. It focuses on the gendered division of labour as a necessary, rather than contingent, structure of capitalist political economy. I identify two schools of SRT: Value Social Reproduction Theory (V-SRT), which argues that gender is a “time-as-value” mechanism that dissociates valued and devalued forms of labour; and Accumulation Social Reproduction Theory (A-SRT), which sketches the historical development of the gendered and racialized divisions of labour and social forms of embodiment that characterize capitalist family and household relations.
SRT’s twin account expresses a primary tension at the heart of capitalist social reproduction between the abstract needs of capital on the one hand, and the concrete human needs of living subjects on the other. V-SRT and A-SRT conceptualize needs from distinct (but related) conceptual grounds of, respectively, temporality and embodiment; but without a unifying account of need, I argue that SRT gives a necessary, but insufficient, view of oppression in capitalist social reproduction.
Critical phenomenology can clarify this tension by weaving together V-SRT and A-SRT’s temporal and embodied conceptual grounds. I argue that it offers an account of the lived experience of the capitalist household and family form as historically-sedimented structures of oppression that organize domestic life in ways most conducive to the abstract needs of capital. Crucially, critical phenomenology also helps disclose immanent possibilities for organizing liberatory forms of inter-and intra-household relations, grounded in alternative ways of giving, making, and taking time together.
After outlining the conceptual bases of V- and A-SRT, I critique their accounts of need before sketching a phenomenology of the needy body. I then offer the concept of the domestic hold: the habituated way in which domestic relations are held together. I then draw on classic feminist phenomenological sources to give an account of the temporality of the capitalist household. I conclude by putting critical phenomenology in conversation with family abolition scholarship to sketch out future avenues for conceptual and theoretical development.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International