ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

In the post pandemic moment there is a renewed focus on the importance of reproductive labour in sustaining human life. Long before that, feminists theorised how women performed reproductive labour in bearing and raising children, maintaining households, and socially sustaining male labour. I draw on this scholarship to locate social reproduction theory in the context of the global south while also exploring varied forms of reproductive labour along the market-marriage continuum including sex work, dancing, surrogacy, paid domestic work and unpaid domestic work. I consider the law’s key role in producing and entrenching the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour while also crucially mediating the terms on which ‘homes’ as sites of social reproduction are created and sustained. I conclude by interrogating the prospects for reimagining the just home.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Prabha Kotiswaran is Professor of Law and Social Justice at King’s College London. Her main areas of research include criminal law, transnational criminal law, feminist legal studies and sociology of law. Prabha has authored Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India (Princeton 2011) (winner of the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics). She has written on economic sociology of law and edited in that context, a book on trafficking (Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery Cambridge, 2017). She co-authored Governance Feminism: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press 2018) and co-edited Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (University of Minnesota Press 2019), both with Janet Halley, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir). She has edited the Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (with Mariana Valverde, Eve-Darian Smith and Kamari Clarke). She is currently PI of an EU supported grant, the Laws of Social Reproduction, a cross sectoral study of five sectors of reproductive labour including unpaid care and domestic work.

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Download file: Kotiswaran-2-hy-qfk.pdf

Sponsor(s): Center for India and South Asia