Vignettes on Social Reproduction: Gender, Empire and Capital in an Egyptian Century

Sara Salem (Assistant Professor in Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science) and Mai Taha (Assistant Professor at the Department of Law, American University Cairo)

This paper looks at the idea of social reproduction in the context of Egypt, from the founding of Egypt's postcolonial state to the beginning of Egypt’s neoliberal project in the 1970s. Social reproduction, initially conceptualised as a Marxist feminist framework for understanding the unpaid work that goes into reproducing both the household and the labour force, asked the famous question: ‘If labour produces the commodity, who produces labour?’ Challenging the tendency of orthodox Marxist scholarship to ignore the importance of unpaid labour – often done by women – to the evolution of capitalism, social reproduction as a theory made a crucial intervention into Marxist analysis. Nevertheless, its emphasis on gender as the primary means of understanding social reproduction meant that it became a narrow approach to the question of unpaid labour and capitalist exploitation. We aim here to critically analyse the intersecting social structures that come together around social reproduction, building on the Black feminist tradition and the Italian autonomous feminist tradition: in particular Claudia Jones’s concept of ‘triple oppression’, to read how colonialism, class and gender come together at different points in Egyptian history; and Silvia Federici’s analytical approach that takes imperialism as central to the workings of social reproduction.

Social reproduction and empire in an Egyptian century

Organiser: Kerem Nisancioglu

Contact email: kn18@soas.ac.uk