Unpaid Care Labour and International Law: A Reading of Capitalism, Social Reproduction and the Law

A paper for SOAS's Law & Marxism Spring School — a room I had wanted to be in for years.

The case I made: unpaid care labour is not a "blind spot" in international law. It is a structural feature. The architecture of the global economy depends on women's social-reproductive work being unpriced, and international law has been complicit in keeping it that way through the language of choice, the household, the private.

I drew on Nancy Fraser's reading of the crisis of care, and on the South Asian feminist tradition that has been arguing this since the 1980s — long before "social reproduction theory" became a phrase in the global north.

The room was generous. The argument is still becoming an essay.