Social Reproduction as Political Resistance: Case Studies from US Politics in an Age of Extraction

Abstract

This dissertation advances a novel theoretical framework that puts feminist theories of social reproductioninto conversation with research on contemporary political economy and political resistance. I expand and universalize the logics of social reproduction so as to bring their political commitments out of the home and into the realm of deliberative public acts. Part I contains two central theoretical contributions. First I assert that distinctly public political actions take up the logic and commitments of social reproduction theory when they are (1) future-oriented (2) community-motivated, and (3) aimed at collective over individualized benefits for a given political community. While most of the existing literature on social reproduction takes the actions associated with biological or private reproduction as the central site for the enacting an ethics of care, I theorize a social reproductive politics that looks instead to the realm of formal political acts. Under this expanded schematic, actions that take place in the presence of others, outside the private realm of the household, and which are driven by motivations and processes not necessarily tied directly to human reproduction or regeneration, can just as easily advance a politics of care that seeks to improve or maintain the shared world of a political community. Second, I consider the ways in which extraction as a governing logic, not just a material practice, has increasingly driven developments in US political economy, presenting new threats to communities living under increasingly extractive regimes. Extraction, in addition to describing a material practice, here represents a political ethos that prioritizes the accumulation of private profit and corporate interests over the needs of an existing community. Using this conception, I show how extraction can take as its object not just natural or material resources, but social resources as well. Thus things like tax bases and community spaces become extractable, as states allow and even sanction the siphoning of collective resources back into the reserves of private or corporate interests through policy and regulatory regimes. When registering and working collectively to resist or object to increasing extractive threats, I argue, communities often embody the tenets of social reproduction in order to maintain their collective resources and ways of life. In Part II I present empirical evidence in support of this two-part theory in the form of two in-depth case studies explored using qualitative, quantitative, historical, and ethnographic methods. The first considers historical methods of extraction by taxation in South Louisiana, and traces local movements to register objections to long-running tax exemptions that funnel resources away from local governing bodies and back into private reserves of corporate wealth. These movements, I argue, embody the futureoriented and collectivized ethos of social reproductive politics. The second traces the expansion of the cryptocurrency industry in two Central Washington counties and considers how the industry’s extractive tendencies have increasingly shaped life for local residents. After residents and their local governing boards registered crypto mining firms’ massive consumption of power as an extractive threat, public utilities managers instituted new higher rates aimed at reining in these new industries. I consider this political process under my expended schematic of social reproduction, pointing to the future-oriented and collective concerns that animated it. I conclude by drawing some comparisons and distinctions between these two case studies to investigate the constraints inherent in a politics of social reproduction that seeks to enact meaningful checks on contemporary extractive regimes.