Abstract
This article builds on existing feminist critiques of transnational debt regimes and austerity politics in order to theorise a new conception of reproductive debt. This involves critiquing debt burdens imposed upon people who reproduce, as a consequence of global restructuring programmes, cuts to social services and the increasing financialisation of reproduction. In place of individualised obligations to financial lenders, I argue that we all owe an infinite debt to those who reproduce, in order to ensure that reproduction is possible when desired and that its necessary conditions – social, cultural and environmental – are supported. This theory of reproductive debt draws on the 1970s Wages for Housework movement, feminist literature on reproductive labour and Kathi Weeks’ post-work politics. It also explores Patty Chang's video exhibition Milk Debt, which was inspired by David Graeber's discussion of the Chinese Buddhist tenet of ‘milk debt’: the infinite kindness of mothers, exemplified by the practice of breastfeeding, which can never be repaid. Recognising the negative impacts of environmental damage and histories of slavery and colonialism on reproduction, reproductive debt is understood as an infinite, non-quantifiable obligation that is the basis for our shared existence on this planet.
Introduction
Gary Owen's searing critique of ongoing austerity politics in the UK, Iphigenia in Splott, begins with working-class Effie (short for Iphigenia) declaring to the audience: ‘you lot, every single one/ You’re in my debt’ (Owen, 2016: 1). The inspiration for Owen's monologue is Agamemnon's daughter, sacrificed to guarantee ancient Greece's military victory over Troy. Effie is sacrificed – her love, her capacity to reproduce – in the name of cutting the cost of social programmes. Effie has an impossible decision to make at the end of the play, when her premature daughter dies due to insufficient special care beds that have been cut to save money. She is offered hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation, which would enable her to live a middle-class life, including buying a house. But a midwife points out that this money would further reduce available health care services, potentially causing suffering and death to others. So Effie doesn’t take the money. Though Effie is built upon the right-wing caricature of the slatternly benefit scrounger, by the end of the play such stereotypes are upended: Effie emerges as the selfless bereaved mother saving the rest of us. But the true challenge Effie poses in the play is to overturn neoliberal, patriarchal social norms, in seeking a life that doesn’t come at a cost to others. In the final lines of the play, Effie asks ‘What is gonna happen/ When we can’t take it anymore?’ (Owen, 2016: 72). Effie's question points out the impossibility of continuing to demand that the poorest and most vulnerable continue to be sacrificed for the sake of tax cuts. It also points to the possibility of revolution, of overturning the violent organisation of reproduction in contemporary capitalist society.
There is a long history of feminist critiques of debt, including discussions of slavery, migrant debt and indentured servitude (Cavallero and Gago, 2021). Transnational feminist critiques of debt have examined how debt has been used to justify global austerity politics, in the wake of global restructuring programmes by the IMF and World Bank, and to reinforce the neoliberal market ideology that individualises responsibility for social services such as education and health care (Fudge, 2012; Roberts, 2016; Briggs, 2020; Cavallero and Gago, 2021). Feminist analyses have responded to ongoing hardships resulting from global restructuring, which disproportionately impact women, as well as the role of debt in the privatisation of social reproduction in the Global North (Roberts, 2013, 2016). Austerity policies have motivated transnational migration, leading to what Shellee Colen (1995) termed stratified reproduction, and have dramatically impacted health (Briggs, 2020: 68). Global debt crises have also forced people, mainly women, to turn to microcredit loans in order to finance household necessities. Instead of its purported goal of promoting income creation, microcredit has led to the spiralling feminisation of debt (Taylor, 2011; Wichterich, 2012), as well as financial hardship, mental distress and even suicide, when extremely poor borrowers are unable to repay their loans (Biswas, 2010; Wichterich, 2017). Through the financialisation of international development, gender becomes a technology for extending debt into previously uncapitalised spaces (Roy, 2012; Briggs, 2020: 77).
This article develops a novel theory of reproductive debt that critiques the increasing debt burdens imposed upon people who reproduce 1 as a consequence of global restructuring programmes, austerity politics and the increasing financialisation of reproduction. I argue that debt understood as an individual and quantifiable obligation owed to lenders must be replaced by the recognition that an unrepayable, infinite debt is owed to all those who reproduce, in order to ensure that reproduction is possible when desired and that its necessary conditions – social, cultural and environmental – are supported. This involves both critiquing how care work is currently exploited under capitalism, while also imagining new possibilities for valuing care both in and against the market.
This conception of reproductive debt draws on the reproductive justice movement, led by women of colour, which goes beyond individual rights and choices in order to recognise the influence of power structures and intersecting forms of oppression (SisterSong, n.d.). It also builds on Marxist feminist theorising of reproductive labour – particularly the 1970s Wages for Housework movement. Reproductive debt does not replace the important extant and developing literature on reproductive labour. However, increasingly, debt compels labour, along with gendered surveillance and discipline (Natarajan et al., 2021). The work of managing household debt is also a growing part of reproductive labour (Guérin et al., 2023). While the Wages for Housework movement is often misconstrued as limited to demands for financial compensation for unpaid work historically carried out by women, it in fact goes far beyond the mere demand for wages, to challenge the gendered division of labour and transform gender roles, including a thoroughgoing critique of heterosexuality and the disciplining of sexuality under capitalism (Capper and Austin, 2018). Reproductive debt further develops this project of valuing reproductive labour, with the ultimate goal of overcoming the gendered division of labour and corresponding sexual norms.
David Graeber (2014), in his influential work on debt, asks why we believe that debt is something that must be repaid, given that doing so often involves considerable suffering and even death. Underlying the compulsion to repay debt are the requirements that debt be quantifiable and measurable in money. This quantification allows debt to become ‘a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene’ (Graeber, 2014: 14). This abstraction violently removes things and people from their embeddedness in social relations for purposes of commercial exchange (Graeber, 2014: 159). Graeber challenges conventional conceptions of debt, arguing that instead debt is ultimately about what we owe to each other. He describes the Chinese Buddhist tenet of ‘milk debt’ as the infinite kindness of mothers, exemplified by the practice of breastfeeding, which can never be repaid but motivates spiritual education and charity. Inspired by this concept, Patty Chang's video project Milk Debt, featuring lactating women who articulate a range of personal, political and ecological fears, demonstrates, through a powerfully affective response to the shared challenges we all face, the communal basis of all reproduction as well as the precarity of our human existence. Care work is always carried out in the context of our interdependence with our environments and other species (Haraway, 2016; Bellacasa, 2017); therefore, this theory of reproductive debt recognises our shared obligations to support reproduction and the broader ecologies that make it possible. Reproductive debt is understood as both collective and infinite, since our debt-to those who provide care work and to the environments we live in - can never be exhausted. At the same time, as the reproductive justice movement illustrates, responding ethically to our shared reproductive debt requires careful attention to the differential impacts of histories of inequality and oppression.
From reproductive labour to reproductive debt
Reproductive labour, and the associated field of social reproduction, emerged as a means to recognise and value work historically done by women that usually goes unpaid and is devalued. Conceptualised by socialist feminists as a way to remedy Marx's blind spot in focusing on productive labour, and drawing on Engels’ ([1884] 2010) work on the relationship between the family and private property, reproductive labour refers to the activities that maintain and reproduce life, both daily and generationally. This includes caring for oneself and others (e.g. providing childcare, elder care, health care), maintaining physical spaces and organising the resources necessary for caring for oneself and others and reproducing the workforce through having children. This is essential work that is not acknowledged or compensated in a capitalist economy; without this unpaid labour, however, capitalism would cease to function. Care work has received extensive feminist attention as a way of recognising the often-invisible labour predominantly carried out by women, typically defined as unpaid work carried out within the private sphere of the family (Tronto, 1987, 1993). It has also been theorised as emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) and intimate labour (Parreñas and Boris, 2010). Ongoing inequities in the gendered division of care work, and challenges in measuring care work through time use surveys, continue to draw feminist attention (Folbre and Bittman, 2004; Folbre, 2012).
Wages for Housework was one of the earliest groups to identify and organise around this unpaid work predominantly carried out by women. Wages for Housework began in Italy in 1972, launched by the International Feminist Collective (IFC), a Marxist feminist collective founded by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici and Brigitte Galtier (Toupin, 2018). The IFC declared that women's reproductive work was central both to the class struggle and the women's movement, though it went largely ignored by both. It argued that ‘productive’ – paid, usually male, labour – could not happen without the unpaid, ‘reproductive’ labour that was usually done by women in the home. According to the IFC, capitalism was predicated on the exploitation of women, and unpaid housework was the root of women's oppression. It sought to make women's labour visible and compensated in order to overturn the gendered division of labour and transform women's role in society and the family.
Wages for Housework groups were established in cities in Italy, France, Switzerland, England, the USA, Mexico, Argentina and Canada (Toupin, 2018). These groups published books and articles, and sponsored meetings, lectures, rallies, marches and international conferences. They fought for the preservation and extension of family and children's allowances, and against social assistance cuts to women-led families. In addition, they promoted reproductive autonomy and better access to women's health services, along with improvements to women's waged working conditions, particularly those that demanded ‘emotional labour’ from them on top of their regular job duties (Zelleke, 2022: 2).
Although explicitly calling for compensation for reproductive labour, ultimately the goal was a thoroughgoing transformation of the gendered division of labour and the structure of work under capitalism. As Silvia Federici writes in Wages Against Housework, a founding text of the movement, ‘To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity’ (Federici, 1975: 81). Compensation is a first step in overcoming the invisibility of reproductive labour; expanded welfare programmes were posited as an example of such compensation. Ultimately, though, the movement moved beyond the merely financial, in order to challenge reproductive labour as naturally the responsibility of women, who are expected to carry it out inspired by feelings of familial love and affection despite the tediousness and oppression associated with this burden of work.
Federici described a debt owed not just to the women currently carrying out reproductive labour but also to the countless generations of women who worked without recognition. The debt to women is owed not just on the basis of their own unpaid labour but also because of how this demand for their unpaid labour has (mis)shaped them. Federici wants to ‘make it visible that our minds, bodies and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function, in a specific function, and then have been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted as women in this society’ (1975: 81). Demanding wages for housework was understood as a first step towards refusing to do the work altogether, transforming the gendered division of labour as well as the underlying gender roles. Federici's description of lesbians as being on ‘heterosexual strike’ (Federici, 2017b, 2017a), a formulation intended to disrupt the homosexual/heterosexual binary, understood ‘as both an instrument and an effect of capitalist divisions of labor’ (Capper and Austin, 2018: 455), illuminates the profundity of the critique of sex and gender norms developed by the movement.
Some feminists reject what they see as the commodification of reproductive labour in this movement. But as Melinda Cooper points out in her analysis of the relationship between neoliberalism and social conservativism, leftist demands for protecting the privacy of the family and decommodifying social life support conservative arguments that certain forms of reproductive labour should remain unpaid (Cooper, 2017: 23). Wages for Housework has also been criticised for failing to recognise that, as Angela Davis points out, ‘In the United States, women of color – and especially Black women – have been receiving wages for housework for untold decades’ (2011: 237). Davis rejects the idea that women would want to carry out housework even if it were paid, arguing that such work is inherently oppressive and should be industrialised for efficiency, and socialised, so that everyone may be freed from its demands (Davis, 2011). The Wages for Housework international movement lasted only four years and remains controversial; nevertheless, it had a lasting impact on the feminist imaginary.
Debt and the financialisation of reproduction
From the 1980s onwards, global restructuring programmes by the IMF and World Bank imposed financial reforms on developing countries, leading to dramatic cuts to social programmes and intensified debt burdens on their citizens. This coincided with an expansion of privatised and debt-fuelled forms of social services, including housing, health care and education. As debt burdens have grown under neoliberal austerity regimes, there has emerged what Nancy Fraser (2016) calls a ‘crisis of care’ under financialised capitalism, with longer working hours and reduced social welfare, stretching people's capacity to provide care to the breaking point. This coincided with a rise in what Federici (2018) terms the ‘financialisation of reproduction’, where an increasing number of people (students, welfare recipients, pensioners) are forced to borrow from banks to purchase services (education, health care, pensions) that the state formerly subsidised, so that many reproductive activities have now become immediate sites of capital accumulation (Federici, 2014: 233), leading to a dramatic increase in women's debt (Federici, 2018: 179).
The dismantling of the welfare state in both developing and developed countries led to an increase in women's waged labour to compensate for the rising cost of living and the restructuring of waged work. In the absence of adequate social services, women's burden of unpaid labour intensified. Women's debt also increased in the form of microfinance programmes in developing countries, which were ostensibly aimed at ending women's poverty but often merely subjected them to high interest rates, financial stress and even social ostracism and violence, as a consequence of their inability to repay the loans (Moodie, 2013; Federici, 2014). In developed countries, pay day loans and credit cards with debilitating interest rates, along with substantial increases in debt loads for education, housing, health care and elder care, increased financial stress on women while at the same time disciplining them as workers and individualising the responsibility for what are in fact structural barriers to social reproduction (Federici, 2014, 2018). When wages do not cover the cost of living, they are used as leverage for accessing credit to support life, including mortgages and personal and student loans (Adkins, 2018).
Biotechnology's role in the intensification of ongoing capitalist modes of accumulation has been theorised through the various lenses of biovalue, biocapital and bioeconomies (Helmreich, 2008; Birch and Tyfield, 2013; Vertommen et al., 2022). Exchanges in reproductive labour and material are motivated by increasing economic precarity, while also advancing capital accumulation. These exchanges include commercial markets in surrogacy (Banerjee and Castillo, 2020), human milk (Lee, 2019; Newman and Nahman, 2022) and gametes (Cooper and Waldby, 2014; Waldby, 2019). Lucy van de Wiel describes egg freezing as involving the ‘financialisation of fertility’: it encompasses not only the sale of commodities, in the form of goods and services, but also the financial value ascribed to frozen eggs through capital investments in fertility companies (van de Wiel, 2020).
The expansion of debt under neoliberalism also led to a retrenchment of conservative social and sexual mores. As Melinda Cooper describes, the liberation movements of the 1960s challenged welfare capitalism's grounding in the sexual normativity of the family wage. The alliance of neoliberals and social conservatives that emerged in response to these liberation movements, ‘sought to revive the tradition of private family responsibility in the idiom of household debt, while simultaneously accommodating and neutralizing the most ambitious political desires of the 1960s’ (Cooper, 2017: 22). In the Global South, financialisation has resulted in intensifying social control over women's bodies and sexual puritanism (Guérin and Kumar, 2020), even as women are coerced into sexual activities as a result of debt burdens (Guérin et al., 2023). The disciplining of sexuality within the family links with the rhetoric of ‘fiscal control’ that attributes poverty in racialised communities and the Global South to out-of-wedlock pregnancies and over (or under) population (Briggs, 2020). Feminist resistance to the gendered impacts of debt, both financial and social/cultural, has been attentive to the ways in which these individualising and privatising gestures exacerbate inequality and lead to intensified surveillance and control over women's bodies and role in the home.
Federici describes the ‘debt economy’ as beginning in the 1980s through extension of credit to workers who could not afford to repay it. Since it individualises and moralises the problem, it effectively hides exploitation and inequality, and although it has potential to reduce women's dependence on men, in practice it merely makes them dependent on banks and other predatory lenders (Federici, 2018: 181–182). This leads to what Luci Cavallero and Veronica Gago call ‘financial terror’: ‘a structure of obedience that operates over the day-to-day and time to come and forces us to take on the costs of structural adjustment in an individual and private way. But additionally, it normalises the fact that our lives are only sustainable through debt, in a type of financialization of daily life’ [italics in original] (Cavallero and Gago, 2021: 14; Martin, 2002).
‘The debt is owed to us’: a post-work feminist politics
In formulating their opposition to the gendered impacts of debt, Cavallero and Gago explore the contribution of debt analysis to discussions of social reproduction. They challenge the supposed abstraction and universality of financial debt, showing how in fact it is marked by gender difference due to moralisation, exploitation, the link between debt and reproductive activities, debt's link to sexist violence and the way in which possible futures are shaped by financial obligation (Cavallero and Gago, 2021: 4). Cavallero and Gago (2021) emphasise forms of defiance and possibilities for disobeying debt, citing the slogan of the 2020 International Feminist Strike in Argentina: ‘the debt is owed to us’. They insist on giving ‘debt a body’ by making it public and visible, through protests in the street opposing the abstraction of financial exploitation and by showing how debt deepens the extractivism of social reproduction (Cavallero, 2020: 136; Cavallero and Gago, 2021).
In response to the rise of financialisation, Federici (2018: 179) calls for rethinking the ‘right to work’ strategy that many liberal feminists have adopted in pursuit of economic autonomy for women. In answering this call by Federici, I take up Kathi Weeks’ (2011) theorisation of a ‘post-work’ politics. Weeks (2011) finds in Wages for Housework inspiration for what she calls a ‘post-work politics’: this involves both the utopian demand to move away from work as providing meaning and value to human life, as well as adopting the pragmatic feminist goals of a shortened work week and a guaranteed basic income, which help support social reproduction. She argues that the movement for shorter hours importantly involves a demand for more pleasure in life – ‘more time for what we will’ – apart from the demands of paid work and family. This would allow for pursuits such as art, as well as reimagining and transforming our relationships with each other.
Weeks argues against both feminist efforts to secure equal access to waged work as a way to escape culturally enforced domesticity on the one hand, and, on the other, feminist revaluing of unwaged forms of domestic labour. The problem with both these strategies, according to Weeks, is that neither ‘challenge the dominant legitimating discourse of work’ (2011: 13). Instead, she argues that feminists should struggle not for more or better work, but for the reduction of work overall. Not only should feminists attempt to revalue traditionally feminine forms of domestic and reproductive labour; they should also challenge the moralisation and purported sacredness of such work. Drawing on the autonomous Marxist tradition and the Wages of Housework movement in articulating these demands, Weeks argues for the reduction of the work week and a guaranteed basic income. She does not see these as merely reformist demands, however; rather, she sees in them possibilities for waging a radical critique of work and for creating visions of life that are not tied to work and that are not limited to conventional modes of relating to others (Weeks, 2011: 33). Weeks engages in both utopian and pragmatic demands, seeing them not as contradictory but rather as mutually supporting modes of feminist theory and activism. This double demand is also found in Federici's understanding of the Wages for Housework movement as not just as a concrete demand for payment but actually a political perspective, namely: ‘subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society’ (1975: 75).
The idea of guaranteed basic income has a long history in politics. It is intended to establish a floor under which income would not fall and is paid unconditionally to individuals regardless of their employment status, other incomes or family and household relationships. Guaranteed basic income moves beyond piecemeal approaches to social support and welfare programmes that were often explicitly designed to support male breadwinner-led families and exclude single mothers (Cooper, 2017). Weeks argues that basic income is a direct challenge to the belief that one must work in order to live. By breaking the link between work and income, basic income ‘highlights the arbitrariness of which practices are waged and which are not’ (Weeks, 2011: 143).
Davis and Federici both support guaranteed basic income, but they also argue that it is insufficient as an end in itself. Davis (2011: 237) calls for a universal basic income rather than wages for housework; ultimately, though, like many pro-trade union opponents of basic income (Swift and Power, 2021), she believes that good jobs are what is needed. For Federici (2018: 184), calls for a reduction of the work week and basic income (along with progressive taxation) do not go far enough, because this fails to recognise and remunerate women for their reproductive labour: women are still doing work that they are not getting paid for. This also fails to address the debt owed to past generations of women who carried out reproductive labour. Federici argues that in addition to monetary compensation, more resources should be made available to support daily reproduction, such as ‘free housing, free communal spaces and so forth’ (2018: 185).
Reproductive debt and legacies of oppression
As is apparent from Davis’ Black feminist critique of Wages for Housework, any conception of reproductive debt must grapple with the question of what is owed to people from historically oppressed groups and not just to ‘all women’ or all people who reproduce. Reproductive debt must rely upon the insights of the reproductive justice movement in recognising the full range of social, cultural and environmental support required for reproduction, as well as the historical and ongoing violence and restrictions on reproductive capacities experienced by people from oppressed communities (Ross, 2007; Gaard, 2010; Ross and Solinger, 2017; SisterSong, n.d.). Reproductive debt must also grapple with the obligations of settler colonialism to the Land Back movement, led by Indigenous communities, (Oaster, 2022), and with demands for reparations for slavery (Táíwò, 2022). These various obligations cannot be merely added together, as the insights of intersectional feminism have made obvious. They remain infinite obligations, non-quantifiable and irreducible to each other. Nevertheless, they must be included in our responses.
Indebtedness is ‘the continuation of the colonial life’ (Zambrana, 2021: 9), reinstalling hierarchies of race, gender and class (Zambrana, 2021: 24). Feminists in the Global South condemn debt as a ‘form of neo-colonial exploitation and continued domination of the global North’ (Michaeli, 2022: 158). This is clearly evident in feminist resistance to the colossal debts exacted upon Haiti and Puerto Rico as a legacy of slavery and colonialism (Briggs, 2020). Histories of colonialism and ecological exploitation intersect in theories of ecological debt, accumulated by northern, industrial countries through resource plundering, unequal trade, environmental damage and occupation of environmental space to deposit waste. Arising in the early 1990s within environmentally aware social movements and expanding into academic and legal discourses, ecological debt points out how industrialised countries are responsible for violations of the right to a clean and safe environment in developing countries, and demonstrates the impossibility and undesirability of copying the development paths of industrialised countries (Goeminne and Paredis, 2009; Rice, 2009). Ecological debt has important connections with the (broader in scope) environmental justice movement, which, led by communities of colour, identified the links between environmental pollution and racism (Warlenius et al., 2015). There are also important linkages between the environmental justice and reproductive justice movements (Sasser, 2023), though there are also tensions, particularly in feminist critiques of environmentally based limits to population growth (Haraway, 2016; Clarke and Haraway, 2018). Ecological debt provides an important resource in theorising reproductive debt, but they are not reducible to each other, since ecological debt retains a focus on quantification that reproductive debt strives to move beyond, towards an infinite obligation owed to those who reproduce.
Denise Ferreira da Silva uses the term ‘unpayable debt’ to describe how racial subjugation underpins capitalism, through a reading of Octavia Butler's novel Kindred, in which Dana, a Black woman in 1970s USA, travels through time to the antebellum South, where she tries to save the life of her slave-owning ancestor (Butler, 2004; da Silva, 2022). This understanding of ‘unpayable’ refers to the structural impossibility of racialised people to repay their debt; in fact, debt is foundational to their constitution as racialised, as blameworthy for their conditions of marginalisation (Chakravartty and da Silva, 2012). Debt, and the power relationships produced by it, is the foundation of racism (Guérin et al., 2023: 11); the indebted woman is produced through intersecting power relations, including patriarchy and capitalism (Guérin et al., 2023). Dana's blackness ‘signals both slavery and lack of equity’ (da Silva, 2022: 14) to da Silva, and she links this historical debt in the body to how poor and working-class Black and Latinx people in the USA were coerced into taking on subprime loans with exorbitant interest rates and then blamed for the global economic crisis of 2007–2008 that gave rise to a new wave of austerity measures. Indeed, the critique of debt as intrinsically linked to histories of slavery, colonialism and patriarchy challenges an individualised conception of debt and demonstrates how resistance to debt must play a central role in feminist politics. I situate da Silva's ‘unpayable debt’ within an overall critique of debt in its current form, which serves to maintain social hierarchies of oppression. This unpayable debt, like ecological debt, describes an existing, asymmetrical debt, imposed on subalterns who are not responsible for it and are structurally unable to pay it.
In place of this unjust, monetary debt, I propose an infinite debt that is owed, not to financial lenders or colonialist nations, but to all those who reproduce, a debt that is unquantifiable but exists as a moral obligation on all of us as a consequence of our mutual interdependence on this planet. However, the infinite nature of reproductive debt still requires that we attempt to fulfil our collective obligation through specific actions. I follow Weeks in seeing no essential contradiction between the utopian and the pragmatic: both movements are necessary, and, although in tension with each other, nevertheless their relationship is productive, moving us forward in action even as we recognise the limitations of our action.
Here I draw on David Graeber who suggests that: ‘If one were looking for the ethos for an individualistic society such as our own, one way to do it might well be to say: we all owe an infinite debt to humanity, society, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers to frame it), but no one else could possibly tell us how we are to pay it’ (2014: 68). The question of what is owed under reproductive debt exceeds the quantifiable and objectifying nature of what we usually think of as financial debt. And yet, reproductive debt compels action, which must take histories of oppression into account. As Cavallero and Gago insist, ‘the debt is owed to us’ (2021), but this ‘us’ is not homogenous or ahistorical: reproductive needs vary significantly as a result of the ongoing impacts of slavery, colonialism and other forms of oppression. Reproductive debt requires challenging the commodification of work, the individualising of responsibility for care work and the boundaries between the private life of love and family and the public life of work and civic duty. A post-work feminist politics requires transforming our social relationships through creative experimentation: overcoming injustice and finding new anti-oppressive ways of engaging with each other. As adrienne maree brown writes, ‘all organizing is science fiction – … we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced’ (2019: 10). In exploring such an infinitely transformative conception of reproductive debt, and its connection with the ecologies that support our lives, I turn to Patty Chang's film exhibition Milk Debt, ongoing since 2018.
Milk debt and the sacrifice of women
Patty Chang's Milk Debt features videos of women from around the world pumping breast/chest milk while reciting lists of their fears. Upon moving from New York to Los Angeles in 2017, in the wake of Donald Trump's inauguration, Chang described herself as having brought with her intense environmental anxieties, becoming obsessed with the lack of water, fossil fuel usage and the extreme heat leading to forest fires. Feeling intense worry about climate change, she began to make lists of her fears, including death, burning in a fire, and smog, as a way of attempting to manage her anxieties in the face of intensifying climate and political crises. Chang then invited her friends and colleagues to contribute their own worries, which ranged from climate change to poverty, and she began drawing on these lists as a prompt for multiple performances, both live and video installations.
She collected fears for the Milk Debt project in Hong Kong in 2019, at the very start of the city's tumultuous extradition protests. In that first iteration of the project, she filmed a young woman pumping breast milk on an overpass, reading her feelings about civic upheaval while demonstrators marched down the road below. The project has continued in Los Angeles and along the US-Mexico border in Texas, with more recent additions filmed via Zoom to observe social distancing. There are significant commonalities in the fears expressed in this work, including fear of death, fear of catching COVID, fear of losing a job and fear of being unloved. The project creates a portrait of collective anxiety during a time of deep political division, civil unrest, pandemic and doubts about our collective future.
The title of Milk Debt is drawn from the Chinese Buddhist tenet which views motherhood as an infinite act of kindness, exemplified by the practice of breastfeeding, which can never be repaid but which inspires spiritual education and charity. The multitude of fears described in this project are embedded within a context of care, as these fears are voiced by women expressing milk. Like many of Chang's other works, Milk Debt features a focus on the female body in relation to natural and cultural landscapes that have suffered political and ecological devastation. Chang's performances often include flows of vital fluids – water, breastmilk, blood, urine – and focus on interconnectedness rather than autonomy.
For instance, in a previous project, The Wandering Lake (2009–2017), Chang explored environmental loss, in particular the disappearance of water. Over a period of eight years, Chang embarked on several expeditions across China, Uzbekistan and Fogo Island in Newfoundland, initially inspired by Swedish explorer Sven Hedin (1865–1952), who published reports on water migration in Central Asia. On these journeys, Chang followed a path carved by our collective actions that have impacted environments. She enacted her own rituals, suggesting that while it is impossible to ignore environmental devastation, we can nevertheless ‘re-look at our relationship with the world from a non-hierarchal and non-capitalistic perspective’ (Cheung, 2019: 67). The Wandering Lake features split-screen video recordings of Chang performing acts of care for nonhuman entities. In one, she washes the body of a dead sperm whale in Newfoundland, an act of care and mourning. In the other, she washes an abandoned ship in the desert of Muynak, Uzbekistan, a defunct seaport on the receded Aral Sea, which lost over 70 per cent of its water due to Soviet-era irrigation projects.
The Wandering Lake also included a photo installation: Letdown (Milk) 2017. Chang was prohibited from taking photos of infrastructure in Uzbekistan. So instead, having recently given birth to her son, she travelled to the water line and pumped breast milk along the way into empty fish tins, saucers and cups at the end of every meal and photographed them. She describes this as depicting her own ‘sympathetic loss of flow’ (Chang and Iwasaki, 2017: 31). The juxtaposition of her abandoned breast milk with other discarded objects and remnants of meals highlights how the gift of breast milk goes unrecognised and unvalued.
In Milk Debt, breastfeeding/chestfeeding is understood as an undervalued activity of feeding the other. In one video, a woman in a red bathing suit expresses milk into the bathtub she sits in. In breastfeeding, ‘pump and dump’ refers to pumping breastmilk and then discarding it out of fears that it is contaminated with alcohol or other potentially toxic substances. The financial meaning of pump and dump is also alluded to in the video: a form of securities fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of stocks in order to sell one's shares while the price is high (Vikram, 2020). This double meaning of pump and dump illustrates the waste of milk along with the care work required to produce it. Milk debt acknowledges the infinitude of our obligation for our existence, a debt we can never repay. This allows for a new economy to emerge, one in which debt is not something incurred by autonomous agents that must be repaid under threat of violence. Instead, debt can provide motivation for continued openness and giving to the other and recognition of collective responsibility for our environments.
Luce Irigaray asserts that ‘most of our societies have been built on sacrifice’ (Irigaray, 1993: 75). According to Irigaray, the ‘hidden sacrifice’ is our failure to recognise that the labour of care and reproduction underlies all social life (1996: 171). Milk debt illuminates this hidden sacrifice as well as our obligations to the environments that sustain us. According to Irigaray, a new economy is needed, one based in the relationship between radically different subjects who are nonetheless open to each other. She draws on the placenta as a model for an alternative, relational economy between two embodied beings coexisting in corporeal communication and negotiation (Irigaray, 1992). Through this placental economy, both mother and foetus exist in a relationship based on differentiation rather than fusion or equivalence, where giving flows both ways. 2
Recognising milk debt can overturn masculinist economies and move towards Irigaray's goal of a true gift economy, a mode of exchange without exploitation of women and nature. Revealing this hidden sacrifice requires another sacrifice: recognising that we are never closed off but are always already open to the other (Irigaray, 1993: 172). As Irigaray writes, ‘Openness permits exchange, ensures movement, prevents saturation in possession or consumption’ (1992: 63). This openness cannot be reduced to a commodity because it cannot be produced; it is irreducible to a closed system. For Irigaray, this new economic system of exchange will also involve a reordering of social relations, a new language and new forms of art.
Living in a time of intense political and environmental devastation, fears connect us all as vulnerable and embodied beings, although precarity is unequally distributed across social hierarchies. These fears are also indicative of our capacity for care, our ability to forge ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing et al., 2017). Milk debt is a reminder of our inability to repay the obligations we owe to each other and to the planet. It also reminds us that none of us are alone in our anxieties. Our fears bind us together, deepening our collective responsibility to the earth and to each other. Chang's affective response to capitalism, marked by environmental degradation and the associated work of mourning, also challenges masculinist conceptions of debt. In place of debt understood as incurred by rational agents who are under obligation to repay under threat of violence, milk debt recognises the infinite character of debt, underpinned by the maternal and our relation to nature. Milk debt binds us to our history and to the earth, and is an infinite debt – it is the basis for our very existence, and therefore exceeds any efforts to discharge it.
Conclusion
Reproductive debt challenges the individualised, monetary conception of debt as quantifiable and perpetuating inequality. Criticising this conception of debt, and the austerity politics and financialisation of life that it supports, allows for reconceptualising debt as an infinite responsibility to the other that cannot be counted or repaid. Instead, this obligation binds us to each other in our shared responsibility for the grounds of life itself: the capacity for reproduction and the environments that sustain us. Drawing on existing literature on reproductive labour, reproductive debt goes further in recognising that it is not work that gives us the right to live: rather, we are endlessly indebted to our ancestors and to those who care for others, as well as to the interconnected ecologies of which we are all a part.
In Iphigenia in Splott, Effie's premature daughter is sacrificed to the gods of austerity cuts. Either we ‘take responsibility for her loss, or we partake willingly in the cruelty of the gods that have condemned her’ (Gualberto, 2021: 130). Like the mythical Iphigenia, Effie's sacrifice has saved all of us, while also illustrating the violence at the heart of our social and political life. While Effie is scorned for her sexual promiscuity, linked to the moralisation of poverty, she challenges the disciplining of sexuality through the family and reveals the violence that keeps it in line. The ruinous debts imposed on previously enslaved nations such as Haiti, as well as on developing countries in the wake of global restructuring programmes, have led to highly gendered impacts that include violence, bodily surveillance, intensification of sexual and gender norms, and even death. This leads Laura Briggs to propose that, ‘A feminism of erotic marronage might also help us understand and resist the production of austerity, debt, cyclical economic crisis, and ever greater inequality’ (2020: 77). Weeks’ post-work politics importantly also makes space for challenging the nuclear family structure by creating new modes of relationships: what adrienne maree brown (2019) terms ‘pleasure activism’. Federici recognises that sexual freedom, overcoming of gender norms and refusal of work are necessarily linked.
A feminist theory of reproductive debt should involve specific demands, such as a reduced work week and guaranteed basic income, while also recognising that our co-existence on this planet imposes an infinite ethical obligation that motivates ongoing response. It should address the material needs of all those carrying out reproductive labour, with careful attention to how those needs differ as a consequence of inequality and oppression. It must recognise that all reproduction depends on the environments we live in: action on climate change must be an essential demand of reproductive debt. It should also, as Federici and Weeks argue, involve changes in how reproductive labour is carried out through transforming gender and family structures, our subjectivities and our relationships with the environment and each other.
Reproductive debt opposes the capitalist, colonialist hierarchies that undergird our normative concepts of debt and processes of financialisation. It also contests the narrow boundaries of families disciplined by gender hierarchies and markets, revealing how the privatised space of the family cannot protect any of us from the ongoing impacts of environmental damage. Chang's Milk Debt was inspired by wildfires sweeping California, a devastating symptom of climate change. At the time of the writing of this article, Canada is experiencing the worst wildfire season on record, with eleven provinces and territories affected, resulting in air-quality alerts across Canada, the USA and Europe. Pregnant people and their foetuses are especially at risk from wildfire smoke, which has been linked to adverse outcomes such as preterm births and reduced birth weight; Black women and women living in neighbourhoods with low socioeconomic status are particularly vulnerable (Sklar and Padula, 2023: 385). Although conventional understandings of debt serve to separate us, Chang's Milk Debt demonstrates how our fears unite us as all. Together, as Cavallero and Gago remind us, we can ‘give debt a body’ and insist, in our vulnerably embodied co-existence, that ‘the debt is owed to us’ (2021).
