But Who Reproduce the Protesters? Judith Butler’s Assemblies, Social Reproduction Politics, and the (Under-)Theorization of the Public Sphere

This essay partakes in the on-going effort, within (trans)feminist theory, to articulate a queer understanding of social reproduction, that is, of the continuous labor through which workers and individuals are regenerated and cared for. It offers to read Judith Butler’s Notes Towards A Performative Theory, as a decisive resource to recognize the role played by social reproduction in street politics, and to organize in a way that puts social reproduction issues such as the availability of food, shelter, and clothing or the distribution and organization of care and dependency work, at the forefront of feminist politics. Focusing on her performative interpretation of the mutual aid projects set up in anti-precarity protests, it argues that Judith Butler offers an understanding of the reproductive labor necessary to ensure the sustainability and accessibility of social struggles in public spaces, that opens a fecund dialogue with non-queer accounts of social reproduction. More precisely I demonstrate that by emphasizing the fact that as no workers can be productive if they don’t sleep, eat, drink or are not cared for physically and emotionally, no protesters can continue being part of a social struggle if their energy is not regenerated, Butler exposes the need to think the public dimension of reproductive labor, and, not only, its private dimension because the ways in which the protesters are reproduced impact 1) the presence of queer and feminist subjects in social struggles’ ranks ; 2) the ability of the struggle to foster an understanding of emancipation that does not rely on the opposition between the private realm of necessity and the public realm of freedom ; 3) the recognition that public spaces too, and not only homes and factory need to be transformed for a fairer polity to emerge.