The return of the arcane: A study on the role of social reproduction in feminist movements’ discourses

Sociological contributions to the long-term trajectories of social movements have often focused on the continuities and discontinuities of single movement organizations, families, or social movement processes in specific cities/areas. They have investigated how organizations sustain themselves for longer periods of time, how they survive between one ‘wave’ of mobilization and another. In doing so, these studies have theorized the existence and the workings of structures allowing for the reproduction of movements over time. However, rather than focusing on such organizational structures, this paper follows the wobbly paths of knowledge and ideas, investigating how these disappear, how they are transformed by and how they impact larger movement processes. In particular, my contribution will try to trace the evolution of the discourse around social reproduction in Italian feminism. Reflections around care have not solely been brought back to the fore with the latest global wave of feminist mobilization, but, as the COVID-19 crisis hit, they also underwent a discursive implosion, with ‘care’ becoming an ever-more popular buzzword. In pandemic-ridden Italy, Non Una di Meno, arguably the most prominent trans-feminist movement in the country, advocated for a radical retrieving of feminist knowledge on reproduction, presenting it as a crucial field of struggle. Reflections around care and reproduction are hardly new: rather, they are rooted in Italian Marxist-feminist theories of the 70s, which interrogated (patriarchal and capitalist) exploitation from a critical and feminist standpoint. These elaborations, however, perceived as ambivalent by the larger women’s movement of the time, which used difference, not class or other mannish categories, to advance its claims. The distance between these two visions eventually contributed to the progressive marginalization of the theory of social reproduction in the following decades. From the 90s on, however, the movement started to critically engage with so-called ‘historical-feminists,’ interrogating the absence of a feminist understanding of class, and taking up discourses around precarity that were advanced throughout the early 2000s. Despite this development and precisely when a critical gaze on the economic realm was needed, the feminist perspective of social reproduction disappeared again: during the 2008 global financial crisis, feminists in Italy were preoccupied with opposing Berlusconi’s sexism and made the fight against the hyper-sexualization of women in the media central to their discourses. This paper revisits this untold history, and, in investigating the persistence of the concept of social reproduction, is able to tell the story of Italian feminism from an unexpected angle, bypassing the organizational focus which is all too common in movement studies. In order to so, it draws from original documents, second-hand sources as well as semi-structured interviews with key activists and experts. My hope is to contribute to the understanding of movement trajectories through the analysis of lesser known periods in Italian feminism (the 90s and early 2000s in particular), studied in continuity with more renowned eras such as the 70s.