Reproductive Protectionism. Racialized Social Reproduction and Far-Right Electoral Support: Evidence from France

Social Reproduction Theory, which seeks to analyse the multiple social processes through which labour power is reproduced (Bhattacharya, 2017), has come to occupy an increasingly central place in feminist and Marxist scholarship. This literature has renewed the understanding of the relationship between gender and class, but has also interrogated the ways in which social reproduction is structured by race, notably through slavery and colonialism, and, more recently, migration from the Global South to the Global North. In Western countries, characterised by ageing populations and a growing participation of women in paid work, the reliance on migrant labour has become ever more essential to the reproduction of the workforce, particularly in non-relocatable sectors and, especially for female migrants, in the care and domestic sector (Farris 2017; 2019). However, these migrants are often conceptualised precisely only as paid workers (a substitute workforce), which tends to obscure the fact that they also engage in their own processes of social reproduction: raising children, sending them to school, making use of public services, and receiving social benefits such as family allowances. This racialised social reproduction can be perceived as an illegitimate and detrimental source of competition over access to the institutions of social reproduction, especially among the “native” segments of the working class who do not directly benefit from the capitalist exploitation of racialised migration. The political implications of this reproductive competition within working classes have been insufficiently explored through the lenses of Social Reproduction Theory. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the South-East of France, this paper shows how far-right voting is fuelled by desires that I propose to conceptualise as “reproductive protectionism”, expressed through the will to exclude racialised groups from access to, and the very possibility of, their own social reproduction. The empirical material was gathered during 15 months of fieldwork spread over a five-year period (2017–2022), during which I conducted informal conversations and semi-structured interviews with male and female voters of the Rassemblement National (RN, France’s main far-right party, led by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella). The paper demonstrates that, among certain sections of the RN electorate, migrants (and, more broadly, racialised groups perceived as of African descent) are less often regarded as “job stealers” as people who do not work but nevertheless receive welfare benefits. The productive labour of racialised groups is overlooked, while their reproductive labour is perceived as threatening to the social reproduction of the white working and middle classes. The paper further shows that this “reproductive protectionism” is a gendered phenomenon, and helps explain why an increasing number of women vote for the RN in France (Durovic, Mayer and Piolat 2025). It concludes by highlighting how these ordinary perceptions resonate with far-right ideological repertoires, from party discourses centred on “welfare chauvinism” to the more militant “Great Replacement” narrative.