ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ideological and material devaluation of social reproduction in the context of contemporary Canadian healthcare, through elucidating the changing shape of social reproduction in Ontario’s increasingly privatized healthcare system. The chapter examines how the reconfiguration of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism impacts the day-to-day work of social provisioning in Canadian healthcare, with particular attention accorded to clinical healthcare workers (including nursing staff), ancillary workers, and unpaid informal caregivers. Primarily, the chapter argues that healthcare privatization strategies undertaken in the name of ‘cost-saving’ and ‘efficiency’ rely on the widespread devaluation of social reproductive work, which has profoundly gendered and racialized effects. The chapter, thereby, invites readers to consider the centrality of social reproduction to the logics and practices of health and healthcare under neoliberal capitalism, especially given social reproductive labor is feminized and racialized; and to engage seriously with feminist insights on this labor and the broader political economy of health.
