ABSTRACT
The thematisation of life as an immediate sphere of economic intervention, but also as a particularly unstable and crisis-prone terrain for capital, is central to the argument of this chapter. It analyses two recent fictional engagements with the field of reproduction, Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood , where living labour is resituated at the centre of capitalism’s post-industrial strategy of appropriation and exploitation. In Kavenna’s novel, the characteristically post-Fordist erosion of experiential boundaries between production and reproduction, between work and life, is tackled through a vindication of parturition as a terrain of struggle and resistance. Heti’s text, in turn, challenges a recently revitalised discourse of demographic crisis (secular stagnation) that specifically targets women’s alleged failure to comply with their reproductive mandate. By turning this reactionary narrative on its head, Motherhood proposes an alternative vindication of reproductive temporalities and of women’s agency in contemporary capitalism. Finally, the chapter turns to a classic fictional engagement with the matter of reproduction, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood in order to consider the broader historical and cultural implications of the role played by reproduction in capitalism. This novel presents reproduction as part of the process of primitive accumulation, which – it is argued – is a particularly useful concept to understand ongoing transformations in post-Fordism.
