Performance and Reproduction: Introduction

Figure 1.

(facing page) The Q-Kidz Dance Team in Anna Rose Holmer's The Fits. See "Ecstatic Girlhood: Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion" by Rizvana Bradley.

(Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories)

What does performance have to do with reproduction? In what ways are performances uncritical mediums for the reproduction of capitalist social relations and, conversely, how might performance practices interrupt the reproduction of the conditions of exploitation, immiseration, and domination that structure our world? These are some of the questions that prompted the call for papers that resulted in this TDR Consortium issue. Our call invited a broad reflection on the intersections between reproduction and performance, galvanized by debates within performance studies surrounding the relations among reproduction and disappearance, the non-live and the live, the enduring and the ephemeral, as well as more recent meditations on the entanglements of life, labor, and performance. Simultaneously, our call expressed an interest in contributions that might bring performance critique to bear specifically on the contemporary resurgence, in both academic and activist discourses, of Marxist and socialist feminist accounts of social reproduction and reproductive labor.

In the most basic sense, "social reproduction" is a political concept that has been employed to describe those activities that reproduce life both daily and intergenerationally (see Laslett and Brenner 1989). While in the work of Marxist feminist scholars from the 1970s onward, social reproduction predominantly describes the gendered and racialized reproductive labor, whether waged or unwaged, that sustains the relations of production (such as sex work, care work, and domestic labor), social reproduction has equally been leveraged to encompass the multiple institutional and social locations in which life is reproduced and which themselves sustain capitalism. As the editors of a recent special issue of Historical Materialism elaborate,

[Social reproduction feminist theory] is not simply about the relationship of households to workplaces. It is about relationships between the workplace and all the institutions and processes through which labour-power is renewed, including—among others—(private and public) schools, hospitals and daycare centres. [...] Moreover, on an international scale, the renewal of labour-power occurs in, and through, the policing of borders, flows of migrants and the remittances many send to their countries of origin, army camps, refugee camps, and other processes and institutions of a global imperialist order.

(Ferguson, et al. 2016:31)

Social reproduction is not only a site for the reproduction of labor-power, however. It is simultaneously an insurgent terrain of resistance and refusal. This is what the Italian Marxist feminist Silvia Federici has diagnosed as the double nature of social reproduction: at once the ground zero of capital's reproduction, it is also a ground zero for our struggle against the enclosures of capitalist accumulation and on behalf of the preservation and survivance of alternative modalities of being-in-common (2012:2). As a terrain of struggle, social reproduction is therefore also about the practices of refusal that aim to carve out spaces and times for reproducing and living differently. Following a definition proposed by Fulvia Serra, we might then say that social reproduction is "more than a container with fixed boundaries (a sphere), it should be considered a process, a continuously changing one, which expands and contracts both in response to its own internal dynamics, and under the pressure of the continuous attempts at enclosing it on the part of the capitalist machine" (2015).

If social reproduction is a process, so too is performance. As processual temporal forms, both tend toward entropy even as their constant repetitions serve simultaneously to regenerate and maintain the social worlds of capitalist modernity. Potentially meeting at a crossroad between a fatigued body and the fatiguing of productivity itself, disruptive rebellions of the reproducing and reproducible body are pivotal to the dynamics we chart in this issue, given that disruptive rebellions are often marked as performances themselves. Critical theories of theatre, dance, and performance often imbue performance and the relations made possible by performance's temporality, spatiality, and embodiment with the potential for enabling experiments in living otherwise. When Elin Diamond asked...