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93 Time and again, women’s reproductive dilemmas underscored a wider debate, articulated both within familial relations and in state policy, about the responsibility for nurturing children and citizens in post-Soviet Cuba. As the narratives of the previous chapter demonstrated, women attributed low fertility and high abortion rates not simply to the expense of raising children, but also to the gendered demands of balancing claims by family and the state in the complex and often fragile arrangements in which children are born and sustained. Such tensions have repercussions not only for reproductive practice in terms of fertility rates, but also for the distribution of gendered labor and the production of gendered subjectivities. In socialist theory, state support for reproduction and the de-gendering of the productive and reproductive spheres would form the basis for new and egalitarian norms of female and male socialist citizenship, both in the home and in the workplace. In practice, as the lives of my informants showed, while women assumed many new roles and obligations outside the home, the connection between women and reproduction remained largely intact; women’s supposedly natural affinity for nurturance and reproductive labor was often tacitly reaffirmed at both the level of the state and in familial gender relations. Thus, socialism’s new woman has been produced not simply through explicit policies around labor or childcare, but also indirectly through women’s double and triple burdens as mothers, workers, and revolutionaries. Moreover, as in other socialist states (Gal and Kligman 2000), the historic alliance between women and the state made women in many ways more dependent than men on state policy and largesse to realize the new gendered ideals. The contraction of the state therefore had gendered effects when responsibility for household reproduction was returned to the family—that is, to women.1 Observing 5 Engendered Economies and the Dilemmas of Reproduction 94 CONCEIVING CUBA Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Katherine Verdery (1994) argued that “The end of socialism necessarily mean[t] making once again invisible , by feminizing them and reinserting them into households, those tasks that become too costly when rendered visible and assumed by the state.” Although reproductive tasks in Cuba were neither defeminized nor fully moved out of the private domestic sphere, the forced reorganization of Cuba’s post-Soviet economy has meant the elimination or reduction of many of the benefits that the state was previously expected to provide. During the height of the Special Period, the exorbitant number of hours required to supply the home with goods and services that could no longer be found or afforded in the public sphere meant that many women abandoned their positions in the paid labor force for the unpaid work of reproducing the private sphere (Pearson 1997; Valdés Jiménez 2010). This has also had consequences for the reproduction of the “new woman.” In this chapter, I return to key concerns introduced in chapter 2 about the relationship between women and reproduction, this time as they are refracted through the post-Soviet household and labor economies. Exploring this issue through the analysis of three extended case studies, I ask: What gendered opportunity structures have emerged, as long-standing state policies are experienced in new economic conditions? How does the continued feminization of reproductive labor inform the gendering of the various economies of labor, and vice versa? And finally, what are the implications for socialist visions of gender egalitarianism and ideals of female citizenship? In posing these questions, I reiterate this book’s central contentions: first, that processes of reproduction neither end at birth nor are contained within unique fertile bodies, but continue in the ongoing labor of sustaining children , households, and social forms. The frequently uneven distribution of this labor across axes of gender and generation (as well as, in other contexts, race/ ethnicity, class, and nationality) reveals the social organization of reproduction , as well as the interactive effects between gender and reproduction. Thus, not only do gender ideologies shape responsibility for familial and household reproduction, but the forms of gendered practice that emerge as people work to secure the broader “conditions” for the nurturance of dependents also shape gendered subjectivities, often in ways antithetical to the predictions of the state. The second and related point maintains that the social organization of reproduction is best understood not simply in conjunction with policies explicitly targeting gender or reproduction. It must also be contextualized in the interplay between household relations and broader economies...

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