IAS Gender and Feminism Network Seminar: The Laws of Social Reproduction

The IAS Gender and Feminism Research Network welcomes Dr Prabha Kotiswaran from King's College London for the second seminar of the Spring Term for this talk on social reproduction.

Abstract

Successive waves of feminist scholarship have rendered visible the labour that women perform through biological reproduction, the production of goods and services for the home and the reproduction of culture and ideology. Yet, as the global economy and welfare states are thrown into crisis mode, not only are women increasingly called upon to perform paid work in and for transnational markets, they also face increased burdens of social reproduction. Meanwhile, the very parameters of paid work are fast changing with the neo-liberal expansion of markets in sexual commerce and surrogacy. Social reproduction under conditions of globalisation is therefore being urgently debated in several disciplines and locations. Dr Kotiswaran's talk will focus on the central role of the law in shaping social reproduction, particularly its highly differential regulation of apparently disparate forms of female reproductive labour. By drawing on this occasion on the specific example of transnational commercial surrogacy she explores the possibilities for an alternate regulatory matrix that could further women's economic justice.

Speaker bio

Dr Prabha Kotiswaran is Reader in Law and Social Justice at King's College London. She received her undergraduate law degree in India from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and an LLM and SJD (doctorate) from Harvard Law School. Dr Kotiswaran's main areas of research include criminal law, transnational criminal law, sociology of law, postcolonial theory and feminist legal theory. Her 2011 book Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India (Princeton) won the 2012 SLSA-Hart Prize for Early Career Academics, and she is currently writing multiple books on governance feminism and the law and governance of trafficking. In 2014 she was the recipient of a Phillip Leverhulme Prize, and her work has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School; and the Journal of Law and Society, among others.