BirthStrikers and Traditional Housewives: Reproductive Power as Resistance in an Era of Crisis?

Abstract

SRT suggests that the mode of economic production and its necessary counterpart—the reproduction of life—are irreducibly intermeshed, with both capitalist and patriarchal dynamics integral to the overall functioning and supremacy of capitalism. This thesis employs SRT to examine two social movements: 1) the Trad Wife movement, which advocates for women to return to the role of so-called ‘traditional housewives’, and 2) the contemporary BirthStrike movement, which used a ‘strike from birth’ to generate awareness of the climate crisis and lobby the United Kingdom government to implement progressive environmental reforms. Using a mixed-methods research approach, this thesis is interested in how these movements explicitly politicise the work of reproduction, and, further, how they position reproductive power as a form of resistance within the contemporary social context. Moreover, the thesis contends that these movements illustrate that reproductive labour is in crisis in contemporary capitalism. In addition to analysing the significance of these movements, the thesis reflects on SRT as an analytical framework for interpreting the ongoing reorganisation of everyday life under distinctly capitalistic imperatives and in particular its ability to account for novel cultural phenomena such as the ‘BirthStrikers’ and ‘Trad Wives’.