Social Reproduction in the Periphery: (Re)Producing Life in Lebanon

Abstract

Throughout different historical eras, women migrant domestic workers have been employed into private Lebanese households for at least a century to carry out daily care and housework for little (or no) pay. In this thesis, I seek to explore that situation through a critical analysis of the organization of domestic labor in Lebanon. Based on the Marxist-Feminist analytical concept of social reproduction, I analyze the modern configurations of domestic labor in households as constituted by larger market structures, and as positioned within social relations of (re)production on a local, regional and global scale. Accordingly, the analysis will examine the broader organization of “social reproduction” in Lebanon, meaning those processes and forms of labor needed for the daily and regenerative (re)production of life and labor power. This thesis seeks to display that in the social and colonial formation of modern Lebanon, the centering of financial and trade interests in the political economy has simultaneously pushed the processes of social reproduction to a peripheral position with crucial consequences for the majority popular classes and social relations of (re)production. Such processes are visible through the long-lasting privatization of social welfare, in legislations on labor and family relations, (non-)citizenship laws, housing conditions, and in unequal access to reproductive autonomy and means of subsistence, particularly for women and those deemed non-citizens. It is shown that Lebanon as a financialized capitalist society, like elsewhere, results in an organization of social reproduction and domestic labor as both feminized, racialized, and either privatized or commodified. Hence, reproductive processes become a contested field of survival, dependent on people’s structural position with regards to class, gender, citizenship, race, and sexuality, while enabling the political establishment to utilize social reproduction as a means to subordinate and gain political support. By demonstrating the connections between global and local structures of feminized domestic labor, I show that such a configuration is co-constitutive of a large global labor force of temporarily employed (migrant) workers whose reproductive autonomy become significantly reduced to cut the costs of labor and (re)production in order to increase capital accumulation. As such, I argue that social reproduction in Lebanon appears to represent a rather permanent microcosm of current structures of social-reproductive conditions and crises on a global scale. In other words, I show that the organization of domestic labor and social reproduction in Lebanon ought to be perceived as directly structured by the capitalist mode of (re)production on all its various scales, especially in its current crisis-phase.