At its theoretical core, the panel builds on Marxist-feminist critiques of value, labor, and social reproduction. As Silvia Federici argues, Marx’s analysis of capitalism remains limited in accounting for value-producing work beyond commodity production, thereby obscuring the centrality of women’s unpaid reproductive labor to capitalist accumulation. While capitalism did not originate from women’s subordination, it has intensified divisions between what counts as value-producing labor and what is rendered invisible: the gendered reproductive and care work.
Expanding this framework, Nancy Fraser diagnoses a contemporary “crisis of care” as a structural contradiction of capitalism, in which the system simultaneously depends on social reproduction and systematically undermines the conditions that sustain it, leading to its uneven commodification and depletion.
By putting in conversation these insights with recent materialist feminist approaches attentive to ecological and technological entanglements, the panel highlights how crises of care, labor, and the environment are explored in literature and art—a question the following papers investigate across interconnected yet uneven regional and cultural contexts.
The first paper, by Garima Panwar, reads Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love through Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, arguing that maternal refusal emerges as a response to the crisis of care. By foregrounding postpartum depression rather than maternal love, the novel exposes motherhood as an enforced labor regime under conditions of social abandonment. The narrator’s refusal to mother reconfigures care not as a moral obligation but as coerced labor, positioning refusal as a form of negative agency that reveals the limits of reproductive labor under contemporary capitalism.
The second paper, by Gayatri Mehra, develops a Global South feminist optic on care through the works of Tsitsi Dangarembga and Buchi Emecheta. She demonstrates how postcolonial and neoliberal crises manifest as care crises, foregrounding psychic injury and damaged subjectivity. By situating African literary representations within broader debates on care, welfare, and neoliberalism, this paper shows how the concept of care has gained renewed theoretical traction as a means of articulating contemporary political demands, while emphasizing its psycho-affective dimensions.
The third paper, by Ki Cora Chow, examines 1990s South China through Anzi Fever as a postsocialist cultural formation shaped by factory labor, media circulation, and entrepreneurial discourse. It explores how the technological imaginary of the assembly line generated new forms of gendered subjectivity and cultural production, offering a materialist feminist account grounded in industrial labor, automated machinery, and emergent media networks.
The final paper, by Tatjana Gajic, investigates women’s writing and artistic practices at the intersection of extractivism and ecology. Through dialogue between literary and artistic works, it frames these practices as ethical and political engagements with the earth, foregrounding care as a mode of relational engagement that challenges extractivist logics.
Taken together, these papers demonstrate how comparative materialist feminism provides a transregional framework for critically understanding the multiple facets of the circulation of labor, resources, affects, and ideas under global capitalism. While attending to the specificity of different historical and cultural contexts, the panel emphasizes the interconnectedness of these formations within a shared totality. By foregrounding both the uneven distribution of care and the structures producing its crisis, the panel positions materialist feminism as a crucial method for analyzing contemporary cultural production and articulating a radical feminist internationalism grounded in struggles over reproduction, labor, and life-making practices.
The session will include four presentations of 12–13 minutes each, followed by at least 15 minutes of open discussion, with careful time management to ensure smooth transitions and adherence to the 75-minute format.
Importantly, the panel brings together scholars across ranks (a full professor, two VAPs, and two doctoral students), institutions, and geographic origins (India, Argentina, Eastern Europe, and China), reflecting diverse positionalities and fostering equitable engagement with the topic.