Embodied contradictions: Capitalism, social reproduction and body formation

This paper argues that Marxist feminism offers a powerful approach to body formation theory. Building on social reproduction theory's key innovations, as well as its recognition that Marx's ‘critique’ of political economy is unfinished business, I develop my argument through a constructive critique of three manifestations of the fetishism of wage form, respectively problematizing the distinction between labor and labor power, the limits of the concept of labor within production-centered approach, and the embodied nature of labor power. In recovering the centrality of the body for critical social theory, social reproduction theory sheds new light into our understanding of the complex processes by which the contradictions of capital are displaced and ultimately embodied in specific ways, and therefore offers a powerful approach attentive to the ways in which the physical body shapes, and is shaped by, social and material forces.