Fieldwork Sectors

Anchored in the Global South context of India, our project broadly conceptualises female reproductive labour to include unpaid domestic work as well as abject forms of labour performed by women outside of the institutional domain of marriage and for the market, namely, sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy and egg donation, and paid domestic work. Placing varied forms of reproductive labour along the market-marriage continuum, our project not only demonstrates the law’s key role in producing and entrenching the invisibility of women’s reproductive labour in these sectors, it also offers a cross-sectoral comparison of the law’s highly differential regulation of these apparently disparate forms of female reproductive labour – sex work through criminal law, erotic dancing through licensing law, surrogacy and paid domestic work through contract law, and unpaid domestic work through family and tort laws. 

Drawing on feminist legal theory and deploying methodologies ranging from doctrinal case law analysis to ethnographies of women’s labour markets, our project problematises law’s jurisdictional boundaries over women’s reproductive labour and critiques the varied, even contradictory, legal regulation of reproductive labour as well as the misguided law reform initiatives that undermine women’s economic agency. Given the current interest, nationally and internationally, in unpaid care work, our project will offer a timely intervention by proposing a holistic understanding of reproductive labour and exploring an alternate regulatory matrix that can further women’s economic justice.