My doctoral dissertation, Feminist Earth Politics, brings into dialogue Marxist feminism—particularly as it emerged from the experience of the Wages for Housework collectives active in the 1970s in Italy, the UK, and the US—and feminist new materialism, which investigates the material and semiotic processes that shape the world and the multiple worlds that compose it within today’s complex intersectional geographies.
The central aim of this dialogue is to reframe the crucial question of reproduction—and of reproductive labor—by placing it at the heart of a reflection that fully acknowledges the nonhuman as an integral and inescapable part of economic and ecological processes.
Grounded in the demand to recognize reproductive labor as labor de facto—and thus as productive of surplus value—and in the consequent reconceptualization of the working class, the dissertation expands these categories beyond the human to offer a theoretical recognition of the effort and valorization of the nonhuman within the current mode of (re)production.
This attempt to de-anthropocentralize the categories of political economy unfolds through a situated and careful re-signification of key Marxian concepts such as living labor and dead labor, constant capital and variable capital, while also questioning dichotomies such as life/non-life, tool/product, and organism/technology—binaries diagnosed as inadequate to grasp the contemporary materializations of laboring and commodified bodies at the shifting intersections of exploitation and domination.
The analysis follows a baroque line of value, one that travels unevenly and discontinuously across space, mobilizing and extracting profit from embodied minds and their interrelations—differentiated by race as well as by gender—up to the point of enrolling trans-species and ecosystemic relations into the meshes of capitalist valorization. In this framework, the notion of sympoiesis becomes key to theorizing the hybrid, collective actions that simultaneously function as the ground zero of capitalist modes of production and as sites of worldly emergence beyond capitalism and its logics.
Foucauldian analysis, in this context, allows for an understanding of naturalization as a strategy in which "nature" operates as a dispositif for the production of subjectivities that resist clear inscription within the domain of political economy.
Ultimately, the dissertation seeks to reconceptualize political economy itself through a trans*feminist and ecological lens—as a space of experimentation for coexisting with alterities in times of socio-environmental crisis.
Finally, the analysis turns more concretely to the exploration of potential circuits of restitution—such as the Care Income—to imagine possible ways of involving the nonhuman in a positively sympoietic economy, one aimed at radically subverting the current painful economization of existence.
