This study argues that women's empowerment and honor-based violence (HBV) are not inherently aligned. Based on qualitative interviews with professionals working on violence against women in Turkey, it explores how empowerment, honor, and protection are interpreted in everyday institutional and policy practices. Findings indicate that policies limited to education or economic participation are insufficient unless they also challenge patriarchal norms that legitimize control over women's lives and bodies in both private and public spheres. Within Turkey's family-centered policy framework, initiatives such as the "Year of the Family" may restrict women's agency by linking empowerment to motherhood, sacrifice, and care. The study also reveals a key paradox: although legal mechanisms such as Law No. 6284 formally ensure protection, their implementation can reproduce control through bureaucratic procedures and moral surveillance. Thus, empowerment should be conceptualized not as a technical objective but as a political process grounded in autonomy, rights, and defamilialization processes.
In this article, we discuss the possibilities for theorizing social reproduction allowed by analytically centering human and more-than-human relationality and the environment. Addressing the nature-society binary, multispecies relationality, and the role of the more-than-human in social reproduction, we propose theorizing reproduction as an entanglement of violence and care, understood as simultaneously existing, interlocking, multispecies oppressions, and attempts to offer care. We draw, first, from the works of Latin American feminists who theorize the relationality of humans and more-than-humans through the epistemology of interlocking, everyday (vida cotidiana) oppressions; second, from those of decolonial Latin American feminists who critique nature-society dualism and introduce the reproduction of life as the relationality of a communal body-territory (cuerpo-territorio); third, from environmental feminist theorizing on multispecies intersectionality and reproductive relationality beyond capitalist relations; and, finally, from a dialogue with the feminist theorizing of social reproduction as an entanglement of life and death, life and capitalism.
This article critically examines the governance of Kenyan domestic workers' labor migration to the Gulf states through digital platforms such as the Labor Mobility Management Information System (LMMIS). Drawing on interviews with returnee migrants and other stakeholders, it interrogates whether contemporary eMigration systems reproduce colonial-era indenture logics by creating a "fiction of free labor" through contractual rituals. The study reveals how debt, work contract substitution, and structural barriers exacerbate vulnerabilities, despite state efforts to ensure "good governance." By applying a pluralizing social reproduction approach, the authors highlight the gendered, racialized, and neoliberal dimensions of care work migration, urging reforms that center migrant agency and rights.
Social reproduction theory (SRT) is one of the most fruitful strands of feminist theory, while still being dominated by research from the Global North. In this context, a recent article calls for SRT to be pluralized by broadening the concept of social reproduction, shifting from "theory" to "approaches," and departing from universal ontologies to relieve a tension between universal ontologies and locally embedded social practices. Building on this attempt and others to develop SRT further, this article calls instead for SRT to be anchored in a Marxist-feminist ontology of human labor and living power. This is done to overcome a dilemma that arises between one-sided understandings of social reproduction and to sharpen the theoretical profile of SRT and its explanatory power of feminist materialist social analysis of global capitalism without reproducing Western biases.
This article theorizes social reproduction as enacted by feminist social movements in response to state hostility under neoliberal capitalism and authoritarian regimes. Drawing on empirical research from 2018 to 2024, it examines two case studies: assistance in accessing abortion under Poland's near-total ban introduced in 2020 and activist support for migrants stranded at the Polish-Belarusian border. We introduce the concept of "illegitimate care" to describe care practices that are criminalized or suppressed by the state, particularly when directed toward marginalized populations deemed unworthy of support. These acts challenge capitalist and nationalist logics by sustaining lives considered disposable. The article argues for a pluralized social reproduction approach that centers empirical realities and blurs the lines between care and reproductive labor. By analyzing activist practices that both reproduce and resist capitalist structures, we demonstrate how social reproduction becomes a terrain of struggle, transforming everyday acts of care into politically significant forms of resistance.
