There has been an emerging interest among international organisations and national governments in unpaid care and domestic work for a few years (UN 2015). Unpaid care and domestic work is theorised as re_productive labour1 in Marxist feminism, which highlights its role in the re_production of capitalism and aims to make such work visible (Federici 2012). From a feminist Foucauldian perspective, the emerging governmental interest in this labour and its quantification needs to be scrutinised as a technology of government (Beier 2025). This paper combines feminist, Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives on re_productive labour and its governance to understand the emerging governmental interest in unpaid care and domestic work. A feminist Marxist Foucauldian perspective on re_production suggests pushing "Marx beyond Marx as well as Foucault beyond Foucault" (Means 2022, 1969). The paper probes to introduce a theoretical framework through which the current power-knowledges and materialist conditions in the governing of re_productive labour can be understood.

Some feminist scholars propose a Marxist and materialist reading of Foucault, which is reflected above all in Foucault's conception of biopolitics and the domination of life (Hennessy 1990; Oksala 2015). Feminist scholarship on biopolitics draws on the Foucauldian concept to illuminate how gendered bodies are governed in biopolitical ways (Repo 2015; Waldby and Cooper 2008; Sanders 2017). They apply a biopolitical research framework to formulate critical perspectives on technological practices, such as self-monitoring devices (Sanders 2017), reproductive medicine (Waldby and Cooper 2008) or sexual rights (Fotopoulou 2016). Biopolitics is thus directly referred to as the governing of the body or as body politics (Govrin 2025). What is, however, less theorised and analysed is how biopolitics shape the conditions under which bodies are cared for, the conditions of social re_production, even though Foucault's conceptualisation of biopolitics includes the rule and organisation of life beyond the body (Foucault 2003b, 2007; Lemke 2011; Sauer 2015).

Luca Mavelli (2017, 814) conceives biopower as a "power of care", "strengthening and enhancing life", although he does not refer to the feminist concept of care, but understands it in a broader sense: the governmental concern for the well-being of the population. Birgit Sauer (2015, 111) criticises Foucault's work on biopolitics for its bias towards the governing of life rather than its re_production. Analysing the governing of care and household labour, therefore, enriches the concept of biopolitics. The paper argues for a return to the Foucauldian conceptualisation of biopolitics, in which the regulation and enabling of the labour force through different mechanisms, including childcare, is the aim of the biopolitical governing of the population.

Such a Marxist feminist understanding of biopolitics encompasses a wide range of current politics. It entails pro-natal politics in the cote of the "maternal matrix" (Simons 1996, 199). Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (2010, 67) understands furthermore domestic workers "as a site of the (re)production of life, as a biopolitical force, governed by the absence of direct State intervention". Care is thus governed by the state through the silencing of domestic work. The state's protection of the national labour market and restrictive migration policies lead to the informalisation of migrant labour as a cheap and available resource (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010, 75f). The biopolitical governing of household labour is embedded in nationalist labour and migration regimes. The biopolitical framework, moreover, demonstrates how family policy addresses the family as a site of production of human capital. The family is targeted for quantitative enhancement of the birth rate and for qualitative enhancement of national human capital, as Katharina Hajek demonstrated, taking Germany as an example (Hajek 2019, 196).

These important applications of biopolitics to the realm of care and social re_production have highlighted the crucial role of the production and reproduction of life itself. They have, however, omitted to theorise the relation between re_productive labour and biopolitics at the nexus between Foucauldian feminist and Marxist feminist theory. To better understand the governmental mechanisms or, in Foucault's words, the "technology of government" (Foucault 2008, 297), the paper develops a theoretical perspective on re_production as biopolitics (4) by drawing on Marxist feminism (2) and Foucauldian and queerfeminist theorising of biopolitics (3). The paper further introduces a Marxist feminist and Foucauldian perspective on re_productive labour as biopolitics (4) and suggests applying this perspective to the governing of re_productive labour as biopolitical technology (5). It further argues that the current state interest in re_productive labour is a form of biopolitics that enables the conditions under which the society reproduces.

Marxist feminist scholars, such as Silvia Federici (2012), Mariarosa Dalla Costa (2019) or Lise Vogel (1987) have most prominently theorised the function of re_productive labour for capitalist accumulation. They were inspired by Karl Marx and his critique of the political economy and the exploitation of human labour (Marx 1990 [1867]). The role of housework in the "production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life" (Engels 2021 [1884]: 4) is, however, largely omitted in the work of Marx and Friedrich Engels. This omission has led Marxist feminism to theorise housework in the capitalist economy.

Marxist feminist analyses demonstrate that the labour force needs to be reproduced for the capitalist system to function. In effect, the paid labour force is built upon a huge amount of unpaid and marginalised care and housework, later called re_productive labour or social re_production, because it reproduces not only the labour power but also the society and the capitalist system. It was Nancy Chodorow (1979) who used the term 'social reproduction'2 in this sense for the first time:

The concept of social re_production includes unpaid as well as paid forms of domestic and care work. This enables feminist alliances between unpaid and paid care workers, "between producers and the reproduced" (Federici 2012, 128). Women's dominant role in the domestic sphere is traced back to their "diminished capacity to work during the child-bearing period" (Vogel 1987, 154). While capitalism depends on this unpaid labour, it also reduces the capacity of women to be exploited in the paid labour force. Marxist feminist analyses focus on this contradiction between reproduction and production (Fraser 2016).

Discussions in Marxist feminism revolve around the question of how far this labour is productive or reproductive, and at what point in the value chain the added value of domestic labour is created. This debate is known as the 'domestic labour debate' (Glazer-Malbin 1976; Dalla Costa 2019; Vogel 1973).3 Those theorisations, although very concise and relevant for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of capitalism, have however marginalised to theorise the role of the state in the governing of re_productive labour.4

Such omissions are addressed by Mary McIntosh (1978) and have also gained relevance in Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and Feminist Political Economy (Bhattacharya 2017; Bezanson 2019; Bakker 2007). McIntosh (1978) applies the work of Louis Althusser (2014) on how the state reproduces the relations of capitalism to enhance the understanding of the state in governing unpaid household labour. She emphasises that the state is responsible for reproducing the relations of reproduction. In other words, during economic restructuring, the state needs to maintain the conditions for reproduction. This process, for instance, reflects the economic costs and benefits of investing in public childcare so that more women can enter or remain in the labour force, or of lowering the costs of reproduction and thus promoting a breadwinner model. Such reflections often lead to contrasting or even contradictory state policies:

Since the 1970s, state policies and strategies concerning the reproduction of social and economic relations have undergone significant changes. Women's participation in the labour force has grown in Post-Fordism, but the domestic and care work burden remains unequally distributed by gender, race and class (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010; Rai 2024). Feminist scholars show how the decline in the availability of unpaid labour triggered a crisis or depletion of social re_production, which led to the further commodification of care services and thus increasing intersectional inequalities (Rai 2024). Social Reproduction Theory fills some of the blank spaces of Marxist feminism by theorising multiple and intersecting forms of oppression, primarily gender, race, and sexuality as structurally embedded in capitalist accumulation (Ferguson 2016, 54). SRT and other materialist scholarship also focus on the privatisation or enclosure of social reproduction and its crisis (Federici 2004; Bakker 2007; Dowling 2016). The crisis of social reproduction is, thereafter, part of a bigger crisis of capitalism, which is being dealt with "an increasing privatization and commodification of social reproduction, with capital penetrating into spheres that in the past were not directly subsumed by the market" (Arruzza 2016, 11).

SRT also focuses on the state's role in reconfiguring gender relations through the governance of social reproduction. The state's role has shifted from excluding women from the paid labour force to including them, driven by capitalism's rising demand for labour power (Fraser 2016). While capitalism depends on social re_production, to ensure the replenishment and maintenance of the workforce, it also deprives its very foundations by commodification and other means. The commodification of social reproduction goes hand in hand with the state's withdrawal from financing public and social services (Bezanson 2019, 162ff). When social services are commodified, their quality decreases, and structural inequalities of gender, race, class, and location are reproduced. Social reproduction is thus depleted, undermining human and more-than-human life (Rai 2024).

The governing of social and biological re_production is thus of great interest for governments and International Organisations which aim to regulate birth rates and the conditions of re_production, in relation to the state's labour force and its economic development (Beier 2024). To grasp the rationalities, mechanisms and processes of the governing of re_productive labour, a biopolitical Foucauldian perspective is very helpful.

Foucault is not the first to consider the question of biopolitics.5 The theoretical value of Foucault's concept of biopolitics lies in the genealogical methodology through which he traces the emergence of the "power over life" (Foucault 2003b, 248), its economic and political governing effects, and related mechanisms. Foucault describes in his genealogy of capitalism and the modern state that in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries the "biological came under state control" (Foucault 2003b, 240) and that the central target of government shifted from territory to population (Foucault 2007, 96). Biopolitics can be defined as a way of governing human life in which human life itself becomes the aim of government. This constitutes, according to Foucault, an important shift in the constitution and exercise of power because "what might be called a society's 'threshold of modernity' has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies" (Foucault 1978, 143).

It is important to note that Foucault's understanding of biopolitics is inextricably linked with the emergence of the human body as "productive force" (Foucault 2003b, 31). Foucault (1978, 141ff) makes it very clear in his chapter 'Right of Death and Power over Life' that biopower is a specific phenomenon of modern capitalism that makes the "adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital" possible. Modern capitalism created the need for vital, healthy, productive, and sexually (re)productive labour power and made it necessary to govern the "constitution of the productive forces" and to minimise and exclude unproductivity (Foucault 2003b, 31).6 It is exactly this linkage with economic reasoning that biopolitics should be considered in line with Foucault's consideration of liberal governmentality, where he elaborates the "introduction of economy into political practice" (Foucault 2007, 95). Understanding biopolitics in a limited way to encompass solely life as the target of politics misses not only a great deal of its meaning but also makes it compatible with questionable interpretations, such as right-wing and authoritarian politics (Lemke 2011, 1).

The concept of biopolitics is thus based on the Marxist assumption that the governing of the population and the disciplining of bodies are exercised to maintain labour power and generate profit in the interests of the bourgeoisie (Foucault 1978, 141; Marx 1990 [1867]).7 Biopolitics is not an end in itself but a means or a power-mechanism for the end of economic profit. Political utility and economic profit were not necessarily generated through the exclusion of deviancies, such as sexuality or madness, but rather through the "techniques of power" developed in the process of exclusion (Foucault 2003b, 32, 33). It remains, however, underexposed how these mechanisms and techniques generate economic profit.

Sexuality has, alongside racism, a very central role in Foucault's conceptualisation of biopolitics. Sex is "the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life", those two axes being the disciplining of the body and the regulation of the population (Foucault 1978, 145). The control over the body through disciplinary mechanisms characteristic of medieval times was not replaced but rather supplemented by new regulatory mechanisms aimed at the population as a whole. These regulatory mechanisms include living conditions, habitation, and childcare. Foucault mentions childcare as one characteristic of a normalising society in the context of sexual control. He argues that the nuclear family emerged during the end of the 18^th century to ensure the care for children's bodies, life, and education and to control their sexuality (Foucault 2003a, 254, 265):

The nuclear family and its role in the re_production of future workers are thus part of a biopolitical technology of power. Biopolitics include biological and vital characteristics, but it is mainly about the organisation of life itself. Therefore, it makes sense to analyse the government of re_productive labour from a biopolitical perspective. However, Foucault omits to consider that it is not the nuclear family per se that cares for children, but that care is highly gendered and embedded in power relations, as Marxist feminism has highlighted.

Feminist scholars use the concept of biopolitics to illuminate how gender and feminised bodies are governed through biopolitical mechanisms (Waldby and Cooper 2008; Repo 2015; Sanders 2017). Biopower and biopolitics are furthermore understood as constitutive in the construction of two sexes (Butler 1996). Gender is moreover "an apparatus of biopower that emerged 60 years ago in the clinic and was instrumental to sedimenting Western postwar capitalism through the management of sex" (Repo 2015, 3). Studies concerned with gender, women, and/or sexuality that apply a biopolitical research framework offer a critical perspective on technological practices such as self-monitoring devices (Sanders 2017), reproductive medicine (Waldby and Cooper 2008), or sexual rights (Fotopoulou 2016).

The biopolitical entanglement between gender and race is less common in feminist literature, although Foucault developed his biopolitical framework with explicit reference to racism (Foucault 2003b), which was refined by other scholars, such as Giorgio Agamben (2005). Literature informed by a more intersectional understanding of biopolitics demonstrates how race and gender/sex are connected in the genealogy of biopolitical governing (Weheliye 2014; McWhorter 2004). Another critical intervention in the gender and biopolitics discourse is concerned with the essentialism inherent in the focus on women's bodies and the governing of heteronormativity (Garwood 2016).

Many feminist postcolonial scholars discard the concept of biopolitics and adopt Achille Mbembe's (2003) concept of "necropolitics" instead because the way bodies and populations are governed in the Global South rarely aims to increase the well-being of populations. Necropolitics emphasises the "power of death" in colonial violence, a dimension neglected in the Eurocentric concept of biopolitics (Mbembe 2003, 39). Postcolonial perspectives are integrated into the theoretical framework to focus on how gender is deeply entrenched in post-colonial power relations (Gunkel 2009). Sima Shakhsari (2013, 340) argues, for instance, that "the concept of biopolitics may not be sufficient to explain the global division of populations into those whose lives are produced and managed and those whose lives are deemed disposable". 'Necropolitics' is therefore a useful adaptation of the biopolitical framework and a reminder of how biopolitical governing may not or only partly be applied in a postcolonial context. The biopolitical concept is in a global context used by gender scholars to scrutinise private-public partnerships in the development discourse and their biopolitical targeting of girls and women (Koffman and Gill 2013).

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a plethora of research on the biopolitical governing of gender (Chakraborty 2021; Correa 2020). Judith Butler (1996) previously used the biopolitical framework in the context of the AIDS pandemic to reflect on "who will be left to die" through the withdrawal of scarce resources: "In this way politics can achieve the goal of death, can target its own population, under the very sign of the administration of life" (Butler 1996, 73). The queer-feminist refinement and application of biopolitics highlight the centrality of gender relations in biopolitical governing, on which basis I theorise re_productive labour as an important aim of biopolitics and its government as biopolitical technology.

The application of biopolitics to the context of household labour is a return to the Foucauldian conceptualisation of biopolitics, in which the regulation and enabling of the labour force through various mechanisms, including childcare, are the aim of the biopolitical governing of the population (Foucault 2003b, 251). Combining such a Foucauldian conceptualisation with a Marxist feminist approach to social re_production deepens the role of capitalism and the state in reproducing the relations of re_production. Because of the structural devaluation of re_productive labour in capitalism, its regulation in capitalist states aims to lower the costs of social re_production while at the same time ensuring the re_production of labour power. While the Marxist feminist approach to social re_production is very useful, from a Foucauldian perspective, it underestimates the mechanisms and powers and risks reproducing governmental "dividing practices" (Foucault 1982, 777). The term social reproduction includes the danger of "reinscribing the dichotomy between reproduction and production" (Vishmidt and Sutherland 2020, 151). A Foucauldian feminist lens scrutinises the division between production and reproduction as part of the "general tactics of governmentality" (Foucault 2007, 108). I thus suggest theorising social re_production and re_productive labour as a continuum, which is productive and reproductive at the same time and therefore propose the underscore. A broader understanding becomes even more important when re_production includes different activities, such as caring for children while doing subsistence, manufacturing, or producing food, which makes it even more difficult to draw the line between both (Bhattacharya 2017; Vishmidt and Sutherland 2020). The exclusion of re_productive labour from governmental measurements and indicators of 'the economy' was scrutinised in length by feminist political economists (Rai, Budlender, and Grapard 2014; Waring 1988). While feminist political economy focuses on unpaid household labour and conceptualises the economy from the unit of the household, the embodiment of re_productive labour and their exploitation based on the relations of difference is often marginalised:

The devaluation of re_productive labour and the bodies that perform this kind of labour is a core element of capitalist states, while social re_production must be at the same ensured for the re_production and maximisation of human capital. The framing of gender equality, family, and social policies by governmental organisations as enablers of women's 'economic empowerment' suggests such an interpretation. The way the object of unpaid care and domestic work is formed by the state is thus based on economic reasoning, which is connected to the alleged well-being of the population. The governing of social re_production can moreover be understood as a biopolitical technology in which governmental rationalities are inscribed. Biopolitical measures can be disciplinary, such as the illegalisation or restrictions of abortion or regulatory, such as parental leave policies. Measures include a set of techniques, different rationalities, tactics, and targets.

Researching and analysing biopolitics is methodologically comparable to the analysis of governmentality and requires to "investigate the network of relations among power processes, knowledge practices, and modes of subjectivation" (Lemke 2011, 119).8 Biopolitics as governing technology concerns discursive elements and inscribed knowledges and the techniques that translate discourses into practice and are the means and measures through which power is wielded.

By analysing how social re_production is internationally governed as biopolitics, I highlight the value of connecting Foucauldian and Marxist feminist approaches. In 2015, the United Nations proclaimed in its Sustainable Development Goal 5.4 to "recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies, and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate" (UN 2015, 18). This is just one example of the renewed state interest in unpaid care and domestic work (OECD et al. 2014; EU 2022). From a feminist materialist Foucauldian perspective, such governing includes power effects and political economy as a central form of knowledge.

The UN thematised care and housework primarily in the context of the UN as part of the world conferences on women between the 1970s and 1990s (UN 1995, 1980, 1986, 1976). Although feminist activists and scholars have lobbied for decades to recognise unpaid care and domestic work as a policy priority, it was only recently that this became a relevant policy goal. The context of the current interest in unpaid care and domestic work by international organisations and national governments suggests that the sharpening crisis of social re_production increases the need to address unpaid care and domestic work. Many countries have insufficient care infrastructure and suffer from staff shortages in the care sector (Dowling 2021). This became especially evident during the first year of the Corona pandemic (Stevano et al. 2021). Countries in the Global North fear the loss of labour power when women refrain from the labour market to care for children, sick relatives or elderly people, which is why they attempt to "keeping capitalism on the move" (Plomien, Scheele, and Sproll 2022). Unpaid care work also means fewer tax revenues or the other way around: when someone engages in paid work, and someone else takes on the job of caretaking (as a carer for elderly care or a kindergarten teacher), the tax revenue and the economic growth rate increase in a double sense (Beier 2025). To keep women in the labour market, increase economic growth, and raise tax revenue, states must address the 'problem' of unpaid care work and ensure that it doesn't stand in the way of wage labour. They do this by using a very liberal feminist framing of economic empowerment, which equalises paid labour with emancipation and empowerment and thus marginalises and devalues care and re_productive labour (UN 2017c).

The effect is the further commodification of social re_production, when formerly unpaid domestic tasks are transformed into paid work in and outside of private households. Paid care and domestic work are carried out mostly by racialised and classed women in the most precarious conditions due to the labour intensity or "cost disease" of the care sector (Baumol 2012). The care sector has a limited capacity to increase productivity besides cutting labour costs, because care takes time and is locally bound (Madörin 2011).

The commodification of care is thus privatising the costs of social re_production while at the same time increasing tax revenues. States are therefore more interested in privatising public care than truly recognising it. The staff shortages in the care sector are then compensated for by colonial extractivism. The German state has, for instance, recruitment agreements with Brazil, the Philippines, and other countries to recruit carers for health and elderly care from there, as part of colonial care extractivism (Wichterich 2023). These countries suffer enormously from the brain drain and the depletion of re_production in their countries, so Germany can reproduce the conditions of re_production. Other forms of care extractivism as biopolitical technology include global care chains and transnational surrogacy, by which re_productive labour is externalised and extracted (Wichterich 2019).

A feminist Foucauldian and Marxist critique also scrutinises the mechanisms and techniques of governing. Unpaid care and domestic work are quantified in global governance by time use studies (Eurostat 2009; UN 2017b). These studies are used to quantify such labour and determine how much time it takes. When analysing the ways re_productive labour is suggested to be valued, it is remarkable that valuation means mainly its portrayal in monetary terms in international and national accounts (SNA). This time is then valorised with the wage of an unskilled worker or a professional carer to determine the value of care. Such an approach is highly biased because it assigns low value to social re_production tasks (UN 2017a).

Time use studies, moreover, enable international benchmarking and suggest appropriate time use for re_productive labour, because time use is normalised (UN 2021). It suggests that there is a 'right' or 'appropriate' amount of time that one should spend on unpaid care and housework, which subjectivises, especially feminised persons, as re_productive entrepreneurs, responsible for navigating the 'right' relation between productive and re_productive labour.

It thus portrays people in countries of the Global South as spending 'too much' time on unpaid work and not enough on paid work (UN 2022, 11). The studies thus feed into the rationality of Eurocentric and liberal thought that only paid labour equals the emancipation of women. They are a governing technique that creates binary gender divisions and constructs gender as heteronormative.

What time use studies measure and portray are binary inequalities of social re_production on an individual or household level. They don't consider their material conditions and the role of the economy and the state in shaping the infrastructure and apparatuses of care. When public infrastructure is available, and marketised care services can be bought, caretakers spend less time on care, which can also equal lesser gender inequalities in the household. This, however, is based on the privatisation of care services, which increases worldwide neocolonial and intersectional inequalities through global care chains and other precarious ways care is organised. It is thus important to scrutinise the governing social re_production as biopolitical technology.

The biopolitical governing of re_productive labour includes gender policies as well as quantification as a governing technique enabling women's 'economic empowerment'. The way the object of unpaid care and domestic work is formed is thus based on economic reasoning. The materialist perspective demonstrates that economic reasoning is closely tied to the way the state(s) maintains the relations of re_production and is currently dealing with the crisis of social re_production through capitalist and colonial depletion, which increases intersectional inequalities as it navigates the crisis.

The international government of population, labour, and time has set universal standards for quantifying re_productive labour. Understanding statistics and indicators, and measuring household labour, as governing techniques means acknowledging that they are not neutral, objective, or scientific, but are shaped by different knowledges and rationalities embedded in global power structures. As such, time use studies produce a "system of differentiation" (Foucault 1982, 792), but they also function to legitimise economic rationalities and goals such as the normalisation of a dual-earner model.

A feminist Foucauldian and Marxist reading of social re_production as biopolitics enables the analysis of the material conditions of governing re_productive labour, as well as its mechanisms and techniques. It demonstrates how life is governed and re_produced under the conditions of capitalism. The current governing of unpaid care and domestic work must be understood against the background of the crisis of social re_production.

By applying a feminist Foucauldian and Marxist approach to biopolitics, I have highlighted that the governing of unpaid care and domestic work externalises costs and privatises re_productive labour, showing how states navigate through the crisis of social re_production. Furthermore, I argued for an understanding of quantification techniques that make biopolitical governing possible, which include gendered power effects. Analysing social re_production as biopolitics moreover shows that heteronormativity and the nuclear family are an effect of the biopolitical mode of governing.

The paper demonstrated that biopolitics includes so much more than the governing of the body and its re_production–and that framing it as social re_production is a return to Foucault but also makes it possible to link Marxist feminist and Foucauldian approaches. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is important to understand the mechanisms and techniques of governance that are not neutral but create and reproduce power effects. A combined Marxist feminist and Foucauldian perspective can thus shed light on how the state, or its international orchestration, maintains the conditions of re_production, how such governing is linked to the political economy of social re_production and what techniques are used in the process.

The current analysis of the biopolitical governing of social re_production is based on (neo)liberal forms of governing. It remains to be seen and should be of interest for further research, how such an analysis applies against the background of the rise of authoritarian regimes. It is assumed that more disciplinary mechanisms, such as the illegalisation of abortion and the stricter return to the heteronormative nuclear family, will come to the fore, while more regulatory mechanisms will step into the background. Such development requires new theorisations of biopolitics in the light of authoritarian and right-wing regimes and their alignments with neoliberal capitalism.