Nancy Fraser

In fact, the criminal justice system disproportionately targets poor and working-class men of color, including migrants, while leaving their white-collar professional counterparts free to rape and batter; it also leaves women to pick up the pieces: traveling long distances to visit incarcerated sons and husbands, providing for their households alone, and dealing with the legal and bureaucratic fallout of imprisonment. Likewise, anti-trafficking campaigns and laws against “sexual slavery” are frequently used to deport migrant women while their rapists and profiteers remain at large. At the same time, the carceral response overlooks the importance of exit options for survivors. Laws criminalizing marital rape or workplace assault won’t help women with nowhere else to go, nor those with no way to get there. Under such conditions, no feminist with even a shred of sensitivity to class and race can endorse a carceral response to gender violence.

What must be reinvented, then, is the relation of production to reproduction, of private to public power, of human society to nonhuman nature. If this sounds like a tall order, it’s our best hope. Only by thinking big can we give ourselves a fighting chance to vanquish cannibal capitalism’s relentless drive to eat us whole.

And in this new world, where money is a primary medium of power, the fact of its being unpaid or underpaid seals the matter: those who do this work are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash wages in “production,” even as their “reproductive” work also supplies necessary preconditions for wage labor.