Sociology of Social Reproduction Final Paper

Hailey Saya Tomlinson Dr. Sonal Sharma Sociology of Social Reproduction, Spring 2024, Final Paper Sistaazhood: South African Transgender Sex Workers & Social Reproduction as Liberation INTRODUCTION We are sick and tired..we want to go live a life.. get a job.. be ourselves.. get our own accommodation as ourselves, as a home, as a family. – Lameez Oliver, Transgender Sex Worker, Cape Town, 2019. When we founded Sistaazhood, I finally found a [place] where I can be who I am. — Netta Marcus, Co-Founder of Sistaazhood, Transgender Sex Worker, Cape Town, 2019. From being the first country in the world to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation to legally recognizing transgender people since 2003, South Africa is popularly viewed as progressive and accomplished in LGBQTI+ rights and protections. However, the country’s historically complicated relationship with sex, sexuality, and race since the apartheid era as well as its popular “conservative attitudes and cultural, religious, and moral codes” continue to make transgender sex workers (TSWS) “particularly vulnerable to violence.” In analyzing this “lag between the law and..lived experiences” of LGBTQI+ people in South Africa, I find that TSWS in South Africa face complex discrimination based on their identity, expression, and occupation—with this bias taking enumerate forms like homelessness, police brutality, and employment discrimination. Further rooted in South Africa’s history of physically linked, hierarchical discrimination, TSWS in organizations like Sistaazhood face not just social aversion to their identities and intercourse, but the complete demonization and devaluation of their bodies, work, and being. Thereby oppressed in their ability to pursue socially reproductive processes under capitalism, I propose that transgender emotional labor, mental health, and kinship kindle themselves in a nexus of positionality, morality, and wellbeing to promote the use of enlightened, comprehensive social reproduction as true transgender liberation. In this essay, I utilize Nancy Fraser’s work in the Contradictions of Capital and Care to understand the general ignoration of TSWS’s differential social reproduction and expand upon the oppression of TSWS by the natalist, cisgenderist view of social reproduction. Then, I analyze the commodification of the transgender body in response to the capitalist failure to employ TSWS in the formal labor market. I also establish differential extracted labor surplus value for TSWS, further examining the cyclical capitalist condemnation of transgender identity as seen in the labor surplus phenomena. Inspired by the work of Nat Raha and Kate Doyle Griffiths in Transgender Marxism, I additionally critique the limits of classical social reproduction theory, proposing further analysis of differential transgender social reproduction. I argue that sociologists and grassroots organizations across South Africa should move to expand their views of social reproduction and Marxist theory by focusing on TSWS, ending their violent disacknowledgement of the unique needs TSWS must meet to survive. As we protect, prioritize, and sanctify transgender social reproduction as a part of the broader transgender liberation movement, day to day life for TSWS in South Africa may then finally begin to match the ‘progressive’ legal landscape in the country. I conclude my prose with my own theoretical conjecture on the privileged transsexualization of white transgender sex workers in comparison to the ever-oppressed Black transgender sex worker. TRANSGENDER SEX WORKERS IN SOUTH AFRICA In a country with prevailing discrimination based on gender identity, self-described “support group[s] for trans women sex workers…founded by trans sex workers” like Sistaazhood provide invaluable emotional, medical, and familial support. Comprised of majority Black transgender women and supported by South Africa-based transgender rights organization Gender Dynamix, these organizations provide social and familial homes for transgender people facing “high unemployment rates, poor implementation of legislation, and low levels of education.” Sistaazhood has recently received media attention for its vocalization of South Africa’s discrimination against TSWS in COVID-19 and its successful establishment of a gender-affirming care and HIV-prevention clinic for TSWS, thus offering an alternative to the frequently discriminatory government clinics throughout South Africa. Unfortunately, these efforts can only go so far. While TSWS may change their gender markers in South Africa, they must have had “medical or surgical gender reassignment;” this, in combination with a lack of availability of gender-affirming healthcare throughout the country prohibits widespread access to “basic services such as health care, education, employment,.. social grants,..opening a bank account, and accessing temporary housing.” Transgender people are often forced to assume their assigned sex at birth to receive medical care, moreover facing “transphobic slurs..discrimination…and professional stigma” in their basic quest for social reproduction. The conditions for TSWS are even worse, with daily “expectations of violence and rape,” exponential rates of homelessness, and discrimination at every turn. While research detailing the vulnerabilities of TSWS in South Africa is limited, past studies highlight the horrific treatment of TSWS by police because of the sex work’s intense criminalization in the country. Faced with “sexual violence, beatings, rubber bullets, and [the] spraying [of their] genitals with pepper-spray” at the hands of those who are supposed to protect them, South African TSWS lack the ability to prosecute those that mistreat them on their journey to survival. As the murders of these TSWS go uninvestigated, it is communities like Sistaazhood that save lives through “acceptance, support, and safety tips” —resources vital to social reproduction. CAPITAL & CARE In pondering the definition of social reproduction as propagated by Johanna Brenner and Barara Laslett alongside Fraser’s Contradictions of Capital and Care, I see the “rotten” core of capitalist society as expanding itself to the continual ignoration of transgender (sex workers’) social reproduction. As popular analyses of the social reproduction crisis exclude transgender sex workers in the Global South, capitalist society has created yet another “institutional basis for new, modern forms” of transgender subordination just as it has women’s. However, this transgender subordination is embedded in the very movement that critiques the “institutional basis..of women’s subordination,” insofar that classical social reproduction theory ignores the differential and complex social reproduction of the transgender sex worker. While scholars like Fraser successfully expand social reproduction theory and unintentionally offer valuable insights on TSWS’ social reproduction, their ignorance of TSWS is wholly oppressive. In Contradictions of Capital and Care, Fraser elaborates on the inherent contradictions in capitalism, claiming that capitalists view socially reproductive labor as informal—thereby ignoring their own reliance on social reproduction to reproduce the labor force. As capitalists furthermore pay their wage laborers inconsiderate of their reproduction, the laborer is thereby oppressed via the separation of production and social reproduction. Uncompensated for their own social reproduction, capitalist laborers grieve their labor surplus and seek to fulfill it by any means, thereby creating a world in crisis. This ‘crisis tendency’ is ever present throughout the capitalist system: as “capital accumulation..effectively eats its own tail,” it continues to promote the instability, chaos, and crisis fundamental to our world. Where scholars like Fraser excel is the analysis of the crisis tendency cognizant of the potential agency our world has to be free from it. As Fraser ponders a historical view of social reproduction theory with the goal of provoking liberation from capitalist exploitation, she writes on the inability of those in poverty to socially reproduce, the promotion of gender equality to “mute social contradictions,” and the acclimatized heteronormative assumptions of state valorization of social reproduction. Finalizing her work through a critique of “emancipation in market terms” and calling for the promotion of the expanded socially reproductive struggle, Fraser analyzes social reproduction at a high level—but fails to mention the complexity of transgender identity, sex work, or TSWS in deference to social reproduction throughout her analysis. This is not to say that transgender sex work cannot be analyzed through the lens of social reproduction; rather, it is to say that in analyzing conditions like the “‘progressive’s neoliberalism” that “re-[dismantles] social protections and re-externalizes social reproduction,” one must analyze the condition of the transgender sex worker. Fraser and other scholars tick intersectional boxes in their articles with surface-level analyses while continually treating TSWS as an afterthought. They thereby forego the true power of Marxist analysis, forgetting the transgender experience, body, and sex worker in deference to social reproduction and obscuring the lens of transgender sex worker social reproduction—that which could promote the most potent scholarship on social reproduction theory. TRANSGENDER CONTRADICTIONS Capitalism relies on transgender sex work as it does housework—but it does so by veiling TSWS into not just an informal, but underground economy,. TSWS thereby take on the instability of “separation-cum-dependence-cum-disavowal,” literally embodying the flux, volatility, and self-danger of capitalism’s economic contradictions firsthand, cell by cell. As TSWS are forced to upkeep every member of society, they are infantilized, objectified, and perverted in the sadistic kink dreams and back-alley rendezvous of the elite. TSWS are demonized in the mouths of the many; they are loved by the few. As TSWS are further crushed by the differential emotional labor and socially reproductive burden of performing transgender sex work, they are simultaneously gaslight vis-à-vis disciplinary hand of the capitalist economy and told their labor is not labor at all—it is perversion, it is sin, it is horror. Then, this plagues TSWS with even more narratives of self-loathing already coalesced in the very foundation of the transgender being—thus, the social contradictions of capitalism expressed in Fraser’s prose too become personal: is my work perversion? am I perverting those who seek me? am I the reason behind the rap? am I brutalized by law enforcement for breaking the law as they too break it? is it my trans-sexuality, my transgender identity, my sex? can I ever reproduce myself without reproducing another first? is my sex valuable? am I valuable? if I let them sleep with (rape) me can I sleep inside tonight? am I the demon? If I cease this reproduction of others, I cannot produce to reproduce myself, yet this reproduction is entirely essential, antithetical, abhorrent, and conducive to my being. can I be slept with for love? can I live? can I die? TSWS are the crisis tendency of capitalism. They embody the ultimate panic and liberationist riot that individually enumerates every flaw in the capitalist system. As those who are the most marginalized become so once more by selling their bodies for survival, TSWS continue to reproduce the ‘natural’ (cisgender) population through sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, TSWS are hunted by the very same persons they sexually reproduce—brutally murdered in the street, killed on behalf of their role in sustaining another’s life. As the masses disinvest from social welfare, they change nothing for the TSWS: after all, they never received social welfare to begin with. The “poor and working classes” reach the “breaking point” at which all TSWS started; as TSWS are mentally assaulted by internal, transsexual contradictions, they are further physically undone by the capitalist contradiction of social reproduction and production separation. Then, the reproductive burdens of TSWS become heightened; in order to survive, they must engage more in the very act that causes this burden in the first place. When analyzing the social reproduction of the transgender sex worker, one can finally reveal the crisis tendency of the cyclical capitalist condemnation of transgender identity. In the transgender sex worker, one can see the harkened rampage against transgender people exemplified—even when analyzing within the LGBTQ rights regimes of countries like South Africa which intend to mute the social contradictions of the transgender sex worker. With a socially reproductive analysis of TSWS, one can further see through South Africa’s legislative progress and unveil the quieted social contradictions of TSWS, the failures of South Africa embodied in muted screams. TSWS in South Africa sleep under bridges, they are murdered in their sleep, they are murdered while they are awake. TSWS are the social contradiction. While Fraser does successfully showcase social contradiction underneath capitalism, perhaps she misses the most pertinent is social contradiction of them all. What’s more, as Fraser analyses the social reproduction which remains external for the rural periphery because of imperialism, she misses the imperial roots of the disparately downtrodden TSWS. In South Africa, an analysis of the TSWS’ social reproduction can further reveal the roots of social reproduction in casteism and apartheid. As TSWS in South Africa fail to socially reproduce themselves at the hand of intense discrimination, they are discriminated against because of a long apartheid legacy that permits the ascribing of morality to physical attributes. Where is that link in Fraser’s analysis? ROOTS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN TRANSGENDER SEX WORKER WAGE To establish the sufficient sociological precondition for a social reproduction theory analysis of differential labor surplus value for transgender sex workers in South Africa, one must first examine the roots of the contextually low wage for TSWS. Beyond the preconceived knowledge that all sex workers in South Africa receive a low wage, the wage received by TSWS in South Africa is particularly low. While the ‘normal’ (cisgender) sex worker wage already excludes social reproduction costs, for TSWS, the normal wage received covers even less. This is because the social reproduction cost for the transgender sex worker is heightened, reflecting an exponential and differential cost of existence and social reproduction demonstrated by all transgender populations. The wage received by TSWS does not account for the emotional and physical toll enacted by sex work, much less more violent and dangerous nature of sex work as a transgender person. What’s more; the wage does not include the cost of talk therapy, hormone therapy, or appearance upkeep in the form of hair, clothes, and makeup in the transgender journey to grapple with gender dysphoria. The wage received excludes the mental strain of being transgender in a cisgenderist society; it foregoes consideration of the unique pain involved in the monetary commodification of the transgender body for sex. As transgender sex workers are underpaid in an underground economy for that commodification, their socially reproductive burden is furthered by the notion that transgender people are not worthy of formal employment. The transgender sex worker then is wholly excluded from community incorporation and ‘normal life,’ taking away networks that can uplift social reproduction burdens off their shoulders—like Sistaazhood. For TSWS, the negative equities of social reproduction are sky high. THEORETICAL EXPANSION In observing the Marxist concentration of social reproduction theory, one may analyze TSWS as commodifying their own body, pawning off their humanity to become a part and parcel of production themselves. The only avenue available to secure the necessary monetary funds to support their social reproduction is the commodification of their own socially reproductive processes. While the precondition for general commodification in capitalism is primitive accumulation, leading to the separation of production and social reproduction, the precondition for the transgender sex worker’s commodification is discrimination, bigotry, and the transgender embodiment of capitalism’s crisis tendency. While feudal serfs turn to wage laborers through primitive accumulation and indigenous people dissolve into the proletariat through regimes of dispossession, transgender people become transgender sex workers through their scrutinized existence under capitalism. This commodification increases the social reproduction burden for the transgender sex worker because of the inherent mental difficulty, psychological strain, and emotional labor of commodifying one’s body through selling one’s own social reproduction process. The commodification in transgender thus shows a positive relationship with negative social reproduction equities. TSWS further exemplify the hypocrisy of capitalism’s internal contradictions; TSWS, more than anyone else, cannot ignore the fact that social reproduction and production are one and the same. While the classically viewed housewife uses her body to upkeep the home and may go rest, seek other work, and separate herself from her exploited socially reproductive processes, TSWS can never forget their own exploited social reproduction. How can TSWS forget the physical trauma and PTSD tied along to that exploitation? How can they feel the sensation of sexual intercourse for self-satisfaction and self-reproduction without pondering their reproduction of others to then reproduce oneself monetarily? I claim that TSWS overachieve in their exemplification of the social reproduction/production contradiction of capitalism. Every time they wish to earn money and socially reproduce themselves, they must do so through a continual reminder of that contradiction, a production that is solely the outsourcing and exploiting of social reproduction. TSWS can further be analyzed through the social reproduction framework that demonstrates social reproduction as the root of extracted labor surplus value. I thus claim that the transgender sex worker provides a disparately high amount of extracted labor surplus value to capitalists because of the disparate social reproduction burden of TSWS and the aforementioned low wage provided to TSWS. As capitalism subjugates TSWS, it does to keep the extracted labor surpluses from TSWS exponentially high, continually degrading TSWS to decrease their wages and increase their social reproduction burden. Insofar that TSWS continue to reproduce the proletariat labor force, I also propagate that the disparate labor surplus value present in transactions between TSWS and their working-class clients showcases the pervasive hegemony of capitalism. Differential extracted surplus value—and capitalist exploitation—can thus exist even for customers of TSWS that are being exploited themselves. Even as the proletariat class suffers at the hand of their own divide between social reproduction and production, they inadvertently extrapolate that divide onto TSWS. In purchasing sex work as a productive commodity and using it for their own social reproduction, the proletariat clients of TSWS subconsciously reify capitalism itself and further subjugates TSWS. The transgender sex worker must not only reproduce herself in the way of the cisgender, non-sex worker which prioritizes daily return to the formal economy; she must too reproduce herself in a way that maintains the transgender body as the very capital, product, and factory of production. If TSWS want to produce more, raise their wage received from sex work, and decrease their labor surplus, they must force their square shaped bodies into the spherical cisgender mold: shaving, trimming, hormones, consultations, contradictions. Even though those processes are not accessible to the average transgender sex worker in South Africa, those processes in and of themselves may lead to increased labor surplus value. If TSWS were to complete that process, there is a risk that the pressure to ‘pass’ and conform into cisgender society may harming the psyche and body of TSWS. For example, if TSWS choose to go ‘stealth’ in everyday life after medical changes and pursue non-transactional love, they may end up with a self-loathing, cisgenderist partner that further brutalizes and rapes them because of their own insecurities. This thereby risks increasing the transgender sex worker’s social reproduction burden. Perhaps too, upping the productive value of TSWS through the modification of their transgender bodies could promote a dissonance between their own bodily view and their forced post-op bodily view forced on to them by cisgender society. This then worsens mental health, increases the cost of social reproduction, and increases extracted surplus value. THEORETICAL CRITIQUE & CONCLUSION As one cements these increases of labor surplus value extracted from the transgender sex worker into the social reproduction theory framework, one can reconstitute social reproduction as a liberatory act for TSWS in places like South Africa. As those TSWS are homeless, raped, traumatized and alone without communities like Sistaazhood, they suffer the effects of a society that has not yet critiqued its capitalist society through a transgender-sex-worker-deferential lens of social reproduction theory. We must move to utilize a comprehensive, transgender-sex-worker-directed framework of social reproduction as a liberatory venture. In this, we must further demote morality based on physicality, expand our view on the preconditions of commodification, and analyze the labor surplus value and exploitation of the transgender sex worker. Moreover, our capitalist world must move to genuinely prioritize the thriving of transgender populations, destroy mutually exclusive, ‘intersectional’ activist movements defined in market terms, and critique the LGBTQI+ rights regimes of countries like South Africa that only serve to quiet present horrors for TSWS. We must prioritize, protect, and sanctify social reproduction for the transgender sex worker, encouraging TSWS to feel true love from others and themselves. In destroying cisgenderist frameworks that force surgeries on those who do not want them and building societal infrastructure for TSWS, we can also work against a “paucity of resources and knowledge to provide [comprehensive] health care services to the transgender population” in places like South Africa. Social reproduction for the transgender sex worker must mean wellbeing, kinship, and family in the same vein that it does for the cisheterosexual capitalist laborer. TSWS must be able to truly see and feel their humanity in society in order for their socially reproductive burdens to lessen. This must be accomplished through active cultural change that de-transmedicalizes and accepts non-passing transgender people as they are. Sex work must be decriminalized, and society must normalize caring, romantic, and healthy relationships with the transgender sex worker. Political activists and social movements must also dually prioritize the grassroots, humanitarian safety of the transgender sex worker while working to promote the real human rights of the transgender sex worker to pursue a life outside of the underground economy. While the goal may be to tear down the capitalist economy brick by brick, it must also include a world where the capitalist achievements of cisgender and transgender people are equal. Afterword: Transsexuals in the Master’s House As I analyze the transgender sex worker, I cannot forget the differences in the experience of the Black transgender sex worker and the white transsexual. While the white transsexual can ascend, the Black transgender sex worker can only descend. While states, persons, and worlds differentially valorize the reproductive work of homes which are “heteronormative, male breadwinner, female-homemaker,” state inspectorates upholding cisgenderist society too rip off the undergarments of that family, inspecting genitals, medical records, Adam’s apples, voices, races, beings. As inspectors ensure the valorized home is white, cisgender, cissexual, natural, they hunt for the Black TSWS. They can’t find them: there’s rumors they live underneath every cisgender master’s house. When the state inspectors go, they see nothing, no one in the Blackness. The inspector gives up on Black TSWS, lets them go, and subsequently concentrates on the labor surplus of the state. In recent years, it’s been decreasing—women are getting too used to equality, equity, diversity, liberation; birthing has gone down, those that do give birth demand welfare from the state. They’re demanding we pay for the social reproduction. How dare they? We need more bodies, the state inspector says. He has an idea. Cisgenderist society thus organizes an LGBTQ+ rights parade in the city center, a place rumored to be where the white TSWS gather. In the dual purpose of body hunting and carrying out the state’s historical market emancipation regime, the inspectorate travels to the parade, seeking to offers white TSWS a spot in every master’s house. He wants to claim their bodies for the state, re-instating subjugation in the valorized reproductive home through the subjugation of the willing white transsexual. And so, he does. He gives white TSWS to every cisgender master, every cissexual capitalist bourgeois lord, drugging them with incorporation into the formal economy, monetary success, and a life where production does not mean reproduction, sleep becomes sleep, sex becomes sex, and sex work becomes criminal. They can stay in the master’s house if they give up their voice. They must do what the cisgender, cissexual capitalist master says: surgically mutilate themselves, fellate capital, fellate cissexuality, stay far away from the muddy, bloody, sweaty underbelly of the house where the ‘real’ TSWS are said to sleep. Reproduce for to uphold socially reproductive subjugation first, themselves second. You’re not like that anymore, we saved you, the cisgender, cissexual capitalist master says. He calls the state inspector who brought him his first white transgender sex worker reproductive slave and says in confidence that the sex and fetishization of the transsexual body isn’t enough. Thus, the state changes the adoption laws so that his reproductive slave may too be unpaid to raise the bourgeois’ next generation of wage laborers. The state funds research on uterus transplants, ovary creation, and egg fertilization from the skin cell; the inspectors scream into every lab the necessity of mutilating the transgender body, hegemonizing transsexuality. The lab abides. The white transgender reproductive slave then is natalized, transsexualized, natalized once more. At the hand of the cisgender master and the state, the white transsexual reproductive slave has social reproduction valuable beyond the pacification of a human rights code, public relations regimes, sexuality. She forgets the ways policeman rape her TSWS siblings, she forgets her male upbringing, she forgets why she is taking masters drugs in the first place. With natalization, the transsexual slave becomes cissexual, cisgender. With natalization, the transsexual slave becomes valuable beyond market emancipation: she can spit on TSWS on behalf of her master, call them dirty, perverted, shameful. She can degrade them on behalf of master, extracting surplus value for master by tearing TSWS apart bit by bit, increasing their socially reproductive burdens. Thus, the white transsexual reproductive slave becomes another feminine cissexualized slave of every master, every statesman, every capitalist world. The state inspectorate told her master, who ultimately serves the capitalist state, that the labor surplus needs more obedient bodies. The cissexualized slave feels a pull to the Black TSWS and decides to visit them in under the master’s house. For some reason, she can see all the Black TSWS that the inspectorates cannot; she tells them to take the drugs master offers. The Black TSWS ask her if those are the ones she took: she scoffs. She has always been cisgender, cissexual, always will be. But this stirs something within her, making her emotional, shaking, feeble. She leaves and questions master with this: he tells her she must go watch her child, go to her monthly bodily mutilation, take her drugs. Missing her liberationist critical juncture, she obeys, leaving master to rape the Black TSWS as he does every night. He tells the TSWS they can never receive the drugs she took, she is the exception—not only is she white and they’re Black, he never wanted to eliminate TSWS anyway; after all, he climaxes like no other in the underbelly. They must never leave but never valorize themselves; they must exist on the brink of self-extinction but sustain; they must praise the state for their rights while they are shot, murdered, eaten, vomited out by capitalism and its cronies. 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