Wait until the endnotes for the Q and A portion of the essay. There, a text can reenact dialogues, ones at least close to what might have originated as thinking out loud, talking over one another, ceding space to another, offstage voice. In Henri Lefebvre’s essay in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, the second endnote suggests a moment of such dialogue between Lefebvre, as he rehearses his well-known argument that alienation suffused everyday life, and “young women,” in which both he and they think out loud about how reproductive labor might be differently alienating. In the body of the essay, Lefebvre flags the term “alienation” as an example of the dynamic yet imperfect exchange between Marxist thought and culture. He then elaborates in the note. I quote it in full:

For the young women to “come” to him stages the “example” as an interaction where Lefebvre is still (perhaps at the podium), the young women mobile. That these “young” women (plural!) gave unprompted disclosures about their reproductive choices to a then eighty-two-year-old Lefebvre rings a little false, although it is not impossible. For Lefebvre’s contribution, readers today do not have what they have for other, select contributions in the edited volume, transcribed “discussions” that record the post-talk comments and questions, which might have confirmed that this interaction happened or even put a name to this critique.Footnote ¹ Rather, in the note the “young women” serve at once as interlocutors and as fiction, imaginatively embodied and disembodied. These women at best are instrumentalized, meant to stage an example of imprecise alienation, to show how the term has become a colloquialism, detached from an analysis of the mode of production or detached from Lefebvre’s sense of what it means to feel disowned.

But what little access we readers have to these women’s comments, real or imagined, troubles more than clarifies the example. From what I can glean, they suggest that under the current “condition of women,” wanting as well as having a child represents alienation. In response, Lefebvre simply insists that to “have a child against your will” is the only situation that would count (to both want and have is then, presumably, unalienated). It is a debate about definitions that unfolds indirectly through discussing the experience of having children. As a more general correction meant to give “integrity and force” to a hazy definition, it does so only in the sense that it borrows the “force” of unwanted pregnancy. Viscerally, the loss of bodily autonomy in forced birth (“against your will”) captures how radically dispossessing any real experience of alienation is.

This moment is not the first time that Lefebvre turns to women to illustrate his Marxist vocabulary. They, or more accurately their presumed sphere, formed the terrain of his interpretations. The germ for the concept of Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life originated from a domestic scene: his wife walked in holding a box of laundry soap and said, “very seriously,” “this is an excellent product” (qtd. in Ross 58). Perhaps because of this inspiration, the force of the everyday bears on women: anchored in the home, “stultified by the specialization and fragmentation of labor,” “women symbolize everyday life in its entirety. They embody its situation, its conflicts and its possibilities. They are its active critique” (Lefebvre, Critique 517). I am not the first to notice Lefebvre’s choice of examples. Feminist critics have pointed to the crutch of binaries in Lefebvre’s thinking, in which the masculine / feminine binary maps on to the new dialectical oppositions he wishes to articulate, such as modern / everyday, innovation / repetition, linear / repetitive, or organized / disorganized.Footnote ² Women shopping, women holding boxes of soap, women at home working around the clock to tend to bodily needs of children and husband, even—in a more essentialist vein—women in tune with biological clocks capture everyday life as at once suffused with capitalist relations and already containing some of the innate resistances to its rhythms and demands.

As in the endnote, women’s experiences of the everyday, if more ambiguously, illustrate his capacious definition of alienation, or, as he puts it, the “many alienations” that “take many forms” (Critique 501). Marx’s definition of alienation, “the transformation of man’s activities and relations into things by the action of economic fetishes, such as money, commodities, and capital” is but one extreme of a more amorphous concept (501), one that is historically specific, relativized, dialectical with “disalienation,” and “infinitely complex” (503). “Women” (scare quotes his) prove equally complicated and stand for “a heightened image of the general alienation of our own specific society” (505). Figuring out what complicates both “women” and alienation boils down to an almost exasperated articulation of the question, “What do women want?” Each example, “love, or motherhood, or housework,” proves troubled because “representation and symbolism…intervene in the motivation of individual desires as much as or more than in the material conditions of activity (although the one does not exclude the other)” (505). This passage acknowledges the limits of the binary between wanting and not wanting that he relies on in the endnote, and here “individual desires” instead interweave with representations. The difficulty of understanding whether someone wants to cook dinner (after being home or in a factory all day) exemplifies the limits of a narrow Marxist vocabulary.

If this exchange between young women and Lefebvre did not occur at the conference, I wish it had. I see in the women’s comments an effort to reverse the direction of the metaphor: they seem to ask for Lefebvre not to use the condition of women to reveal his ideas but to have his ideas reveal the conditions of women. These anonymous young women apply Lefebvre’s definition of alienation to their concept of “having a child.” It is a move that I would like to replicate here. In doing so, I find a strand of Lefebvre’s inheritors who read the body as the routine site of alienation, but I also find that this kind of routine alienation could reveal more about living in a body in relationship with others, which reproduction and its attendant care labors require.Footnote ³ What Lefebvre accidentally opens up is an integrated vision of exercising bodily autonomy, not as an individual, but entangled with one’s own and others’ repeated, everyday labors—that is, the details that make up everyday life.

In the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life, published in 1947, he characterized alienation as a diffuse sense of one’s entanglement with an alien construction. His descriptions evoke two opposed, separate beings—“‘me’, a man” and “‘him’, the artificial being”—that through these constant, everyday moments are sutured together (187). Subtle details, the movement of the body (“certain gestures”), the smaller units of language (“certain words”), or acts (“certain actions”), “seem to come from an ‘alien being’” (187).Footnote ⁴ While what he calls “genuine criticism” will “expose an unreality” around the alienated man, the ultimate goal is not to disentangle these two beings, either in criticism or in going about life (188, 189). Alienation plays out as a dialectical drama in which “he is inseparable from this ‘other’ self, his creation, his mirror, his statue—more: his body” (189).

Momentary awareness of a double self echoes certain descriptions of pregnancy as a series of sudden, fleeting realizations of an alien being inseparable from a “me.” Iris Young theorizes pregnancy as an “alienating” bodily experience in which the subject is “spilt or doubled” (46). As with Lefebvre’s alienation, this awareness comes from subtle, specific bodily encounters: “She experiences her body as herself and not herself. Its inner movements belong to another being, yet they are not other” (46). More intriguingly, as for Lefebvre, the awareness of these sutures is more acute from an encounter with the body reframed as and by a social product, namely for Young “the institutions and practices of medicine” (46). This sense has recently percolated into popular depictions of pregnancy and has found analogues in the many ways that people change and reshape their bodies. In her best-selling lyric double narrative of her pregnancy and her partner Harry’s top surgery and hormone replacement therapy, Maggie Nelson summarizes pregnancy (elusively connected to Harry’s experience) as “radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body” (13).Footnote ⁵ That feeling extends beyond nine months: “My breasts were sore for over a year, and while they don’t hurt anymore, they still feel like they belong to someone else (and in a sense, since I’m still nursing they do)” (86). And, yet, how to reconcile this double self with a solid concept of bodily autonomy is not immediately apparent to Nelson, who affixes the relationship with an “and,” suggesting the slogan, “IT’S A CHOICE AND A CHILD” (94). Carmen Winant’s My Birth (a title that purposely obscures “who claims the birth,” perhaps parent, child, even “the doctors and nurses who attended them” [66, 70]) names a similar ambiguity: “I am no closer to understanding who takes possession of this process” (113). An entangled vision of bodily autonomy suggests all three, that to be mine, the birth must be constructed by others and our social relations (mother-child, patient-doctor, client-hospital).

To return to the endnote: What exactly do those women mean by “self-alienation”? I can’t know from Lefebvre’s account alone. They may have been referring to what Young suggests, that pregnancy itself enacts a split experienced in the body, which they wished to refuse altogether. I also cannot know what they meant when they said they “do not want any children” and what labors they imagined implicit in that phrase. When Winant labels “my birth” a process, it echoes one definition of social reproduction, as “the processes that enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day,” in Tithi Bhattacharya’s words (1). Certainly, Lefebvre also thought about social reproduction, offering a similar critique of Marx, pointing out that “workers do not have a life in the workplace, they have a social life, family life, political life” (“Toward” 78).

One reading of what these women meant by self-alienation is that, as Catharine A. MacKinnon put it in her contribution, “sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism” (106). Indeed, Christine Delphy had come to see that “marriage was a labor contract” (Barrett and McIntosh, “Christine Delphy” 96). In Delphy’s essay in the 1988 volume, she posits abortion as just such a threat to the husband-boss’s control: “since the bringing up of children is labor extorted from women, it could in fact be thought that men fear women will seek to escape from the labor of child-rearing, notably by limiting births” (263).Footnote ⁶ What is missing in this discussion, as Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh argue, is why “the bringing up of children is labor extorted from women” (“Christine Delphy” 102). Their question sparks projects like those that Barrett and McIntosh undertook to see how the division of labor has been historically gendered or to imagine how care labor might be redistributed.Footnote ⁷ This intervention also broke up the unit of mother-wife-woman, who enters unequally into marriage, gives birth, and does childcare for her own child. These “other labors” are extorted from women in the plural (Barrett and McIntosh, “Christine Delphy” 102). In thinking of “having a child” in more plural ways, what might it mean then to want or not want that experience?

In turning away from sexuality back to work, from pregnancy to the distributed labors of childcare, the body still gives force to alienation. Lefebvre’s approach is another kind of materialist analysis of this division; while not necessarily illuminating the economic and ideological relations of capitalism (as many undertaking social reproduction theory do), it “is material because it reasserts and cultivates the body” (Lefebvre, “Toward” 82). Lefebvre is talking about the body made inseparable from the urban environment, its natural rhythms shaped and reshaped by the city, its work routines, and its machines. Many have taken urban space (or space more generally) to be the literal grounds of struggle over the disalienation of everyday life for Lefebvre and his scions; it can be transformed to transform life. With this emphasis, his heirs have always seemed apparent: Michel de Certeau, who gave the city dweller more agency while walking the city or the reader more agency while consuming, and Georges Perec, who befriended Lefebvre and undertook writing experiments about urban life. Yet, those other labors shape and reshape the body too; as Alan Sears observes, “practices of caregiving labor, whether paid or unpaid…develop a different sense of one’s body than working in a mine or in a heavy industry” (185). This understanding plays out in aesthetic experiments as well. For example, in 1988 the feminist performance artist Linda Montano proposed reworking everyday life by “announc[ing] to friends…you will take care of them when they need someone…[to] go on errands” (Art/Life Institute Handbook 18).Footnote ⁸ Thinking still with the body shaped by space, Lefebvre looks for, reads for, and “notices” the “often modest and even pathetic” breaks, represented by “ordinary willingness to find pleasure in beaches and in the expanses of water themselves” (“Toward” 82). To ask again that his vision of alienation illuminate the conditions of women: What are the modest and pathetic breaks that restructure the everyday of caregiving’s labor?

To view alienation as a synonym for lost bodily control now has a legacy, so to speak. In her book Profit and Pleasure (2000), Rosemary Hennessy defined alienation in such visceral, embodied terms. For her, commodity production requires alienation specifically “from sensation and affect” (217). The worker “sever[s] her human potential to labor from her needs” to “present herself as ‘owner’ of her labour power” (217).Footnote ⁹ These thinkers have also found those breaks in seeking out physical and aesthetic pleasure, grounded in the body. In 1983, the same year as the conference, Fredric Jameson published his essay on pleasure (following Roland Barthes, for him, pleasure is textual as well as sensual) that promised both more and less for the body. To be warm, fed, at ease is “not as Utopian vision of another way of living” and can only “[solve] my individual relationship with my own body” (Formations 10–11). Utopia is rather channeled allegorically through embodied experience. While not evoking Lefebvre, Jameson contrasts this pleasure (“the potentialities of the material body”) with a thick description of consumption that seems taken out of Critique of Everyday Life (14). Writing at the intersection of these thinkers and proposing her own Trans-Feminist Marxism, Kay Gabriel has posited that “the point of this politics is to attend to the body as a site of struggle over the intensive disalienation of mental and manual labor.” As the body bears the brunt of alienation in “everyday life,” in “being hungry, or tired, in chronic pain or constant grief, routinely fearful or simply bored”—these experiences that “one class inflicts on the other”—the body is then “mediator” of social relations. Disalienation, in contrast, reclaims the body and its activities for individual desires through the means available. For her, the struggle in practical terms is channeled through the “transsexual demands to exercise autonomy, however enabled by social or medical interventions, over our configurations of embodiment and sexuality.”

Making the body the locus then changes what is being defined. While one might easily feel the force of a body not one’s own to make sense of alienation, what in turn is bodily autonomy? (“Can you define that for me?” would be my question in an imaginary Q and A with Lefebvre and his inheritors.) More practically, the term has picked up new valences: it can signal not utopias but individual isolations, fantasies of bodily purity, especially white women’s, that cordon the body off from the world, such as when antivaccine movements appropriate slogans like “my body, my choice” (Stümer). It is similarly difficult to disentangle autonomy from choice (or Jameson’s word, “consent” [Formations 10]), both of which posit an individual actor and perhaps a blank background on which they act. Wanting a child has always “depend[ed] on the support of sisters, friends, and strangers,” as Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger put it in their critique of the rhetoric of choice, or, one might add, the support of doctors, nurses, and hospital receptionists (11). Lastly, even zooming out slightly to those networks, the risk of this framework is to constrain the focus to the particular and the temporary, making all other demands mere metaphoric possibility (see Srnicek and Williams).

Asking again for Lefebvre’s definition of alienation to illuminate the complexities of social reproduction reveals how bodily autonomy, like the everyday and like alienation that it resists, “is entirely mediated and mass-mediated” (Lefebvre, “Toward” 79). Capitalism has extended the mode of production into the everyday and into bodily autonomy; that is true for childcare but also for the larger infrastructure of medical care that, for example, supports wanting and not wanting to have a child (Winant suggests her doctor might “possess” the birth process).Footnote ¹⁰ But this mediation only makes everyday life riper for reformulation by an “art of living,” by interventions in aesthetics and culture. As Lefebvre writes, “the genuine art of living implies a human reality, both individual and social” (Critique 219). The project is not to collapse the two individuals, mother and baby (or mother and nanny), but to collapse the individual body and its dependencies. Another one of his definitions of alienation is the contrast between two views of life: in one, life is “some immense anthill, swarming with obscure, blind, anonymous beings and actions” and in “another we see it shining with splendour and glamour which certain individuals and certain actions confer on it” (219, 219–20). To exert bodily autonomy then would be to bring these perspectives together—the body’s private assertions alongside the anonymous beings and actions that “produced” such moments of individual splendor—against the forces of alienation that keep them apart (220).

When Gabriel asserts “transsexual demands to exercise autonomy, however enabled by social or medical interventions,” as an “affirmation over and against routine abjection,” the “however” may seem like a caveat or a compromise, but I do not read it that way: it exists more as an acknowledgment. An entangled bodily autonomy enables this subordinate clause, a nod to the social and medical interventions—the relationships with other people—that underpin affirmations against abjection. While it is not impossible for such interventions to be taken on individually, more often they involve other workers.

In The Last Safe Abortion, Winant writes, “abortion care is work. Which is to say that it is and looks entirely regular.” To prove this, she assembles everyday scenes and details of abortion clinics and offices: messy desks, blue gloved hands on crinkly white paper, people on phones. Across two pages, she places eight photos of a woman, headset on, on a call, at a computer, writing something down on a piece of paper: the framing of the collection suggests that she works in an abortion clinic. In each still frame, her head moves slightly, tilted down, up to the computer, she is serious and laughing or faced away, until she turns to look at the camera and she looks more blankly, ambiguously, certainly not comforting. What administrative labor she undertakes is invisible, blurred by the computer screen’s glare. Her certain gestures constitute the work of someone else’s bodily autonomy.

Embedded within Lefebvre’s endnote is one legacy of his capacious understanding of everyday alienation as it applied to “young women’s” lives, to pregnancy, to social reproduction, to embodiment, to care work, to medical work, to abortion work. Locating what I have argued is such a fruitful exchange in the endnote might imply a marginality, an implicit suppression below the surface of the text. Yet another interpretation of notes is that, as Jameson once mused, they are a “living thought” (Marxism and Form 9n2). The legacy, the still living part of this essay, I suggest, is in asking again how social reproduction complicates the transformation of activities into things, since its activities intimately transform multiple, intimately related bodies, not always necessarily into things, but certainly transforms them repeatedly with some potential breaks.