Colonial Innovations or Collective Futures? Jennifer Denbow’s Reproductive Labor and Innovation

Jennifer Denbow’s 2024 book: Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, seeks to uncover the forces at play in the current moment of the gig economy in which hyper-individualistic “innovations” are praised while reproductive and caring labor is further undervalued. Denbow intervenes in the economics of neoliberal “innovation” with Marxist feminist work on reproductive labor and social reproduction to paint a clearer picture of why, in an era of tech innovation boom, there is actually a hollowing out of resources for reproductive labor, rather than more investment in reproductive labor as a means toward “innovative,” or better, futures. To illuminate this divide, Denbow offers the concept of “the innovation/reproduction binary,” which illustrates the phenomenon of the overvaluing of innovation often coexisting with the undervaluing of reproductive labor, offering such examples as digital care work platforms and new, venture capitalist funded IVF technologies. As a volume, Reproductive Labor and Innovation weaves together the at first seemingly unrelated topics of tech innovation and reproductive labor in order to complicate the notion that what we need for reproductive labor is more optimized technology, but rather to shift away innovation itself as a solution for care.