In Reproductive Labor and Innovation, Jennifer Denbow examines how the push toward technoscientific innovation in contemporary American life often comes at the expense of the care work and reproductive labor that is necessary for society to function. Noting that the gutting of social welfare programs has shifted the burden of solving problems to individuals, Denbow argues that the aggrandizement of innovation and the degradation of reproductive labor are intertwined facets of neoliberalism. She shows that the construction of innovation as a panacea to social ills justifies the accumulation of wealth for corporate innovators and the impoverishment of those feminized and racialized people who do the bulk of reproductive labor. Moreover, even innovative technology aimed at reproduction—such as digital care work platforms and noninvasive prenatal testing—obscure structural injustices and further devalue reproductive labor. By drawing connections between innovation discourse, the rise of neoliberalism, financialized capitalism, and the social and political degradation of reproductive labor, Denbow illustrates what needs to be done to destabilize the overvaluation of innovation and to offer collective support for reproduction.

Jennifer Denbow is Associate Professor of Political Science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and the author of Governed through Choice: Autonomy, Technology, and the Politics of Reproduction.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Othering Reproduction: Neoliberalism and the Innovation/Reproduction Binary  1
1. Contextualizing the Aggrandizement of Innovation: Coloniality, Labor, and Capacity  28
2. Children as Human Capital, Reproductive Labor, and the Logic of Self-Entrepreneurialism  56
3. Investing in the Curative Imaginary: Biotechnology, Disability, and Reproductive Failures  83
4. Neoliberal Eugenics as the Fertility Frontier of Biocapital: Optimizing Baby-Making in Catastrophic Times  110
Epilogue. Pandemic Politics and the Repoliticization of Reproductive Labor  138
Notes  151
Bibliography  185
Index  213