Leopoldina Fortunati

in conversation with Sarah Leonard

Please join us for a discussion of the new edition of Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso 2025) as we explore the work’s implications for the politics of reproduction in an age of austerity and counter-revolution. 

Emerging from the great social upheavals that challenged the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Fortunati’s work is a crucial contribution to contemporary discussions of social reproduction. The Arcana unveils the hidden structures behind the reproduction of the labor force, exposing capitalism's reliance on unpaid, often invisible reproductive labor—primarily performed by women. Combining Marxist critical political economy with feminist theory, her approach demonstrates that care, domestic work, and sexual labor are integral to capitalist production, positioning women as strategic actors in the composition of revolutionary class forces. Ultimately, it demands radical social change to value and liberate reproductive labor from capitalist exploitation. Fortunati will be in conversation with Sarah Leonard.

Leopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.

Sarah Leonard is the editor-in-chief of Lux magazine. Leonard is a contributing editor to Dissent and the Nation, and her writing has been widely published. 

About the book

Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature. Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.

Praise for The Arcana of Reproduction

“The Arcana of Reproduction is a true tour de force, unique both in the world of Marxism and Feminism. Whereas Marxist-Feminists have generally only elaborated on the significance of Marx’s work for understanding women’s oppression and exploitation, Fortunati ‘sweeps away’ our common sense notions of production and reproduction by testing Marxian categories through their unorthodox application to the realm of reproduction. The result is a painstaking analysis that explores these two interlocking spheres as both interdependent and different—radically unsettling our understanding of both.”
—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch

“This excellent edition, wonderfully edited and translated, with insightful supplementary texts by Federici and the author, demonstrates the contemporary importance of this classic feminist text.”
—Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies

“The Arcana of Reproduction is a must-read because it is an at once singular and path-breaking contribution to Marxist feminist theorizations of the capitalist production/reproduction system and because of the powerful estrangement—from domestic labor, from the institution of the heteropatriarchal family, from the gendered ideologies of work—that it continues to provoke.”
—Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work