Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 2nd, at 7pm for a talk and conversation with Leopoldina Fortunati about her classic work, The Arcana of Reproduction. Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers, and Capital, released for the first time in an unabridged English translation by Verso Books. Fortunati is joined by Arlen Austin, media studies scholar and co-translator, who will discuss the work in the context of Fortunati's oeuvre and her recent analyses of digital labor. The conversation is moderated by Andreas Petrossiants, associate editor of e-flux Journal.

Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Fortunati’s work is an essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. 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, it demonstrates that care, domestic work, and sexual labor are central to capitalist production and are politically significant. It positions 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. The Arcana 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. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.

Leopoldina Fortunati is a radical feminist activist and theorist whose work has spanned a broad range of disciplines from political science and technology studies to histories of sexuality and fashion. She was active in the 1968 student movement and subsequently joined Potere Operaio, a prominent group of the Italian extra-parliamentary left. In the early 1970s, she was one of the founding members of Lotta Femminista, a feminist collective that formed part of the international Wages for Housework movement. She is the author of The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital, originally published in Italian in 1981 and re-released in an expanded English edition by Verso in 2025. With Mariarosa Dalla Costa, she co-authored Brutto Ciao. Direzioni di marcia delle donne negli ultimi 30 anni (1977) and was co-author with Silvia Federici of Il grande Calibano: storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale (1984). She is a senior professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Mathematics, Information Science and Physics at the University of Udine in Italy, where she founded and directed the research laboratory on new media (NuMe) and directed the University's doctoral program in multimedia communication.

Arlen Austin received his PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2024. His work addresses questions of media, value production, and reproductive labor. He is co-editor, with Silvia Federici, of The New York Wages for Housework Committee, 1972-1979: History, Theory, and Documents, and has collaborated with Sara Colontuono and Leopoldina Fortunati on an updated and expanded translation of the latter's classic work, L'arcano della riproduzione, which was released by Verso in 2025. His writings have appeared in The Sage Handbook of Digital Labor, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Viewpoint, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, among others. He is co-editor with Jaleh Mansoor and Sara Colontuono of Gendered Labour and Clitoredean Revolt. Carla Lonzi and Leopoldina Fortunati (Vancouver: Fillip, 2024). His works as a research-based artist have been presented at Redcat Gallery, The Bard Hessel Museum, and Exit Art, among other venues.

Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and editor living in New York. His work has appeared in Social Text, New York Review of Architecture, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, RoarMagazine, the Verso and Historical Materialism blogs, and e-flux journal, where he is the associate editor. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU, where he is writing about the role of tenants’ movements and other urban rebellions in contesting the capitalist mode of production.

For more information, please contact [email protected].

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–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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