Depletion by Shirin Rai considers the hidden costs of care work, exposing its unequal gendered and racialised distribution across society. Presenting depletion as an innovative way to conceptualise the toll care work takes on people and the planet, grounded in case studies from around the world, Rai offers us a transformative feminist framework to reimagine care economies and resist systemic injustice, writes Shalini Grover.
Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring. Shirin M. Rai. Oxford University Press. 2024.
“Reproduction of life doesn’t just happen–it is laboured over, in different contexts and with differential resources, unequally.” So states Shirin Rai in the introduction to Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring, a sophisticated and thought-provoking analysis of the political economy of paid and unpaid care (2). Worldwide, the invisibility of this reproduction is mainly shouldered by women and “yet we rely on this work every day and know that without this work we will not survive–as a global population, culture and community” (2). The inequalities of reproductive work have been vocalised time and time again by feminists including Tithi Bhattacharya’s Social Reproduction Theory (2017), Nancy Fraser’s “Can society be commodities all the way down?” (2014), Servants of Globalization by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (2015) and “Portraits of Women’s Paid Domestic-Care Labour” by Grover, Chambers and Jeffrey (2018), to give a few examples. It is a lonely and isolating battle, with scholarship on care often appearing as the last item of a conference schedule or a singular book chapter. Feminists continue to advocate for an inclusive agenda of care and social reproduction to be duly recognised as “work” in national budgets, policy and GDG. Few studies have captured the costs of social reproduction and their anticipatory harms in such a comprehensive and nuanced manner as this new book.
Conceptualising the toll that care takes
So, what is depletion? Rai invokes the term to explicate how the unequal distribution of social reproduction manifests harm to those who care for others (eg. mental and physical health, loss of career, personal safety, everyday structural violence, environmental damage etc.). Usually, caring for others is imagined as a rewarding, safe experience, its difficulties outweighed by its benefits. Rai courageously turns this narrative on its head, centring the harm caused through care work in its current form in the book’s four compelling argument. The first of these holds that an unequal system of social reproduction, which we are experiencing, leads to depletion and affects everyone engaged in social reproduction. Secondly, she argues that the reversal of harm requires seismic changes, not just mitigatory strategies. While mitigation, is the most prominent strategy of reversing depletion, it remains individualised and connects the worlds of paid and unpaid work in fundamentally unequal ways. Thirdly, she claims that besides human life, planetary care is a key factor in the vision of a good life for all and not just selected populations and countries. Finally, she makes the case that harm is embedded in locations and long histories of inequalities, such as gender, race, class, colonialism and slavery.
Rai’s contribution is thus to conceptualise depletion as affecting a broad spectrum of stakeholders: individuals, communities, households and the environment. This novel framing of depletion is striking and is polygonal, convincingly capturing the tensions between unpaid and paid work.
Depletion in context
Conveying the multifaceted, painful and hidden labours of those who perform care is not an easy task. Rai achieves this through a meticulous mixed-methods approach combining participant observation, photographic portraits and interview narratives (a Feminist Everyday Observation Tool approach) that capture everyday forms of depletion through a fine-grained analysis. Crucially, Rai’s insightful conceptual framework eschews narrow area-specific, adult-specific and a class-specific analytical lens; her subjects and locations constitute the multiple, intersectional, intergenerational and overlapping, as well as different landscapes and of poverty and violence. Depletion is drawn out through a series of case studies demonstrating what it can look like in different contexts around different the world. There are chapters on children taking on unpaid caring responsibilities for their parents and grandparents in Coventry (UK) at the peril of their own childhoods, women in India leading different classed lives yet having to heavily negotiate non-state caring resources, and a South African Amadiba community resisting the violent onslaught of a mining company taking over their land. The picture painted across these contexts is one of hardship and struggle, of marginalised people contending with the harms inflicted on them by unequal systems.
The book showcases the energy, compassion and solidarity shared between communities around the world as they mobilise to overturn depletion and build more sustainable and just structures of care
The urgent task of reversing depletion
Situating her work in the domain of feminist political economy, Rai’s deployment of temporality and spatiality foregrounds social reproduction as part of a continuum that should be valued consistently. This is in contrast to the sense of a momentary slippage that the COVID-19 pandemic prompted: governments newly found and arguably short-lived recognition of care work (embodied in “clap for our carers”) as essential work, worthy of gratitude and resources. It is important to remember that care and social reproduction has a rich history of enquiry and feminist agendas well before the pandemic. Rai draws on this broader social and scholarly context throughout the book, which makes for a text that is highly accessible to readers, opening the door for wide audiences such as students, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, policy makers, economists, gender and development studies, counsellors and activists, who will all surely benefit from Rai’s refined analysis. This is a remarkable achievement and an innovative way to foreground the inequalities of social reproductive labour, care economies and planetary harm and its human costs. More than that, the book showcases the energy, compassion and solidarity shared between communities around the world as they mobilise to overturn depletion and build more sustainable and just structures of care.
Rai therefore concludes that there is hope, despite the scale of the task of reversing depletion. It may require a revolution as it slips down the list of governments’ priorities as the COVID crisis slips into the rear-view mirror. The book is a compelling call to action, urging us to mobilise against depletion and the deep-seated structural inequalities though which it operates. Above all, the book offers readers new theoretical directions, concrete visions and the momentum for a transformational feminist politics of care.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Read an article by author Shirin Rai about the book’s research on the LSE Inequalities Blog.
Image: Eric Johnson Photography on Shutterstock.
Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to our newsletter for a round-up of the latest reviews sent straight to your inbox every other Tuesday.
