With the current [2010s] crisis, all signs indicate that the state will be increasingly unwilling to organise IMM activities, since they are a mere cost. Expenses in childcare, elderly-care and healthcare are the first to be cut, not to mention education and after-school programs. These will become DMM for those who can afford it (privatisation), or lapse into the sphere of unwaged indirect market-mediation — therefore increasing the abject. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Even if we might, in the crisis, have no choice but to self-organise these reproductive activities — and even though, most likely, abject reproduction will in the end mainly be foisted upon women — we must fight against this process which reinforces gender. We must treat it as it is: a self-organisation of the abject, of what no one else is willing to do. It is important here to state that, even if unwaged IMM activities and the abject might refer to the same concrete activities, these two concepts must be differentiated. Indeed, the category of the abject refers specifically to activities that became waged at some point but are in the process of returning into the unwaged IMM sphere because they’ve become too costly for the state or capital. While IMM is a purely structural category, independent of any dynamic, the concept of the abject grasps the specificities of these activities and the process of their assignment in our current period. Indeed, we can say that, if many of our mothers and grandmothers were caught in the sphere of IMM activities, the problem we face today is different. It is not that we will have to “go back to the kitchen”, if only because we cannot afford it. Our fate, rather, is having to deal with the abject. Contrary to the IMM activities of the past, this abject has already been to a large extent denaturalised. It does not appear to those performing it as some unfortunate natural fate, but more like an extra burden that one must deal with alongside wage-labour. Being left to deal with it is the ugly face of gender today, and this helps us to see gender as it is: a powerful constraint. [Obviously there are nowadays some men, even if few, who do a considerable part of the abject. And they get to know what many women experience: that the abject sticks to one’s skin. Many of these men, especially when they end up having to do most of the childcare, seem somehow to be undergoing a process of social castration.] Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

The Endnotes argue that, as the state is increasingly unwilling to organize IMM carework activities, those who cannot afford the cost of privatization will have no choice but to self-organize these reproductive activities. They see there the rise of the category of the abject, activities deemed not worth an investment by the capital and therefore thrown back to women (and a few men) to deal with. The difference with past generations is that for them these activities were seen as some unfortunate natural fate, while for contemporary women this is more an external constraint, an extra burden they must do, often alongside waged labour.

A last thought, to conclude: if it happens to be true that the present moment allows us to see both our class-belonging and our gender-belonging as external constraints, this cannot be purely accidental. Or can it? This question is critical for an understanding of the struggle which leads to the abolition of gender, that is, to the reproduction by non-gendered individuals of a life in which all separate spheres of activity have been abolished. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender