Marie Reich, M.A.

Marie Reich studied sociology, history, law, and gender studies at the universities of Marburg, Frankfurt, and Tel Aviv and completed her master’s degree with a thesis on materialist-feminist perspectives on change and persistence in the gendered division of labor. Her research focuses on gender studies, feminist social theory, social reproduction, intersections of sexism and other forms of group-based misanthropy, and gender-based violence in National Socialism.

Being in labour. Giving Birth as a relational practice in contemporary capitalism

Birth is a profoundly social, historically changing and currently contested process that represents a central transition in the life course for the person giving birth. Giving birth is not an unchanging physical process, but is produced by historically and locally changing birth practices. In the PhD project, childbearing is understood as an interpersonal process that is embedded in gendered relations of power and domination. The PhD project aims to (1) empirically investigate the effects of the current organization of obstetrics on the individual handling and experience of birth; (2) theoretically investigate the effects of the current capitalist and patriarchal social formation on childbearing. Birth is understood as reproduction (work) and its relationality is placed in the center. Consideration of the role of childbearing in the reproduction of a patriarchal-capitalist society also includes the effects and intersections of various relations of inequality and domination on the process of birth. Focusing to the contemporary organization of childbearing also includes its commodified form, for example, in the realm of surrogacy and egg sales.

Publications

Reich, Marie/Kuhnt, Anne-Kristin (2024). Being in labour – Gebären als Arbeit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus, GENDER – Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft, 1-2024, S. 26-40.

Reich, M. (2018). Verunmöglichung von Zeugenschaft. Sexzwangsarbeit in den Häftlingsbordellen der NS-Konzentrationslager und ihre Tabuisierung nach 1945. Working Paper Series 18/2018 „Gender, Diversity and Migration“, Faculty of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt.