Women on Lefebvre Towards a re-reading of urban space from Marxists Feminisms

Abstract

This article proposes to revisit the social space conceptualized in the work of the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre from a unitary vision of capitalist exploitation and the oppression of women. For this, a bibliographic review is carried out to build bridges between one of the most significant notions of the struggles for economic, social and cultural rights in Latin America and a theory that, having timidly started its steps towards the end of the 70s, reborns nowadays in the face of theoretical proposals that exclude class from gender analysis. 

It runs through Federici's workerism to rescue her contributions in relation to the conformation of cities during the capitalist transition and the process of expulsion and social impoverishment of women, while the Theory of Social Reproduction is preferred to achieve an analytical framework that allows to account for the contemporary urban phenomenon and the place of women in it. 

It is concluded that Lefebvre's reasoning, in addition to falling into typical preconceptions of his time in relation to the demands of women, uses a very broad concept of social reproduction that makes him lose sight of its importance for capital in equality with production of goods. The complementation of the Lefebvrian theory with the contributions of Marxist Feminisms, then, facilitates the understanding of the historical place of women as the first dispossessed of the urban and their current role in the deployment of collective strategies of social reproduction that mean an appropriation of abstract space that gains ground both from its historical loss of status and from the contemporary logic of capital.