Academic Women's Labor and Feminist Praxis “From Below”: A Social Reproduction Feminist Analysis of Working‐Class Women Academics' Transformative Possibility in Australian Higher Education

This paper examines working‐class women academics' labor as constituting transformative praxis within the capitalist university. Drawing on oral history interviews with 28 Australian women academics from working‐class backgrounds, I demonstrate that working‐class women occupy contradictory class positions simultaneously, exploited through reproductive labor extraction yet structurally positioned to transform that exploitation into collective resistance. I argue from a social reproduction feminist framework that liberal feminist accommodation practices with institutional power obscures this contradiction, producing a vertical feminist stratification through which capitalism reproduces itself through the advancement of some women at the expense of others. Analysis identifies three forms of emergent counter‐hegemonic praxis: teaching as solidarity work, in which domesticated reproductive labor is repurposed toward building student consciousness and community power; research as refusal, through counter‐archives and the documentation of institutional violence; and, organizing collective power through union activism, mutual aid, and critical mass. Crucially, the analysis identifies the structural conditions enabling and foreclosing each form, arguing that capitalism's organization of reproductive labor creates not only the conditions of working‐class women's exploitation but the conditions of its disruption, with the agents of that disruption already at work.