The Arcana of Reproduction: A Public Reading and Discussion
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
4:00–6:00 p.m.
Room 210, Frederic Lasserre Building
6333 Memorial Road, University of British Columbia
Please RSVP. Space is limited.
Please join associate professor Jaleh Mansoor for a gathering featuring Leopoldina Fortunati, reading selections from The Arcana of Reproduction and discussing the history and contemporary relevance of her text with participants. Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labour globally in the 1970s, Fortunati’s work has served to transform how we analyze the sphere of reproduction today. The work presents foundational attempts to define and politicize forms of life, and labour as both were performed in the home and in waged workplaces, articulating some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labour, decades before their popular reception in English language scholarship. Fortunati’s presentation will be followed by a more informal discussion with participants.
Leopoldina Fortunati is a feminist activist and theorist whose work has spanned a broad range of disciplines from political science and technology studies to histories of sexuality and fashion. She was active in the 1968 student movement and subsequently joined Potere Operaio, a prominent group of the Italian extra-parliamentary left. In the early 1970s, she was one of the founding members of Lotta Femminista, a feminist collective that formed part of the international Wages for Housework movement. She is the author of The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital, originally published in Italian in 1981 and re-released in an expanded English edition by Verso in 2025. With Mariarosa Dalla Costa, she co-authored Brutto Ciao. Direzioni di marcia delle donne negli ultimi 30 anni (1977) and was co-author with Silvia Federici of Il grande Calibano: storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale (1984). She is a senior professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Mathematics, Information Science and Physics at the University of Udine in Italy, where she founded and directed the research laboratory on new media (NuMe) and directed the University’s doctoral program in multimedia communication.
Suggested readings:
5th TEXT PROOF_The Arcana of Reproduction
Digital labor and the domestic sphere
Gonzalez-The Gendered Circuit_ Reading The Arcane of Reproduction
The organizers would like to thank Verso and Filip for supporting the visit and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia for hosting this event.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
Additional Events:
The Arcana of Digital Labour Seminar with Leopoldina Fortunati at SFU School for Contemporary Arts: Thursday, April 16, 3:00 pm RSVP
Reproductive Labour and Feminist Revolt: A conversation with Leopoldina Fortunati at Peoples Co-op Bookstore: Friday, April 17, 6:30 pm
