Caregiving as Survival Infrastructure

Abstract

This article reconceptualizes unpaid and reproductive labor by advancing the concept of caregiving as survival infrastructure, grounded in the case of Palestinian women living under conditions of occupation, siege, and chronic instability. It argues that in contexts of conflict and institutional fragility, caregiving is not background or supplementary labor but an essential infrastructure sustaining everyday life when formal systems are absent, unreliable, or overstretched. Drawing on social reproduction theory and scholarship on the depletion of social reproduction, the article develops a multidimensional analytical model of caregiving as survival infrastructure, organized around spatial, modal, temporal, and political dimensions. This model makes visible how gendered care work enables endurance, adaptation, and continuity under conditions of uncertainty and violence, while also producing long-term depletion and exhaustion. The article’s contribution lies in conceptualizing caregiving as survival infrastructure and in advancing a transferable analytical model for analyzing reproductive labor in contexts of conflict, precarity, and inequality.