Notes

I think that you can center on the concept of reproduction without falling for biological determinism if you understand the process of reproduction in social terms -- the oppression of women takes up particular forms based on how the processes of social reproduction are configured.

A dualist theory sees different social aspects as separate and independent and as related to one another in external ways -- a dialectic method sees the internal relations between different social structures; a complex totality that arises from dynamics and structures that presuppose one another and cannot be understood without analyzing all of the aspects. An integral part of Marxist theory is the component of reproduction in any social totality -- you cannot maintain a society without having economic processes that ensure the reproduction of the productive forces, labor, and the relations of production.

However, I don't think you can completely ignore production itself because of the ways that women are exploited as proletarians esp. in the peripheries of capitalism. This is undeniably still connected to the question of reproduction since wages are means of replenishing the laborer for the next day of work.

There was something I remember from reading a couple of Marxist critiques of Afro-Pessimist theory -- which is a critical framework that posits the social death of black people and critiques humanism by asserting that it sustains itself on the category of non-human, which it says is the condition of black people. One of the aspects of social death is natal alienation. I copied a definition that I find useful --
First, natal alienation refers to the initial and continued separation of the slave from biological and cultural ties. While the slave undoubtedly formed kinship structures on the plantation, natal alienation speaks to the way in which slaves were inhuman in their inability to move “freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory” (Patterson 1982).
This definition is useful and applicable in the context of slavery, but not necessarily useful in the context of colonial South Africa where familial ties were employed by colonial authorities to maintain the reproduction of labor and social relations.
The contradiction between legitimacy and accumulation meant that colonial authorities frequently intervened to strengthen the hold of kinship bonds, in order to secure young men’s labour in a system of indirect rule. Wage labour was ethnicised, with ethnic identity often determining which forms of labour were performed. Workers were often employed through ‘tribal’ authorities. Thus, the African’s primary relationship to the state was neither as a worker, nor as a black, but as Xhosa, Zulu, et cetera. These cultural identities were in turn stabilised as ‘biological’ lineages. This fragmentary worker status, in which an interaction between the urban mining and cash-crop areas and the (ethnicised) homestead was institutionally mandated, refracted relations of super-exploitation.[66]