Milking the Labor of Suri Rumah
A Case Study on Farm Fresh
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24229229 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Choong (0000-0002-4477-5022, University of Warwick) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 457-480 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Politics International Studies in Gender State & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1072-4745 • E-ISSN: 1468-2893 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/sp/jxaf059 |
| OpenAlex | W7202265785 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 30 |
This article undertakes a case study on Farm Fresh, a home-grown dairy company embedded within state capital in Malaysia. The case study centers the life stories of suri rumah (housewives) incorporated into the company’s supply chain as home dealers and their bodily and emotional depletion brought about by capitalist extraction. Empirical insights from the case study contribute to the call to pluralize social reproduction approaches, foregrounding contextual meanings while accounting for how domestic labor in the Global South is differentially incorporated into the networks of global accumulation. To provide a more complex understanding of reproductive labor and its relationship with paid labor, this article approaches the racialized-gendered location of suri rumah as an alternative site for theoretical and empirical reflections. Social reproduction is situated within the broader coloniality of milk in Malaysia, and the processes of value extraction are moored to the developmental state project of racial and gender restructuring.
dairy supply chain · Developmental state · Domestic work · Gender · housewives · Racialization · reproductive labor · Social reproduction · value extraction · Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies · Feminism, Gender, and Intersectionality · Political Economy and Marxism
Social Reproduction Theory
Awkward Classes and India’s Rural Development
Cruel Optimism
The Good Mother
Circuits of Social Reproduction
Rethinking Racial Capitalism
Minister of Finance Incorporated
Food Culture in Colonial Asia
Milk for Everyone
Logistics of the neoliberal food regime
No separate spheres
Comparative capitalism and emerging economies
Classes of working women in Mozambique
Towards a feminist political economy of time
Continuums of Violence and Peace
Milk and the Motherland? Colonial Legacies of Taste and the Law in the Anglophone Caribbean
Home-Based Workers
Circulating Power
A Value Theory of Inclusion
Pluralizing social reproduction approaches
Alternative visions of "ethical" dairying
Feminist everyday political economy
Toward a Decolonial Feminism
Theorising the gig economy and home-based service work
Past and present practices of the Malay food heritage and culture in Malaysia
| Highly cited | No |
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