gender<ed> thoughts Y. 3/2025 - Depletion: Towards a Feminist Ecology of Care. Book Review by Sneha Roy
The book review of Shirin Rai’s seminal work on Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring explores the harm caused by the depletion of beings who care when their labour is left unrecognised and unaccounted for within the productive domains of the economy. The article showcases how Rai explores everyday practices of care largely performed by women (also accounting for children who care), while providing an empirical account to recognise care labour. Rai goes on to show how location matters when such care can be delegated; it depletes differentially based on class, caste, and gender, and that commodification of care may valorise it but not necessarily value it. The review argues that Depletion also provides an important empirical account to measure care through time-use surveys and the Feminist Everyday Observational Tool (FEOT), which contributes to both theoretical and policy-oriented accounts in recognising and visibilising care labour. The book also provides rich ethnographic accounts of women who care, while prescribing different strategies to reverse the structural harm caused by depletion, namely, mitigation, transformation, and replenishment.
Keywords
Social Reproduction; Care Labour; Harm; Feminist Methodology; Feminist Political Economy