Feminist Political Economy: Increasing women’s visibility in the global economy

Written by Ciman Araleh

As a field of study, political economy focuses on the historical processes, governance structures, and institutions that shape economic outcomes. Historically, it has ignored gender as a system of power in the global economy, and has been unwilling to incorporate gender analysis into its method’s and framework’s. However, the 1980’s and 90’s saw the emergence of feminist economics and the increased prominence of a critical approach to political economy. Viewed as more accommodating than classical political economy, the critical approach views economic processes as inherently social processes. Despite its pluralism, gender analysis has yet to become a central focus of critical political economy. Within the field, other critical perspectives such as Marxism remain unwilling to properly address and treat gender based power relations as equally important as class based power relations. Therefore, as an academic discipline, the field of political economy has continued to delegitimize gender and feminist considerations. The trivialization of gender, and it’s exclusion from analysis of economic processes, reveals an imbalance in “the wielding of disciplinary power”, and highlights the importance of Feminist Political Economy (FPE) in ensuring the visibility of gender in the discipline. A gendered framework to political economy is necessary because women are crucial to the operation of the global economy, and within that global economy gendered hierarchies exist. FPE scholars recognize the existence of gender inequalities, and share a normative belief that focused research can challenge and transform those inequalities.

The trajectory of feminist political economy began with addressing and challenging the gender blindness apparent in the field, and trying to locate “women’s work” in the capitalist production system. As the field continued to evolve, the diversity of women forced feminists to think critically about the use of universalizing claims of sisterhood. These universalizing claims disregarded differences such as ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality. Although the gendered hierarchies in the global economy are one of the core areas of analysis for FPE scholars, the hierarchies that exist between women force a more complex analysis in which feminist intersectional theorizing has helped facilitate. Although the goal of reconciling gender inequality is shared amongst most FPE scholars, the best means of doing so remains the topic of heavy debate. The most prominent of these debates is the discussion surrounding the politics of recognition versus the politics of redistribution. Recognition politics are struggles for symbolic change and group representation, and developed alongside the politics of identity that sought to elevate and acknowledge the struggles of marginalized groups. Redistributive politics focuses on socioeconomic injustices and the tangible redistribute strategies to correct injustices. Rather than viewing these as two separate prescriptions for the issue of gender inequality, more FPE scholars are focusing on creating the conditions where “a politics of recognition could support the politics of redistribution”.

The knowledge production in political economy have been dominated by men, resulting in a lack of recognition of how gendered structures in the global economy, including state’s and markets’, uphold oppressive patterns of gender relations. Markets act as social institutions that embody gendered norms and practices, as evidenced by the way in which they determine property rights and other economic assets such as the value of labor. Women’s labor -domestic and reproductive- have long been considered marginal to “masculine” productive activities associated with paid work and the formal economy. What is considered to be “women’s work” are often classified as irrelevant, unskilled and unpaid, and are devalued in the global economy. One of the best examples for the marginalization of women’s labor is social reproduction, “which are activities that are usually centred around the household, that are central to the production and reproduction of life, yet go unaccounted for in conventional economic analysis”. The current political economy assumes valuable work to take place outside of the home, which itself is a structure of gender subordination that allows social reproduction to be devalued as a feminizing activity.

10. Waylen, Georgina. “You Still Don’t Understand: Why Troubled Engagements Continue between Feminists and (critical) IPE.” Review of International Studies 32, no. 1 (2006): pg 148 11. Ibid 12. Peterson, Spike V. “How (the Meaning Of) Gender Matters in Political Economy.” New Political Economy 10, no. 4 (2005) pg 501 13. Elias, Juanita, and Adrienne Roberts. “Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday: From Bananas to Bingo.” Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday, 2018, pg 791

If feminist political economy points towards a questioning of orthodox methods, assumptions and biases, its challenge to the previous hegemony of “masculinist” economics is systemically disruptive and necessary. The perception of gender analysis as a field of scholarship that is “produced by women, about women, for women”, has led to the questioning of its academic rigor. Women’s everyday lives and experiences are a part of broader gendered power relations and structures, however, it has yet to be accurately reflected in both classical and critical approaches to political economy. Both approaches to political economy remain narrowly focused on formal structures and processes, and choose to mention women in passing, or “add women” to existing categories, rather than fully incorporate a gendered analysis in their research. What is necessary is more recognition of the way in which norms and institutions are gendered, allowing for a complete understanding of how power and resources are distributed in the global economy; hence society at large. The majority of the world’s population are constituted of women and feminized other’s, whose work is unpaid, underpaid, obscured and devalued. This economic devaluation is consistent with the cultural devaluation of what is considered feminine. Offering a gendered analysis of political economy does not mean solely focusing on male- female relations. It means acknowledging and sufficiently addressing the exploitation of all peoples whose identities and labor are feminized, and therefore devalued, as well as continuing to challenge the gender hierarchies in the global economy.