Feminist Economic Practices and the Negotiation of Capitalism

This paper examines how feminist entrepreneurs engage with and repurpose capitalist mechanisms through what I term feminist economic practices (FEPs). Drawing on 54 in-depth interviews, made between 2023 and 2025, with feminist business founders across Western Europe and the United States, it conceptualises FEPs as situated negotiations that reconfigure value, labour, and redistribution within market constraints. Rather than acts of purity or withdrawal, these practices represent ongoing, imperfect, and imaginative efforts to build feminist economic alternatives from within capitalism. The paper contributes to feminist political economy by challenging the persistent binary of resistance versus co-optation that dominates analyses of feminist engagements with the market. Building on diverse-economies scholarship (Gibson-Graham, 2008) and the notion of strategic deference (Kinder, 2021), I show how feminist businesses tactically comply with market rules just enough to create economic spaces of political experimentation. Their practices (ranging from reconfigured labour relations and collective redistribution to feminist aesthetics and partnership ethics) reveal a repertoire of micro-political strategies that bend capitalist tools toward feminist ends. Methodologically, the study develops a participant-led, meaning-centred approach that resists prescriptive definitions of what counts as “feminist” or “economic.” By shifting focus from “feminist businesses” to FEPs, it foregrounds the plurality of feminist economic life and the epistemic importance of attending to participants’ own categories of practice. This methodological stance, rooted in feminist reflexivity, recognises knowledge production itself as a political act that shapes which economies become visible and legitimate. In a moment of overlapping crises (economic precarity and the backlash against feminism) this research identifies feminist businesses as a site of both survival and imagination. FEPs reveal how solidarity, redistribution, and care can be materially enacted within the very systems that constrain them. They remind us that transformation need not wait for rupture, but rather that it can be created, negotiated, and sustained in the everyday economic practices of those attempting to negotiate politics and survival. References Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2008. “Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for ‘Other Worlds.’” Progress in Human Geography 32 (5): 613–32. Kinder, Kimberley. 2021. The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements. University of Minnesota Press.