Feminist Political Economy: a wide angle lens we need now

How can Feminist Political Economy (FPE) help us to understand our current moment? FPE provides a framework for crossing disciplinary boundaries and subject areas to better illuminate the key questions feminists are asking today. Through methodological approaches that are eclectic and diverse, including ethnographic observation, qualitative and interpretive analysis, and quantitative methods that answer feminist questions, FPE has shone light on many previously understudied or misunderstood questions. These diverse approaches enable feminists to work across scales ranging from everyday practices and provisioning to global governance and trade. This section seeks to encourage conversations across disciplinary boundaries, bringing together empirical and theoretical work and showcasing the growing range of work that engages either explicitly or implicitly with FPE. This includes work in areas such as development, international trade and finance, wealth and debt, conflict/war, post-conflict reconstruction, climate change and environmental politics, fiscal and monetary policy, expertise, sex work, the politics of work, food/food security, care and social reproduction, migration, and both international and national policy making, including explicitly gendered policy modes such as gender budgeting and those that self-present as ‘gender neutral’. In addition to those already working in FPE, we encourage scholars from different disciplines who may not primarily identify as ‘feminist political economists’ to join us in building this conversation. This section is open to any and all work that considers the economic dimensions of political questions, or the political dimensions of economics and the economy – or indeed, work that pushes back against such a binary. It welcomes work that studies how gender, race and intersecting inequalities are constructed, institutionalised, performed, embodied and reconstituted in the political economy. We invite work that draws on key concepts drawn from and related to feminist political economy, such as social reproduction, Marxist feminism, ecofeminism, racial capitalism, and crisis; and a wide range of actors including states, firms, civil society, the family or the household, supranational and international organisations, and individuals. We are particularly interested in research that centres topics that have been historically marginalised in some spaces – such as that focused on race, colonialism, sexuality, or work drawing from indigenous knowledges, art or from outside of the academy. Diagnosing ours as a time of crises has almost become cliché – however, FPE reminds us that crises and turbulence are constructed and political concepts that delineate those deserving of care, state support or resources, and attention. Moreover, feminist scholars, particularly those from the Global South, have shown how crises are neither ‘new’ or temporally bound – indeed, crises of the environment and social reproduction are characterised primarily by their long-term nature. This understanding of crisis as something that is not only reserved for elites, and is not only experienced in limited moments but can be an on-going and ever-present experience, is just one of the important insights of a growing feminist political economy literature. We invite a wide range of scholars to join us in building this understanding of our time of ‘crises’.