Its a Man's World: New Feminist Economic Geographies

Feminist Political Economy and the Financial Crisis: Constructing new Economic Geographies

By Sarah Vowden

Jane Pollard's analysis of the financial crash in 2008 looks towards the critical analyses of feminist political economy in adopting alternative economic geographies to resist the oppressive domination of financial capital. One of the most potently cultural signifiers of the crisis has been the hyper-masculinisation of finance or the proliferation of "testosterone capitalism" that feminist political economy as critiqued, specifically the masculine association of 'risk'. There has also been a shift in the ways economic geographers seek alternative narratives to understand the inherent masculinity of financialisation, specifically looking at the global south to link how macro-economic analysis can be informed by the micro-politics of struggle, particularly regarding gendered and racial oppression. For example, much of the rhetoric surrounding the Asian financial crisis of the 1990's surrounds the idea that classic markers of instability such as asset price bubbles were purely a system of the global south and their "oriental" values, despite the fact that Thailand, Indonesia and Korea capitalised their accounts due to pressure from the IMF whereas India and China, who did not avoided the worst of the crisis.

One of the areas in which feminist analysis is important for the de-construction of masculine finance is through the critique of economics' rational emphasis on the 'individual' and particularly problematizes social capital theory. The conception of the autonomous human being and the 'male breadwinner' bias in which the household is universally conceptualised has led to asymmetric economic outcomes, specifically for women. Feminist theory has significantly fought for the expansion of the economic realm of work, to include unpaid domestic labour. Vitally a feminist analysis of macroeconomic policy leads to a more humane concept of economic distribution instead of labouring to the rhetoric of 'scarcity' and 'growth'.

Data shows that financial crises have affected women exponentially compared with men - for example after the 1990's Asian crisis, 7 times more women in Korea were laid off work compared with men. In the 2008 crash, the shocks were also felt by women in the global south which affected manufacturing work and the tourist industry in these countries. In the north, the segregation of gendered occupations, and the vulnerability of those in which women tend to make up the largest proportion of these workforces, particularly in retail and the public sector in which 143,000 jobs were lost between 2008 and 2011 in the UK. The suppression of wages, the privatisation of social reproduction and austerity cuts have also exponentially affected women, often because they are more likely to take up part-time employment due to domestic and childcare needs. The neoliberalisation of government also has dissolved the redistributive qualities of the welfare state and instead opted one on the basis of assets, shifting the "passivity" of the welfare state to an "active" asset management, and are embedded in the encouragement of "save and invest" which has gendered implications.

Economic migration flows, in attempt to reinvigorate domestic prosperity is also enhancing the old credit-debt imperialism between the global North and south which again asymmetrically affects women. Feminist scholarship which harbours a critical postcolonial understanding of contemporary capitalism applies a Marxist critique of the market mentality (masculine) prevailing over the othered state (feminine). There is a significant move towards the "financialization of everyday life" which has several implications but most importantly reflects Marx's concerns that "labour is not only ‘doubly free’ in the labour market – in that workers are both separated from the means of production and ‘free’ to sell their labour power" a "freedom" that is now applied to the Finacialisation of the economy, through the extraction of household surpluses. For feminist scholars, the household is a significant site of analysis of gendered, racial and class inequalities and a site in which the uneven outcomes of credit and debt.

Ultimately Pollard rightly argues that the focus need not be so much on the re-regulation of finance but by its re-politicisation.  As Mohanty argues, "we need to explore what and how new femininities are being produced in debates about financialization, in addition to the ubiquitous sex worker, teenage factory worker or domestic that populates globalization literatures". The literature around economic empowerment is deepening the inequalities of the poorest women in the world as finance embeds itself in all aspects of domestic life. A feminist analysis of the financial crisis thus broadens the moral and cultural questions surround debt that policy makers need to embrace to create a more human economic system.