Abstract
In her 1997 essay “Gender, Feminism and Political Economy” Georgina Waylen acknowledges the irony of having her work published in New Political Economy, a scholarly journal emphasizing “lack of rigidity and broadness of…scope”, despite the fact that its inaugural 1996 issue made “no mention” of gender or feminist analyses of the political economy (Waylen 1995: 205). She goes on to suggest that “having the occasional article by a feminist academic, and ‘openness’ as a policy is not enough on its own” (Waylen 1995: 205). Her attention to the tokenization of feminist analyses and the marginalization of gender within the new political economy (NPE) was echoed by Penny Griffin ten years later in “Refashioning IPE: What and how gender analysis teaches international (global) political economy”. In this piece, Griffin explains that gender remains “trivialized in the minds of the mainstream, as a category pertaining only to the lives of women, women’s labour rights and women’s social movements” (Griffin 2007: 720). Moreover, the absence of gendered analyses persists within the more radical tradition of critical international political economy (IPE), where “gender is rarely explicitly centralized…and the place of gender analysis remains as yet unguaranteed” (Griffin 2007: 723). Despite these exclusions, a rich body of literature has developed over the years by feminist scholars working within international relations (IR) resulting in a feminist IPE approach. Nonetheless, as Juanita Elias notes in “Critical Feminist Scholarship and IPE”, among the numerous barriers facing feminist scholars is their interdisciplinary training “which cannot be fitted neatly into an intellectual history of the discipline” (Elias 2011:102). Responding to what she describes as intellectual gatekeeping by those working within IPE, she states that “questions need to be raised, therefore, about the extent to which there is an implicit conservatism to IPE scholarship (be it ‘critical’ or otherwise) in which gender issues and feminist-oriented research are always constructed as somewhere ‘out there’ on the edges of the field” (Elias 2011:103).
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- 1.
For a collection of early essays exploring these debates see: Lydia Sargent, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1981).
- 2.
See for example: Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Barbara Epstein, “What Happened to the Women’s Movement?” Monthly Review (May) 1996; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Martha Giminez, “Capitalism and the Oppression of Women: Marx Revisited”, Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis, Volume 69, Number 1 (2005), 11–32.
- 3.
See for example: Linda Burnham “Lean In and One Percent Feminism”, Portside, March 26, 2013; Elizabeth Schulte, “Trickle Down Feminism?” SocialistWorker.org, March 20, 2013; Tressie Macmillan Cottom, “The Atlantic Article, Trickle Down Feminism, and my Twitter Mentions. God Help Us All”, June 23, 2012, http://tressiemc.com/2012/06/23/the-atlantic-article-trickle-down-feminism-and-my-twitter-mentions-god-help-us-all/; Ann-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, The Atlantic, July/August 2012.
- 4.
“Reliving the Rana Plaza Factory Collapse: A History of Cities in 50 buildings, day 22”, The Guardian, 23 April 2015, 1.
- 5.
“US Marine Admits Choking Transgender Filipino, Denies Murder”, CBS News, 24 April 2015.
- 6.
The “sex wars” in US feminism are typically traced to the 1982 Scholar and Feminist IX Conference “Towards a Politics of Sexuality” held at Barnard College in New York City. For contemporary examples of this debate see: Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition (New York: Routledge, 1998); Kamala Kempadoo, et al. eds., Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work and Human Rights (Boulder: Paradigm Pubishers, 2011); Anne E. Lacsamana “Sex Worker or Prostituted Woman? An Examination of the Sex Work Debates in Feminist Theory”, in Women and Globlalization, eds. Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana (New York: Humanity Books, 2004), 387–403
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Lacsamana, A.E. (2016). Feminism and Critical International Political Economy. In: Cafruny, A., Talani, L., Pozo Martin, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical International Political Economy. Palgrave Handbooks in IPE. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50018-2_6
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