Political Economy brims with foundational conceptual dichotomies that feminist scholarship has shown to be gendered. In an article for the Review of International Political Economy, Elisabeth Prügl, Professor of International Relations/Political Science and Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute, explores feminist contemporary writings to show how dichotomous thinking threatens the relevance of Political Economy.
Your piece problematises thinking in Political Economy that is based on dichotomies, for instance the neat separation of public and private spheres represented by the state and the household, exposing that the alteration or restructuration of one affects the structure of the other. How did you arrive at such a (controversial) assessment?
Political Economy thrives on dichotomies, not only the one between the public and the private. It also opposes the concepts of production and reproduction, production and consumption, exchange value and use value, profit and care, the economic and the social among many others. These dichotomies are gendered; that is, if we were to ask which pole of the binary is feminine and which is masculine, most people would agree on what the associations should be. This is not without consequences because gender conveys a hierarchy between these poles, so that for example, production is treated as more important (i.e. the masculine side) than reproduction and consumption (the feminine sides), or the economic (masculine) as more important than the social (feminine). My argument is that this is pernicious, and that the dichotomies actually don’t make sense for most people in the world.
I arrive at this conclusion by looking at Political Economy through the lens of workers that don’t fit into the dichotomies. I look at workers in the care economy (who problematise the opposition between self-interested income earning and altruistic caring) and at home-based workers (who problematise the opposition between work and home). I also have previously looked at the “farmer’s wife” who disrupts gendered oppositions because the term designates both a marital status and a job (as is true for “housewives”). Workers that don’t easily fit into the binaries of Political Economy are often treated as marginal, although taken together they actually perform the bulk of work globally. For them, traditional Political Economy (both in its orthodox and heterodox incarnations) often misses the point: care labour is so much more than earning an income; and working at home or on farms makes visible not only (public?) government regulation but also (private?) patriarchal household governance. Taking seriously the experiences of marginalised workers should alert us that caring and patriarchal governance structures are relevant not only for care workers and home-based workers, but for labour relations more broadly and deserve analytical attention.
What would be required to overcome such inherited binaries in order to advance alternative reasoning and effective action?
Contemporary Economics, paired with economic policies, has brought into being something we call “the economy”. We think of “the economy” as a living thing that needs to be nurtured, fostered, fed, and cared for so that it stays in balance, or sometimes prodded so that it grows. This economy is imagined on the basis of masculinist assumptions: that the primary way of economic reasoning involves rational calculation; that real work takes place in factories and offices, not in households and farms; that value is created there and not in communities and the environment. As a result, Economics and the figure of “the economy” have themselves become part of the problem.
Overcoming unhelpful dichotomies requires questioning the meaning of “the economy”. There is a rich scholarship, including feminist scholarship, that does precisely this – by exploring the everyday lives of people and the ways they create value, by making visible non-market and unremunerated labour that goes into the “production of life” (as described in social reproduction theory; see Elias and Rai 2019, 203) by highlighting the various forms in which people work together in solidarity economies, and by valorising practices of “commoning”, i.e. people “taking care of and accepting responsibility for a resource, and distributing benefits in ways that take into account the wellbeing of others” (Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy 2016). Such scholarship brings back into view elements of economic practice obscured in masculinist Political Economy. In doing so, it opens up thinking space about envisioning less exclusionary forms of economic governance and practice.
Speaking of economic practices obscured in masculinist Political Economy, to which extent would you say the current global health crisis has been a catalyst for making visible the value of those practices?
The pandemic has shown the perniciousness of binary thinking. Discourses that separate the health of people from the health of “the economy” flourish in debates over the wisdom of lockdowns. They should make us wonder, how have we arrived at a situation where it is conceivable to think about sacrificing human lives in order to keep alive “the economy”? Should not maintaining life (i.e. biological and social reproduction) be the key purpose of the economy?
The pandemic also has surfaced in painful ways a long-lingering crisis of care under neoliberal capitalism. Existing policies have utterly marginalised the labour and people involved in care labour. Disproportionately performed by women and mostly unpaid, such labour continues to serve as an undervalued and often free input into “the economy”, while welfare systems –from health care to elder care – continue to be framed as a drain on societies. Because lockdowns have forced so much work into homes, they also have made visible the patriarchal organisation of our economic practices, requiring double- and triple-tasking of some but not others.
At the same time, the pandemic has spawned remarkable acts of human solidarity and caring. Not captured in the measurements of “the economy” during the pandemic, they are invaluable to those in need. They showcase a different economy that already exists in practice. If Political Economy wants to become relevant for all people, it needs to study these practices and overcome its outdated binary fixations.
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Full citation of the article:
Prügl, Elisabeth. “Untenable Dichotomies: De-Gendering Political Economy.” Review of International Political Economy (online 20 October 2020): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1830834.
Interview by Ana Balcazar Moreno, PhD Candidate in International Law; editing by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
Banner picture: excerpt from an image by melitas/Shutterstock.com.