Interpreting International Politics by Lynch Cecelia

Author:Lynch, Cecelia. [Cecelia Lynch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136622205
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Feminist International Political Economy

If we open the boundaries of Cox’s “social and political complex” or Strange’s “four structures of international political economy” to explicate significant practices and processes of international political economy, how far should we go? What matters besides whether monetary rates are fixed or flexible, or to what degree trade is protected or “free,” or how crony capitalism operates, or how knowledge production supports liberal hegemonies? Feminist IPE scholars, who overlap with their security counterparts, reformulate these questions in insisting that everyday economies are intimately tied to transnational ones, and that the constitutive nature of family and market on both local and transnational levels means that we need to investigate once again the gendered nature of international economic practices in our research. It is not merely, then, “domestic social purpose” that matters, but more important are the local and transnational ways that social purpose and practice play out for women and men, families and other systems of organization and authority. The feminization of poverty is no accident, but is directly related to institutions and social purposes that are woven into the fabric of IPE.

In addition to the physical violence that militarized institutions perpetuate vis-à-vis women (see Chapter 2), local and transnational economic institutions promote the gendered nature of labor, trade, finance, investment, and technology. The Gramscian approach discussed above retains class as a major factor of analysis and criticizes the devaluing of labor, especially in “developing” countries. Feminists, however, highlight how the worlds of finance, investment and technology are gendered, ruled by hegemonic masculinities that suppress or subordinate other forms of masculinity as well as femininity, excluding women in the process. These insights, according to feminists, are still insufficiently incorporated into many critical analyses.

Again, feminist theorists show that, in order to understand and explicate gendered divisions of labor locally and globally, we cannot merely employ an inductive method of “adding and stirring” women into the mix. At the most basic level, scholars need to look at the constitutive relationship between gendered labor and gendered discursive constructions. The resulting

gender stereotypes … are promulgated by dualistic categories favored in economic analysis: paid-unpaid work, production-reproduction, skilled-unskilled, formal-informal. These interact with other gendered dichotomies that shape how we think about work: ‘men’s work’—‘women’s work,’ labor for profit-labor for love, working-caretaking, breadwinner-housewife, and family wage earner-‘pin money’ wage earner.

(Peterson and Runyan 1999: 130)

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