Economy, Feminist Approaches to

Abstract

Feminist approaches to the economy question many taken‐for‐granted dichotomies that define what counts as economic practices. By critiquing the methodological separation between private and public realms, feminist scholars point to the political and ideological aspects of economic differentiation. The concept of social reproduction that includes biological, cultural, and systemic aspects of the continuity of a society is central to feminist understandings of the economy. These approaches have contributed new perspectives on the articulation of paid and unpaid work. They have underlined the specificities of care work and the complexity of transnational care chains. Finally a key contribution of feminism is the unsettling of methodological individualism at the heart of mainstream economic theory.