Feminism and Critical International Political Economy

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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).