Financial geography III – Everyday lives of finance

Feminist political economy is essential to understanding the power relations and hierarchies that shape and sustain contemporary capitalism. Motivated by the rejection of gender-blind approaches in economics feminist political economy provides compelling insights into the relations between the economic, the social and the political in the reproduction of inequality. Sara Cantillon, Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano have written a much-needed introduction to key topics in feminist political economy, including the global division of labour, social reproduction, child and elder care, the household and intra-household inequalities, labour market inequalities, welfare regimes, the feminization of poverty and economic indicators. The authors take a global perspective throughout and engage in debates that are relevant for the Global North and/or the Global South. The book offers readers a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the role of power relations and inequality in the economy and is suitable for a variety of courses in political economy, feminism, gender studies, economics, social policy and development studies.

This paper explores two critical feminist methodologies for nursing research: feminist political economy and feminist critical discourse analysis. The aim was to appreciate varied methodological approaches available for nurses to understand complexities in healthcare environments, above and beyond socially normative ways of knowing. Discursive paper. Published articles from nursing databases (CINAHL and ProQuest; no date restrictions) and interdisciplinary databases (Women's Studies International, Sociological Abstracts and Ovid MEDLINE; publication dates between 2017 and 2022). A discursive paper exploring and critically synthesizing the literature on feminist political economy and feminist critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how each methodological approach can be used in nursing. The findings of this discursive paper suggest there is an opportunity to draw on interdisciplinary studies for creative insights into how these methodologies may be helpful for nurses' scholarship and programmes of research. Although few nursing studies explicitly name a feminist political economy or feminist critical discourse analysis approach, several studies apply principles of these methodological approaches. There is an opportunity for these methodologies to be applied within the same project when there is a fit between the research questions and aims of both methodologies (studies where notions of gender and power are considered central and there are potential insights from exploring social progress, structures and the material, along with the social relations of discourses). Feminist political economy and feminist critical discourse analysis offer novel options for methodological analyses. Application of these methodologies may benefit critical nursing scholars looking for diverse critical methodological avenues to explore and to broaden nursing's methodological toolbox towards meeting social justice aims. No patient or public contribution.

This article analyses two ‘fiscal events’ that took place in the UK in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on their content as well as how they were discursively represented in three widely read newspapers that span the political spectrum. It develops and deploys a feminist political economy (FPE) approach that seeks to understand how fiscal policy, and media discourses about fiscal policy, work to reinscribe particular understandings of social reproduction, up to and including the extent to which it is valued, both materially and discursively, in times of crisis. In so doing, it contributes to the growing body of FPE scholarship on COVID-19 by showing how the pandemic unfolded in the UK on gendered terrain. It offers important insights into how gender-based and other forms of inequality are sustained, and even deepened, in moments of crisis. At the same time, in engaging in an analysis of fiscal policy from the perspective of social reproduction, it pushes the research in new directions by showing how the boundary between production and social reproduction and the devaluation and invisibilisation of the latter is reproduced discursively, and on a daily basis.

An emerging critical theoretical framework, queer liberation theory attempts to understand the relationship between queerness and capitalism, and more specifically, anti-capitalist movements. It seeks to update and reinvigorate the structural analysis of the earlier gay/queer liberation movement (1960s and 1970s) with the benefit of the insights of queer theory and empirical queer experiences of neoliberal capitalism. Queer liberation theory recognizes and celebrates diverse sexual orientations and gender identities or expression, including essentialist identities such as gay, lesbian, and trans. Within a realist, structural framework, queer liberation theory is interested in how social movements can move beyond identity formation to produce progressive, structural change. To date, three main tenets of the theory have been noted: anti-assimilationism, solidarity across social movements, and the political economy of queerness. The use of the word “queer” signals a progressive, critical, sex-positive, anti-assimilationist, liberationist perspective as opposed to an assimilationist perspective that strives for respectability, acceptance, prestige, and monetary success on capitalism’s terms. The second tenet, solidarity across movements, is an attempt to transcend to the divisiveness of single-issue politics without sacrificing intersectionality. For example, queer liberation theory seeks to recognize, expose, and dismantle social structures that oppress all communities, albeit in different ways. The political economy of queerness refers to a class analysis of structural inequalities. A genealogy of queer liberation theory’s development shows where it reflects, incorporates, or rejects aspects of various theories including a social constructionist perspective, with its debates about essentialism and identities; social movement theory, with its political tensions between recognition and redistribution; queer theory, with its focus on fluidity and ambiguity; materialism, with the strengths and shortcomings of its class analysis; and intersectionality with its focus on a matrix worldview of interlocking systems of oppression; and feminist political economy, with its focus on social reproduction, but adequate recognition of queer sexuality. Indeed, feminist political economy offers something of a pink road map to discover what aspects of the economy will be important for queer liberation theory to explore. Feminist political economy is helpful in the development of queer liberation theory because it has long claimed sexuality and identity as legitimate, as opposed to frivolous, sites of scholarship and political struggle. Feminist political economy, like queer liberation theory, seeks to understand oppression based on sexuality in everyday life. However, the feminist political economy road map takes us only so far, because the focus of the analysis can be seen as gendered, and often cisgendered, lives. Queer liberation theory attempts to draw from these theories to better understand the relationship between queerness and capitalism and provide a basis for political action.

In this article we argue that a feminist political economy (FPE) approach is critical in understanding why standard policy prescriptions for postwar economic recovery fail to support the building of sustainably peaceful countries and secure lives for their citizens. Whilst many scholars criticize the IFIs’ policies in war-affected countries, our FPE approach provides two overlooked but crucial insights. First, it reveals the disjunction (indeed, chasm) between a country’s economic recovery from war and the IFIs’ focus on the recovery of the economic system. Second, it locates the conceptual underpinnings of this chasm in the profoundly gendered assumptions of neoclassical economics. That is, we find the IFIs’ failure to prioritize financing the social infrastructure that could repair war’s damages, enhance human security, and support the ecosystems on which human security depends has its roots in the fundamental misconception of human reproductive, caring and subsistence labor, and of nature, as external to the economy rather than as central to the ability of the formal economy to function. We illustrate these points with a focus on one pervasive example of the IFIs’ approach to postwar recovery, their encouragement of the large-scale extraction and export of natural resources. Finally, we show how adopting the work of feminist economists who emphasize care, social reproduction and the value of nature, though not without its challenges, can offer radically new visions for postwar economies.

The last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of ‘social reproduction’. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage‐point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda, the special issue we present in this Introduction explores the Social Reproduction of Agrarian Change. Building on the contributions comprising this collection, we argue that the study of agrarian changethroughsocial reproduction enables us to de‐invisibilise processes of life‐making behind agrarian transformations in three distinct ways. First, the lens of social reproduction enables us to better grasp the regeneration of ‘classes of labour’ in rural areas; gender processes of de‐agrarianisation and their implications for livelihoods; and centre reproductive labour within and beyond the household ‐ across spaces and temporalities ‐ as central to life in the countryside. Secondly, this lens also allows us to complicate the land question beyond productivist readings, explore its significance for life in rural settings, and multiply the agrarian questions of our times, whose histories and trajectories must grapple with debates on economic justice. Finally, the study of the social reproduction of agrarian change also provides us with a novel vantage point to read the formation and reorganisation of complex global geographies of the rural, their relation to crises of social reproduction and the ability to redraw the urban–rural divide. All contributions in this issue insightfully advance debates on methods in social reproduction analysis. The study of the agrarian lifeworlds analysed here also contributes significantly to social reproduction debates. It challenges rigid dichotomies between the ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’. It problematises the households as a unit of analysis and sets land as central to planetary debates on crises of social reproduction and their resolution.

This article addresses the question of migrant workers’ exploitation from a feminist political economy and critical race perspective. Overall, my analysis promotes a reinterpretation of workers’ exploitation beyond a narrow focus on labour and production, and towards a consideration of the active social differentiation and reproduction of the work force. Based on my analysis of Black African workers’ conditions in the Italian ‘tomato district’ of Northern Puglia and Basilicata, I argue that recent anti-gangmastering reforms have recalibrated existing tensions between formalizing and informalizing workers’ conditions, tensions that serve the double end of ensuring capital accumulation in agri-food production, while forcing racialized workers to take care of their social reproduction. Formalization, I argue, tends to drive a wedge between ‘productive labour’ and unpaid, ‘unproductive’ work, thus removing responsibility away from firms and state agencies to provide much-needed workers’ welfare. Informalization, I argue, represents a particular racializing dynamic of externalizing the cost of social reproduction to the workers and their extended social networks, who, in this manner, indirectly subsidize parallel circuits of accumulation.

This chapter brings together the strands of literature on financialisation and feminist political economy in the analysis of financialised social reproduction in Southern Europe. Specifically, it draws on the Systems of Provision approach that has examined the diverse ways in which finance has penetrated economic and social reproduction, including connections with material culture. The chapter draws on the feminist political economy take on social reproduction with a more circumscribed focus on the activities required for the reproduction of labour power carried out of the wage labour relation and mostly by women. The financialised social reproduction is illustrated by presenting the Portuguese financialised housing system. The chapter reasserts the differentiated nature of financialised social reproduction in time and place and what can be termed as the resulting variegated, volatile vulnerabilities, even within a fairly homogeneous region such as Southern Europe.

In this article, we examine the practices of survival that Rohingya and Syrian refugees perform as they confront multiple forms of violence resulting from their forced displacement in India and Turkey, respectively. We consider these practices as they are performed in the everyday and reflect on how they expand existing debates in social reproduction feminism. Social reproduction refers to those practices that are essential for the everyday and generational maintenance of life. First, we show that for people living in conditions of prolonged displacement and violence, practices of social reproduction become a matter of survival that entails “making secure” amid the insecurity of displacement. Second, we demonstrate that these practices highlight the role of not only the welfare state but also the security state for social reproduction. We propose the concept of the “(in)securitization of social reproductive capacities” to examine how state and non-state actors hinder social reproduction as much as they support it and how displaced people negotiate with this. We conclude that survival, including the ways in which refugees cope with insecurity, care, and sustain their lives, can be a meaningful tool to pluralize understandings of social reproduction, bridging insights from feminist political economy, critical migration, and security studies.

Using the United States’ fiscal response to COVID-19 in March and April 2020 as a case study, this paper explores the implications the US coronavirus legislation had for the societal distribution of responsibility for social reproduction among US households, employers, and the federal government – and the legislation's effect on women and racialized minorities. It builds on feminist political economy research that argues that, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, economic crisis and stagnating conditions for workers in the US had increased the role of households and the US government in social reproduction relative to the contribution of employers. The paper argues that the US federal government has responded to the COVID-19 crisis through an infusion of income support, but it has failed to increase its long-term socially reproductive commitments and has not addressed the intensified socially reproductive burden placed on households or the declining role of employers in working-class social reproduction. HIGHLIGHTS The COVID-19 crisis prompted the US Congress to spend an historic US$3 trillion on relief. Sixty-nine percent of coronavirus spending was allocated to social reproduction purposes. Congress responded more to the collapse of aggregate demand than to the health crisis. Federal aid improved the livelihood of some groups, while disadvantaging others. The bills left low-wage workers, women, and minorities in vulnerable positions.

Social reproduction has received considerable recent attention from academics and activists aiming to stimulate and advance transformative political change. Yet, an understanding of social reproduction as “work” has sometimes slipped away, leaving behind important anti-racist feminist insights. Engaging with recent contributions from scholars in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, we argue that social reproduction is most useful as a concept, not as a theory, and is best understood as “work”. We point out quandaries and ambiguities that have produced conceptual confusion in scholarship on social reproduction and argue for a conceptualization offered by feminist political economy. We conclude that social reproduction, when understood as work, can support efforts to build the mass movements and solidarity necessary for effective anti-capitalist politics if its relationship to, and contradictions with, the processes of dispossession and capital accumulation are taken into account.

Sustainability has become a powerful discourse, guiding the efforts of various stakeholders to find strategies for dealing with current and future social-ecological crises. To overcome the latter, we argue that sustainability discourse needs to be based on a critical-emancipatory conceptualization. Therefore, we engage two such approaches—environmental justice approaches informed by a plural understanding of justice and feminist political economy ones focusing on care—and their analytical potential for productive critique of normative assumptions in the dominant sustainability discourse. Both of these approaches highlight aspects of sustainability that are particularly relevant today. First, although sustainable development was conceptualized from the outset based upon a twofold notion of justice (intra- and intergenerational), the integration of justice in the dominant sustainability discourse and praxis often manifests merely as a normative aspiration. Meanwhile, the environmental justice and care approaches offer conceptualizations of justice that can act as a powerful lever and as transformation-strategy. Second, the dominant sustainability discourse largely remains within a neoliberal economic framework that continues to promote economic growth as the means to reach prosperity while neglecting the bases of every economy: care work and nature. Its focus lies solely on paid work and the market economy. By integrating (a) social and ecological ‘reproductivity’ (unpaid care and subsistence work as well as nature) and (b) democratic processes for just distribution of environmental burdens and benefits, as well as participatory equity in relevant decision making, feminist political economy and environmental justice approaches offer substantial strategies towards building humane, just and caring societies.

Drawing on feminist political economy and social reproduction theory, we propose an accounting framework for understanding the distributional role of household production, employment, remittances and government social transfers in the social reproduction of the Cuban people. We apply this quantitative framework to available data and produce estimates for 2016. Our findings demonstrate that households – both domestic and diasporic – were the largest contributors to social reproduction in Cuba. Our empirical exercise reveals how the actual distributional arrangements underlying Cuban social reproduction differ from the official commitments and goals of the Cuban Revolution. The relative contributions in 2016 signal several potentially unsustainable self-reinforcing dynamics that undermine efforts to achieve gender and racial equality on the Island.

This article examines women rag pickers’ labour in urban India through feminist political economy, embodiment, and social reproduction. Drawing on fieldwork from Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, it argues that women’s agency in informal waste work operates through responsibility-laden survival rather than empowerment or accumulation. Widowed, separated, and deserted women—often sole household earners—experience intensified bodily depletion through long work hours, chronic illness, time poverty, and debt, yet simultaneously exercise everyday authority over income allocation, spatial mobility, market negotiations, and household governance. Conceptualised here as power within constraint, this relational agency sustains families and urban recycling systems while leaving structural inequalities intact. The article further offers a feminist critique of urban sustainability narratives, showing how cleanliness and recycling regimes depend on women’s embodied labour while rendering them institutionally invisible. By foregrounding women rag pickers as economic managers rather than residual workers, the study reframes informal sanitation as a feminist political economy issue and calls for gender-just urban futures centred on labour dignity, bodily integrity, and social reproduction.

The pandemic of Covid-19 exposed critical gaps in social policy and underscored the foundational role of families and households in both societal and economic stability. This introductory chapter to a Special Issue explores the interdependence between formal economic participation and unpaid domestic labour – collectively referred to as ‘social reproduction’. Drawing on feminist political economy, the chapter addresses how gendered and undervalued reproductive labour is essential to economic growth and the realisation of international commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly gender equality and inclusive growth. This Special Issue uses South Korea as a comparative case study due to its unique economic trajectory, rapid demographic ageing, stark gender inequalities, and limited social protection systems. The country’s long working hours, low fertility rate, and pronounced wage and care burdens on women illustrate how inadequate social reproduction support can threaten broader social and economic sustainability. The pandemic further intensified these issues, disrupting institutional supports and deepening inequalities. This Special Issue collectively examines how policies across different contexts either alleviate or exacerbate the tensions between productive and reproductive labour, using South Korea as a focal point for comparison. This comparative analysis highlights the need for structural reforms and cultural change to support effective social reproduction policies, emphasising that gender-equal leave, accessible childcare, and shared caregiving responsibilities are crucial for work-family balance and social well-being. South Korea’s experience illustrates both progress and ongoing challenges, offering valuable lessons on the limitations of market-driven approaches and the importance of resilient, state-supported family policies.