Adrienne Roberts

Financing Social Reproduction: The Gendered Relations of Debt and Mortgage Finance in Twenty-first-century America

This article addresses a gap in the international political economy (IPE) literature on housing finance by highlighting the ways in which the deepening of mortgage debt is part of a broader attempt to individualise and (re)privatise relations of social reproduction under neoliberalism. While the extension and deepening of debt has been underpinned by policies and discourses that assume the formal equality of individuals, the attempt to erase the gendered subject in the context of ongoing inequalities in paid labour markets, in asset ownership and in the division of unpaid labour has served to reproduce various overlapping social divisions and inequalities. In linking social reproduction to financial markets, the promotion of homeownership in the US has also rendered the social reproduction of present and future generations increasingly insecure. This work contributes to feminist and other critical IPE debates by highlighting the ways in which accumulation in financial markets has been based on the perpetuation of divisions and inequalities between social classes, between men and women and along certain racial and ethnic lines. It also centralises the role of the state in conditioning these processes.

Gender Equality as Smart Economics? A critique of the 2012 World Development Report

Abstract Business now plays an increasingly prominent role in development. While the implicit links between private actors and international development institutions have been widely debated, the explicit role of financial corporations in shaping official development policy has been less well documented. We employ a feminist Marxian analysis to examine the material and discursive landscape of the 2012 World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development. Its exclusive focus on gender equality as ‘smart economics’, and the central role accorded to leading financial corporations like Goldman Sachs in the formulation of the key World Bank recommendations enable us to explore the changing landscape of the neoliberal corporatisation of development. We argue, first, that the apolitical and ahistorical representation of gender and gender equality in the wdr serves to normalise spaces of informality and insecurity, thereby expunging neoliberal-led capitalist relations of exploitation and domination, which characterise the social context in which many women in the global South live. Second, the wdr represents the interest of corporations in transforming the formerly excluded segments of the South (women) into consumers and entrepreneurs. The wdr thus represents an attempt by the World Bank and its ‘partners’ to deepen and consolidate the fundamental values and tenets of capitalist interests.

The Political Economy of “Transnational Business Feminism”: PROBLEMATIZING THE CORPORATE-LED GENDER EQUALITY AGENDA

Abstract This article traces the emergence of a politico-economic project of “transnational business feminism” (TBF) over the past decade. This project – which is being developed by a coalition of states, financial institutions, the UN, corporations, NGOs and others – stresses the “business case” for gender equality by arguing that investments made in women can (and should) be measured in terms of the cost savings to families and communities, as well as in terms of boosting corporate profitability and national competitiveness. This article uses a feminist historical materialist framework to argue that TBF is facilitating the further entrenchment of the power of corporations to create “expert” knowledges about both “gender” and “development.” Using the Nike-led “Girl Effect” campaign as an example, it is argued that TBF is promoting a naturalized and essentialized view of women and gender relations that ignores the historical and structural causes of poverty and gender-based inequality. It is also helping to reproduce the same neoliberal macroeconomic framework that has created and sustained gender-based and other forms of oppression via the global feminization of labor, the erosion of support for social reproduction and the splintering of feminist critiques of capitalism.

Toward a Feminist Political Economy of Capitalism and Carcerality

This article assesses carceral institutions and the social relations surrounding them in the United States in terms of their constituent role in the functioning and reproduction of capitalism in the neoliberal period. Highlighting the interplay between the state’s exertion of more directly coercive forms of power and market relations of confinement, the article develops the concept of carcerality to capture the matrix of carceral relations that underpin the market by shaping individual and collective action and agency. Documenting key trends associated with prisons, debt prisons, and carceral relations surrounding the household, the article challenges critical political economy’s tendency to reproduce liberal representations of the market wherein capitalism appears to be reproduced through people’s voluntary involvement in an autonomous marketplace rather than through the coercive apparatuses and social relations of domination that the market requires to recreate its neutral and natural appearance.

Financial Crisis, Financial Firms… And Financial Feminism? The Rise of ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ and the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE

This paper documents the rise of a politico-economic project of what I have termed ‘transnational business feminism’, focused on the need to promote women’s empowerment, particularly in the wake of the most recent global financial crisis. Here, liberal feminists have joined with states, funding institutions, NGOs and MNCs in constructing women as ‘untapped resources’ capable of delivering a high return on (Western) investment. This project has also generated new knowledges regarding both gender and finance, as the ‘excesses’ that led to the 2008 crisis have been linked to an errant masculinity that can be adjusted by incorporating women (and feminine values) into the finance realm. However, a feminist historical materialist reading of this project reveals that gender is used as part of a narrative that seeks to naturalize and depoliticize capitalist crises. Gender also becomes the basis for the re-embedding of capitalist relations that reproduce the exploitation of men and women while creating new markets and sources of profit for capital. While transnational business feminism is rooted in a particular version of Western liberal feminism that seeks empowerment via integration into the market economy, this paper argues that the contemporary moment offers an opportunity for a renewed emphasis on feminist scholarship that is firmly wedded to anti-capitalism, as well as a Marxism that takes gender seriously.

Gender, Financial Deepening and the Production of Embodied Finance: Toward a Critical Feminist Analysis

This article critically interrogates the ways in which gender equality has been linked to processes of financial deepening, partly via a global coalition of public and private institutions that have come together in recent years to promote an instrumentalist gender equality agenda. Corporations, banks and financial firms are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the contours of the global gender equality agenda and reproducing narratives regarding the need to (1) financially “empower” women, (2) uphold women as the “saviours” of national economies post-2008 and (3) “tap in” to the productive (i.e. profitable) potential of womens bodily capacities. Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, I develop an approach to theorising the inherently embodied and gendered nature of finance that reveals the ways in which these tropes obscure the labour associated with social reproduction, promote the commodification of womens bodily capacities to produce, and support the differential production of bodies while simultaneously masking embodied forms of difference.

Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday: From Bananas to Bingo

Abstract Feminist studies of political economy have long pointed to the multifaceted ways in which global transformations are constituted by deeply gendered economic practices at the everyday level. Nonetheless, the increased analytical focus on the everyday within the study of international political economy (IPE) frequently fails to connect with feminist theories and gendered approaches. In this introductory essay, we argue that any discussion of a ‘turn’ towards the everyday in IPE must acknowledge the role of feminist contributions that predate, and indeed make possible, this shift in IPE scholarships analytical gaze towards the everyday. We map out what might be understood as feminist political economies of the everyday—highlighting the points of connection between feminist scholarship on the everyday, as well as the ways in which feminist scholars engage with the notion of an everyday political economy in quite distinct and diverse ways—a diversity that reflects the methodological and theoretical pluralism of feminist political economy scholarship as well as the ever broadening geographical scope of feminist research.

Mark Carney and the Gendered Political Economy of British Central Banking

In this article We account for Mark Carney’s role in the naturalisation of gender in finance and explain how this depoliticises important questions of gendered finance. We demonstrate Mark Carney’s ability to embody a successful combination of ‘transnational business masculinity’ and ‘traditional bourgeois masculinity’. We sketch how the current monetary and financial stability concerns of the Bank of England appear to reproduce the uneven and exploitative effects of gendered finance. In this article we explore Mark Carney’s place in the gendered political economy of British central banking. We document the gendered narratives surrounding Carney around the time of his appointment as Governor of the Bank of England, suggesting that they worked to naturalise certain gender constructions in finance. We show how Carney seemingly had the ability to successfully embody a combination of two ideal-types of masculinity: both ‘transnational business masculinity’ and ‘traditional bourgeois masculinity’. We argue this contributed to three depoliticising moves, each of which gain their strength in part from the naturalisation of masculinities in finance, while obfuscating important questions of gendered finance. To elucidate the latter, we highlight some of the gendered outcomes that are obscured by the furore surrounding Carney’s character, suggesting that the monetary and financial stability concerns of the Bank under his stewardship are likely to reproduce the uneven and exploitative relations of gendered finance.

Household Debt and the Financialization of Social Reproduction: Theorizing the UK Housing and Hunger Crises

Abstract The proliferation of homelessness and housing precariousness, along with a dramatic growth in food banks, are two signs that while parts of the UK economy may be recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and recession, the same cannot be said for the living conditions of much of the poor and working class population. Much of the media discussion has centered on the ways in which these social ills have been caused by government policy, particularly cuts to social and welfare services introduced under the banner of “austerity.” I argue in this paper, however, that a narrow focus on austerity risks obscuring some of the longer-term structural transformations that have taken place under neoliberal capitalism, namely: (1) financialization and (2) the privatization of social reproduction. Situating these two trends within a longer history of capitalism, I argue, allows us to understand the contemporary housing and food crises as specific (and highly gendered) manifestations of a more fundamental contradiction between capital accumulation and progressive and sustainable forms of social reproduction. Doing so further helps to locate the dramatic proliferation of household debt, which has been supported by both processes, as both cause and consequence of the crisis in social reproduction faced by many UK households.

Politicizing Debt and Denaturalizing the ‘New Normal’

Neither the act of lending nor the state of indebtedness is new phenomena (Graeber, 2011; Mauss, 1967). Debt is also not a novel feature of capitalism (Altvater, 1993; Marx, 1990, 2005; Simmel, 1978). The variants of consumer, corporate and sovereign debt are, however, distinct in the neoliberal era of capitalism and have, alongside growing forms of social insecurity, come to symbolize the ‘new normal’. However, the normality of the reign of debt is neither inevitable nor stable. Over the past several decades, the increasingly unsustainable levels of debt, viewed here as social constructs tied to powerful class-based interests, have resulted in some of the most devastating crises. At the same time, we have witnessed growing forms of collective action against the exploitative relations of debt, up to and including debt bondage. The US