Penny Griffin

Gendering Global Finance Crisis, Masculinity, and Responsibility

This article examines the relationship between discussions of responsibility in and for financial crisis and the locations and effects of gendered power and privilege in the global political economy. Most of these discussions have absented the ways in which power in the global political economy was, is and might continue to be gendered, which has served to reinforce the ‘natural fact’ of economic liberalization, integration and human progress through the expansion of Western-style financial capitalism and has obscured the highly masculinized and ethnocentric model of human activity on which this has been built. This article suggests that accounts of crisis that do not interrogate the ways in which organizations, actors, ideas and norms interact to actively construct the social setting(s) of financial discourse will fail to see contributory factors to crisis as a whole. This article takes seriously the effects of the culture of privilege, competitive success and masculine prowess that contemporary financial discourse has created and sustained and interrogates, against the abstractionism of contemporary neoliberalism and its advocates, where gendered configurations of power, knowledge, representation and identity have enabled contemporary global financial discourse to configure and reproduce ideas and practices of individual, collective and moral responsibility.

Gender, governance and the global political economy

This article considers a range of governance actors (including also the role of political enquiry into the global political economy in and of itself) to analyse how neo-liberal governance strategies seek to socialise human bodies (female, male or otherwise) into a global system of neo-liberal economic productivity. Contemporary mechanisms of global governance, it is suggested, seek to engineer a capitalist ‘market society’ while claiming to ‘empower’ poor people. In recent years, ‘empowerment’ rhetoric in global governance has increasingly depended on measuring the ‘economic’ role(s) of women in developing countries, judging their contributions productive only where they can be gauged to directly contribute to ‘formal economy’ growth. Reinforcing the assumption that ‘formal’ contributions are the only contributions worth measuring, such rhetoric simultaneously eradicates all other (non-competitive and/or non-entrepreneurial) behavioural possibilities for women, while clearly excluding all those who are not ‘women’. Against the instrumentalisation of gender (as a category pertaining only to women and studies of women), this article argues that gender in global governance means much more than simply describing whether people are male or female and quantifying their productive capacities accordingly. As a broad and complex category of analysis, gender enriches the dynamism both of our studies of and practices in the global political economy. To ignore genders role in the global political economy is to fail to see the power that gender (as a composite part of the relations of power that drive systems of economic development and growth) brings to our everyday understandings, and especially to our understandings of economic ‘common sense’.

Refashioning IPE: What and how gender analysis teaches international (global) political economy

ABSTRACT It remains the case that, in spite of the consistently high quality and quantity of gender analysis, gender has not been able to achieve more than a marginal status in International Political Economy (IPE). Increasingly visible as a category of analysis, gender remains trivialized in the minds of both the mainstream and more critical IPE approaches, as a category pertaining only to the lives of women, womens labour rights and womens social movements. This essay therefore analyses what mainstream and critical IPE approaches do and do not say about the constitution of the global political economy. My central argument is that a gender(ed) IPE analysis is absolutely central to fully understanding and explaining the processes and practices of the global political economy, but that the dominant studies and practices of IPE tend not to take into account the contributions of gender based analyses. A critique of the detailed content of gender approaches in IPE is, however, not the main purpose of this review; rather, gender and feminist analyses are the lenses with which to view IPE, with its exclusions, silences and marginalisations, as well as its openings and future paths, not the other way around.

crisis, austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.

Poststructuralism in/and IPE

This chapter seeks to demonstrate how poststructural analysis of the production of knowledge in and about the global political economy (GPE) is both socially useful and intellectually significant. Focusing specifically on the recent global financial crisis (GFC), this chapter asks how this crisis represented a powerful combination of material, ideational and embodied cultures of privilege and how these had (and will continue to have) a profound effect on everyday life.

‘Post’ interventions: Postcoloniality, poststructuralism and questions of ‘after’ in world politics

Thinking about ‘after’ and ‘afterwards’ in world politics necessitates thinking about complex, ambiguous and socially disruptive processes, practices, and methods of governance. Focused on locating the ‘afterwards’ in moments of world politics marked by ongoing, and consistently unsuccessful, responses to crisis, conflict, and questions of social, political, and economic legitimacy, this themed section spotlights two areas of particular concern. First, the section asks what it might mean to theorise ‘after’, and ‘afterwards’, in world politics. Second, it explores what opportunities are afforded in thinking about the relationship between ‘afterwards’ in terms of postcoloniality, governmentality, and the machinery of state building. Interested in diverse ways with ‘thresholds’, and the ambiguity of threshold environments, this section demonstrates the necessity of thinking about complex, ambiguous, and socially disruptive processes, practices, and methods of governance, including how the enduring impacts of past ‘events’ encroach upon the present in intimate and significant ways, influencing the lives, and life chances, of people throughout the world.

Financial governance ‘after’ crisis: On the liminality of the global financial crisis and its ‘afterwards’, through a gender lens

Interrogating the assumption that we live in a time ‘after’ crisis, this article explores financial crisis, recovery and ongoing questions of governance and intervention through a gender ‘lens’. It locates the ‘afterwards’ of the global financial crisis as central to understanding how particular relations of gendered power have been able to prevail in producing a world of governance post ‘post-crisis’. Asking what the limits, and liminality, of global financial governance are ‘after’ crisis, the article argues that governance responses to the crisis can be understood in gendered terms: in their efforts to stave off the potential instability of an undecided, ambiguous and potentially unpredictable economic space, and as concentrating power in the hands of financial elites, particularly, elite groups of white men.

Men, Masculinity, and Responsibility

This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary collection of voices to engage with ideas about men, masculinities, and responsibility. Our aim in putting this issue together is to open up a trail of eclectic and imaginative questions to help illustrate how complex webs of masculinist subjectivities and performative practices interact across and inform various topic areas and lived experiences. Ideas about and practices of responsibility are, politically and culturally, persistently anchored in liberal and androcentric assumptions about individualism, free will, agency, subjectivity, and morality. As such, the masculinist veneer of this significant philosophical concept and personal/collective practice is worth considering in depth, at a variety of levels and in diverse ways. The articles here draw on a range of disciplines and perspectives, including anthropology, postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, critical race theory, visual and popular culture, political science, international relations, sociology, economics, and development studies. In

INTRODUCTION: Asia Pacific going forward: a view from OCIS V

As one of the preeminent academic conferences on international studies in the Asia Pacific, the 2012 Oceanic Conference on International Studies, held at the University of Sydney (with co-sponsors at the University of New South Wales, the University of Technology, Sydney, and Macquarie University) from 18 to 20 July, played host to a large number of academics and international analysts who presented research on a variety of international studies topics. After a very successful conference in Auckland that emphasized the connection of the OCIS community to the Oceanic region, it seemed fitting that the conference would come to Sydney, the largest city in the Oceanic region, and one of the premier global cities in the Asia Pacific. In part because of the location of the conference, and because of the emphasis of many of the conference presentations on the Asia Pacific, no doubt inspired by underlying trends that are both exciting and worrying (sometimes at the same time), the organizers decided to focus this special issue of Global Change, Peace and Security on the challenges that the Asia Pacific faces, now and in the future. In short, this special issue is about the Asia Pacific going forward. The conference keynote address was given by Professor Michael Williams from the University of Ottawa, who critically evaluated contemporary challenges to the liberal international order. Professor Williams returned us to the very foundations of the discipline, challenging us to reconsider the canon of international relations and its impact on how we understand international politics. The breadth and depth of Professor Williams’ oration reminded us that how we tell our disciplinary history can shape how we view our work and our place in international relations. The conference comprised two and a half days of intense and stimulating discussions across 63 panels and roundtables. A total of 274 participants – from PhD students to emeritus professors – were involved in eight simultaneous streams ranging from international security, gender, international relations theory, ethics and international law, climate change and the environment, health, and international political economy. A high level of participation across panels and roundtables demonstrated the depth of interest in the future of our academic discipline, and the breadth of subjects being tackled by scholars of international studies. Elsewhere in this volume, for instance, a forum composed of papers from the conference provides commentary on the Occupy movement that emerged in September 2011. This forum offers creative engagement with the movement: charting its effect on political discourse; understanding the role of conspiracy theories in commentaries on the movement; questioning who the ‘99%’ are; asking whether the Occupy movement has successfully represented disparate groups; and interrogating the translation of popular ‘imaginings’ into concrete political action. The papers within the forum take diverse views on important questions for the movement, for example by expressing doubts

Elisabetta Ruspini, Jeff Hearn, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle (eds). Men and Masculinities Around the World. Transforming Men's Practices

Men and Masculinities around the World forms part of Palgrave’s Global Masculinities series, which is ‘devoted to exploring the most recent, most innovative, and widest ranging scholarship about men and masculinities from a broad variety of perspectives and methodological approaches’ (p. ix). The ‘dramatic success of Gender Studies’, argue the series’ editors, has rested on three developments: ‘making women’s lives visible’, which ‘has come to mean making all genders more visible’; insisting on intersectionality and so complicating the category of gender’; and ‘analyzing the tensions among global and local iterations of gender’ (p. ix). As a gender scholar, political economist and poststructuralist, I should admit at the outset that this opener caused some trepidation on my part: feminist and gender International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship have excelled both at deconstructing the gendered codes that privilege types of identity and forms of behavior in world politics, and of politicizing the everyday practices of gender formation. A project of ‘making all genders more visible’ suggests an understanding of gender as physical that does little justice to the imaginative and thorough work that gender scholars have done to reveal the power that ‘gender’ as discourse rather than biology brings to our everyday understandings (of economic common sense, necessary foreign and domestic policy, appropriate development practice, and so on). I was nervous. I have always found that writing on men and masculinities is most incisive where it engages directly with gender and feminist studies and have long failed to see the wisdom of ‘gender’ programs written for and targeting only women (as if women alone should be expected not only to improve their own lives but entire societies). This is not to suggest that critical studies on men and masculinities need constantly gaze at their feminist navel, but to ask that they take feminist analyses seriously enough to advance a progressive and profeminist politics. The neglect in critical men and masculinities studies of welldeveloped feminist literatures, as Hanlon and Lynch note in this volume (pp. 45–57), can have profound practical impact, legitimating damaging constructions of masculinity and femininity. The increasing focus in the social sciences, over the last thirty years, on men (and sometimes only men), as the editors here observe, has also produced work that is more complex, more intersectional and more attentive ‘to the naming of men as men’. Given this precedent, Men and Masculinities around the World locates itself ‘within feminist and profeminist critical studies on men and masculinities’ successfully, examining gender politics widely and in direct relation to dominant and transformational economic, political and social contexts, practices and relations. The first section of the book purveys various themes and literatures on men and masculinities in a European context, including, but not limited to: the need to ally an underdeveloped critical men and masculinities project with