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This paper draws upon, and seeks to extend, existing feminist analyses of the causes, constitution and effects of financial crisis to argue that crisis, governance and austerity are best understood by interpreting the discursive reproduction of crisis governance discourses and their feminist Frankenstein creation, what this paper refers to as ‘crisis governance feminism’. Existing feminist scholarship has, at length, detailed how capitalism, in all its forms and at macro, micro, local, regional and global levels, is gendered. Feminists have contested the seductively clean and unified agenda of ‘one world’ future prosperity lovingly perpetuated by neo-liberalism and its advocates and have highlighted instead ‘the messy, contradictory and disjointed processes of global restructuring that have monopolised the politics of development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ (Griffin, 2010a: 91). Feminists have analysed and campaigned on economic crises extensively, interrogating the gendered impacts of the 1980s debt crisis (see, e.g., Sen and Grown, 1987; Benería, 2003), the East Asian crisis (Truong, 1999; Ling, 2004; Floro et al., 2009; Seguino, 2009) and the Argentine crisis (Chrabolowsky, 2003; De Cicco, 2011). Feminist discussions of global finance and crisis have displayed in stark relief the gendered injustices and inequalities created and sustained by various crises, the ‘retrogression of individual capabilities’ (Fukuda- Parr et al., 2013: 24), particularly those of women, created by financial crises, the social costs to women of austerity and the organisational manipulations of gender rhetoric that reaffirm existent and unequal economic policies and power relations (see, e.g., Montgomerie and Young, 2010; Roberts and Soederberg, 2012; Fukuda- Parr et al., 2013). As feminist analyses have so convincingly argued, ignorance of the local and social constitution of global processes leads only to flawed scholarship and ignorant policy-making that further exacerbate, or even create, hierarchies and inequalities of labour, class, gender and sexual relations. For feminists, regimes of capitalist production and consumption are always gendered. The reproduction of assumptions of individualism, market economics and democracy, perpetuated by neo-liberal governance mechanisms as pre-given and beyond question, mean, in particular, that neo-liberalism and its advocates have often failed to recognise that ‘the commercialisation of everyday life and of all sectors of the economy generates social dynamics that many individuals and cultures across the globe might find repulsive’ (Benería, 2003: 73).

We can think of retrogression in individual capabilities as a lack of sustainability. The 2012 United Nations conference on Sustainability Development, called “Rio +20” since it took place two decades after the Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, defined sustainability in terms of the ability to meet the needs of present societies without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to similarly meet their own needs. Recast in terms of capabilities, we define sustainability as the ability to realize current capabilities without compromising the ability to maintain and enhance those capabilities over time, including the capabilities of future generations. Therefore, financial crises and macroeconomic volatility compromise the sustainability of human development.

Broadly framed, sustainability has multiple dimensions, comprising the economic, social, and environmental. As this study argues, inequality is a source of economic fragility and imbalance and, as such, is a threat to economic sustainability. Yet inequality also compromises sustainability across its multiple dimensions. An unequal distribution of income and wealth not only creates the conditions for crisis, but is itself a source of political and social conflict. Unbalanced consumption poses threats to the global environment.

Next to questions of androcentric conceptualizations of value and the gendered division of labor, feminist economics has for a long time been struggling with the ideas on the “free” individual. In mainstream economics the free individual constitutes itself in the concept of the Homo oeconomicus. That economic agent is seen as an autonomous identity, a separate self, “fully sprung from the earth” (Hobbes 1966 [1651]) and not dependent on the care of others, not even a mother to give himself birth. In the Hobbesian metaphor, economic agents are envisioned as mushrooms; more recently, the economic agent is seen as an independent adventurer, a Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a lonely island (see Grapard 1995). In this metaphor the Homo oeconomicus is envisioned as a rational individual (whose mind rules over his body); he is utility-maximizing, and fully informed by the signals of the market. Feminist economics is also deeply concerned with the consequences of establishing the “free” individual, the Homo oeconomicus as the economic subject, and with the placing the foremost value on the utilization of private property. Feminist economics clarifies that such a paradigm constitutes an economic system resting on invisibilized, un(der)valued, un(der)paid reproductive labor and the priceless exploitation of commons such as clean air and water. The dominant economic system “cannot respond to values it refuses to recognize. It is the cause of massive poverty, illness and the death of millions of women and children, and it is encouraging environmental disaster. This is an economic system that can eventually kill us all”1 . Feminists, (proto-)feminist utopian thinkers, and feminist economists ranging from Christine de Pizan ([1405], 1999), Mary Wollstonecraft (1792), Charlotte Perkins Gilman ([1911], 1971), Marge Piercy 1997 [1976], Marilyn Waring (1988, 1995 and 1999), Marianne Ferber and Julie Nelson (1993) and Nancy Folbre (1991 and 1995) to countless others have for a long time criticized those core ideas of the current economics paradigm. Not only their manifestation in accounting practices, the distribution of labor, and incomes and wealth, but also the destruction of livelihoods, the environment and the planet as a habitat. They have called for a reconsideration of the current conceptions of value, care, and labor which are the foundations of androcentric and anthropocentric economics (see Schönpflug 2008). Still, a shortcoming of feminist economics is that, while the dominant paradigms have been assessed and deconstructed at lengths, and while the category woman has been added to mainstream models and concepts such as GDP accounting and the evaluation of reproductive labor and welfare indexes have been expanded2 , truly alternative programs have – with some exceptions (see below) – largely been missing and/or have not been largely established (see Habermann 2010). Feminist economists are aware of this shortcoming. Marilyn Waring, one of the second wave’s more prominent feminist economists, originally argued for a (monetary) imputation of values generated by unpaid work or the environment. In her 1988 core book If Women Counted. A New Feminist Economics, she urged policy makers to bring to light “the invisibility of unpaid work and the ecosystem in the unidimensional growth paradigm” in national income accounting (Waring 1999, xx). Interestingly, in her book’s second edition called Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, Waring reconsiders her strategy of the first edition. She explains that because she was striving to save ecosystems and prevent environmental destruction, she was originally “prepared to use whatever tools could immediately empower my argument in the short term. Since economics was all powerful, the way in which I would empower our ecosystem was to give it a monetary value, to quantify it, to make of it a commodity. I desperately had to prove that the natural environment […] had a value comparable with the alternative proposed exploitation. There was no time to battle the pathology of the economic mode” (Waring 1999, xx). Therefore Waring’s primary strategy was to align goods of a common nature or items of the nature-state (in the sense of Locke), which were not yet a private property, with commodities (e.g., objects exhibiting utility). But in 1999 Waring reflects on that strategy: “My underlying agenda was to disable the system. I saw a mechanism for this in taking economics on at its own game. […] I thought that the models would then be so overwhelmed, conceptually and statistically, that they would become inoperable, and even greater nonsense than they are. […] I underestimated the willingness of the ideologues and practitioners to construct even more abstractions, regardless of the model’s relationship to human experience. I underestimated their capacity for unreality” (Waring 1999, xxi). Waring had in that sense originally planned to implode economic models by adding monetary value to non-commodities such as women’s unpaid labor, environmental degradation and so forth, hoping the complexity would collapse the system. In this paper’s final section, we are proposing this exercise again but in an even more systematic and explicitly posthumanist way.

Donald Trump, in a relationship of predation with everything around him, has affirmed his will to dominate others as well as the planet. The destructive capitalism that he has promoted is based on the modern Western ideology of science as the omnipotence of man over his environment, following Descartes' famous formula “to make oneself as master and possessor of nature” . This one values reason, 28 objectivity, spirit, knowledge and progress (considered as masculine) and devalues irrationality, affectivity, emotivity, body and nature (considered as feminine). The valorization of a production-driven economy is therefore achieved through a disregard for the environment, but also for indigenous populations, as evidenced by the giant Keystone XL oil pipeline project with Canada that Trump has revived after Obama vetoed it in 2015. According to Naves, “the overuse of natural resources is the mark of a combative, dominating nation, proud of the physical strength of its men, able and willing to tame the great outdoors.” . The limitless appropriation of fauna 29 and flora is thus linked to hegemonic masculinity, and stems from a short-termist and selfish vision of production and consumption. Besides, the defence of the environment or animal welfare are associated with feminine passivity, gentleness and attentiveness, which are opposed to values presupposed to be masculine such as strength, action or work. The economy (masculine) is thus opposed to ecology (feminine). Ecological activism is indeed mostly carried by women, and thus the protection of the environment is considered by the climatoskeptics as a weakness or a mothering. The destruction of nature follows the same logic as the antifeminism of leaders such as Donald Trump or the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro: to preserve a certain social order, which is felt to be threatened by the rise of feminist and ecological demands, their media coverage and therefore the entrance of these issues into the public arena. Donald Trump denies the reality of climate change, although it is now scientifically supported. Unlike in the past, contemporary climatoskepticism is therefore a denial and even a disregard for science and research. Not only is Trump attempting to roll back national environmental protections, but his 2017 withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement also indicates a real desire to impose a climatoskeptic narrative into the public arena and onto the international stage. The defence of environmental and animal exploitation seems to follow the same logic as that of carrying weapons: as a mark of virility, to question it would also be to question a certain masculine identity. In this regard, we can highlight Trump's cancellation of a measure taken by Michelle Obama to fight against junk food in school cafeterias. As demonstrated by the researcher Hank Rothgerber , hegemonic 30 masculinity is also constructed by the refusal to take care of one's health, notably by a mode of eating that is very much centred around meat consumption. Vegetarianism is in fact easily associated with women, and endangering oneself or others is considered a mark of virility, from which stems men's unconditional of hunting and the carrying of weapons.

For the purposes of this project, we define gender violence as systematic, institutionalized and/or programmatic violence (sexual, physical, psychological) that operates through the constructs of gender and often at the intersection of sexuality, race and national identity. Gender violence comprises the acts and practices that systematically target a person, group or community in order to dictate what ‘men’ and ‘women’ are supposed to be and to discipline marginalized communities or any other perceived threats to dominant political structures and practices. In addition, we fundamentally conceive of ‘gender violence’ as a contested concept that may only represent specific practices and experiences. While certain behaviors or practices are commonly associated with gender violence (such as violence against some women) we do not claim that it is a ‘ready’ category. It is not a static or non-normative category particularly since naming certain experiences/practices as examples of gender violence may in fact delimit those experiences. We want to de-naturalize the category of gender violence to show how dominant representations are imbricated in national and global politics and exist at the intersections of racial, class and international politics. Similarly, in the context of this Special Issue, we understand hegemonic projects as constituted through systematic power relationships that privilege certain ways of knowing, being and acting and that give voice to only certain people’s experiences and agendas in the realm of families, communities and political entities. The processes, practices and discourses that demarcate a hegemonic project are not homogeneous, uncontested or settled. Because sociopolitical forces of actors participate in normalizing power relationships they can potentially pose different ways of knowing, being and acting that could rupture and reshape those relationships. Thus, hegemonic projects are not free-floating monolithic phenomena but rather contextually specific and historically produced, defining the realm of political possibilities. We situate our understanding of hegemony within the context of critical theorists such as Roxanne Doty (1996) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001). As distinct from narrow (neo)realist understandings of hege- mony as a preponderance of resources or Gramscian understandings of how the ruling class maintains its position of power, these critical theorists see hegemony as the discursive linkage of particular ideas (Doty 1996: 8): The hegemonic dimension of global politics is inextricably linked to representational practices ... Hegemony involves the very production of categories of identity and the society of which they are a part. Hegemonic practices . . . seek to create the fixedness of meaning that . . . is ultimately impossible. For example, current hegemonic practices of neoliberalism and neocolonialism circumscribe what democracy and rights are supposed to look like in terms of their appropriate forms and definitions, the legitimate actions taken in the name of democracy and rights as well as the parameters of justice and political participation. In this way, hegemonic actors (political elites and privileged acti- vists for example) deflect criticism by feigning neutrality or ubiquity and, as we argue, require and shape discourses and practices of gender violence. While there may be identifiable actors, this does not mean that domination is sufficiently challenged by ‘cutting off the oppressor’s head’ because of how domi- nation is imbricated in interpersonal, local, global, cultural, economic and social dynamics. As noted above, gender violence accomplishes certain things and fixes particular meanings and practices. Given that hegemonic pro- jects also attempt to create a particular world of meaning and being, both gender violence and hegemonic projects can help each other ‘succeed’. Although it is not only the epistemic that generates hegemonic projects, we pay particular attention in this Special Issue to the hegemonic projects of ‘the state’. We do not conceive of the state as an actor but rather as an idea or what Pierre Bourdieu (1994) calls a ‘bureaucratic field’ that wields symbolic power and centralizes power. It is possible that the principal hegemonic project of the modern world is the project of ‘the state’. Our predominant focus on the state as a hegemonic project, then, is not to affirm state-centrism but to acknowledge that the state is still a central organizing political category of our lives. The politics of opposition, categories of identity and contemporary forms of dom- ination work through the state in many ways. Our focus is on hegemonic pro- jects – such as economic development (and its proxy neoliberalism), women’s rights activism, nation-building and national security – that are implicitly executed in the name of ‘the state’. These issues of gender, violence and power have been dealt with to some extent in feminist IR scholarship on the issues of gender, violence and power. Whereas traditional IR theory often views power as an ability to leverage material resources to get others to do what is not in their interests, feminists have exposed the gendered context of power thereby revealing more nuanced dimensions of hegemonic projects such as nationalism, militarism and globalization. The militarization of daily life when states promote military apparatuses as the solution for stability, security and development, the use of rape as a tool of war and the disproportionate effects of violence on particular women are three examples of a gendered conception of power (Enloe 2000; Jacobs, Jacobson and Marchbank 2000; Giles and Hyndman 2004). Feminist understandings of power have also exposed how gender is used to legitimize the operations of hegemonic projects. One example is the use of gendered conceptions of ‘protecting family and nation’ to promote military operations; another is the gender hierarchy that grounds, enables or cements the separation of public and private spheres (Peterson and Runyan 1998). While the issue of gender violence is indeed more prominent now because of the growth of feminist IR theory, we want to push for a further examination of the constitutive role gender violence plays in hegemonic projects. The scholar- ship on gender violence in IR certainly shows how hegemonic projects, such as nationalism or war, are deeply gendered and thus result in violence against women. But, while this vantage point is critical and often gets at the construction of gender, this framework generally only sees gender violence as primar- ily an example of hegemonic projects – one effect of power through the register of gender, rather than as contested, productive and coterminous with power. If we, as feminist theorists, respond to the obsessive focus on war in the mainstream IR field by documenting power relationships in terms of ‘Man’ over ‘Woman’/State over Citizen, we may inadvertently reaffirm understandings of violence as a ‘tool’ for particular goals of power. We acknowledge that power itself is an understudied political concept, par- ticularly regarding the multiple and layered forms that it takes. It would be easy to set up the realist, masculinist conceptualization of power as a ‘straw- person’ against which to posit the importance of feminist scholarship. However, we are pushing for feminist intervention in various discussions of power, whether it takes the form of compulsory control over others, indirect control via institutions and rules, structural ‘constitution of social capacities and interests of actors in direct relation’, particularly in terms of ‘producing social positions of capital and labor’, or ‘the socially diffuse production of sub- jectivity in systems of meaning and signification’ (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 3–4). Therefore, building on the work of feminist challenges to traditional IR views on power and of feminist scholarship on the gendered effects and pro- duction of various forms of power, we seek more nuanced understandings on this topic through the examination of the relationship between hegemony, gender and violence. It is often the case that the very contours of what constitutes gender violence in feminist IR scholarship are drawn by the issue of ‘violence against women’. Keck and Sikkink (1998) rightly explain how a transnational advocacy network actively developed the ‘violence against women’ frame, coalescing several campaigns worldwide into a platform that gets at the politics of pain which disproportionately targets women. The approach has raised awareness, galvanized support, given rise to much professional and political activity and enabled women’s groups to secure funding. But these political goals may have been secured at a certain cost. In the first place, the ‘violence against women’ approach relies on representational understandings of gender violence. In other words, the focus on violence against women also potentially ignores vio- lence against men and against groups in ways that are gendered, raced and internationalized. For example, feminist IR scholars invoke the presumably disproportionate targeting of women during conflict in ways that emphasize particular gendered effects of conflict and the masculinized state; the general effect is the lack of due attention to what it means to ‘make’ gender through violence or to the way codes of masculinity negatively affect men. Second, we also note that responses to gender violence, in many ways more so than any other political category, have sanctified racism, imperialism and Orientalism among feminists and critical theorists. For example, the obsession with ‘Islamism’ as the explanation par excellence for gender troubles around the world as well as the romanticization and infantilization of indigenous and/or marginalized women, belie feminist concerns about hierarchy (Nayak 2006; Shepherd 2006). Feminists participate in these problematic dis- cussions about gender violence when we presume that the only reason a woman may die elsewhere is because of her (monolithically) oppressive culture in contrast to the choices and freedom of women in the West. Ironically, it may be such limited understandings of gender violence that unintentionally keep the topic of gender on the sidelines of political science. If gender violence is just an effect of power and does not substantively contri- bute to how we understand the operations of power, then the issues that gender violence raises may be dismissed as ‘women’s issues’ rather than instrumental to knowledge in political science. This dynamic also increases the ghettoi- zation of feminist IR scholarship and scholars (cf. Weber 1994).1 The current lacuna in IR scholarship on hegemony as well as on gender violence is not accidental but rather signals the production of knowledge in this field. Work on gender violence is not predominant in political science or the IR field pre- cisely because it is conceived as ‘just’ violence against women. In other words, in order to further our understandings of violence, we must interrogate gender violence as constitutive of power, and to understand power, we must go beyond current understandings that see ‘it’ in terms of tools or phenomena that act on gender. And, as we do so, we simultaneously ask why the questions we examine in this Special Issue are left on the margins of scholarship. Thus, we come to the following: why does our argument that gender violence is more than a case study of the effects of hegemony and, rather, is constitutive of hegemonic projects, matter? By re-orienting the relationship between gender violence and hegemonic projects we challenge the ‘natural- ness’ of the category of gender violence and assert it as constitutive of the productive forces of hegemonic projects. This framework provides a fresh and critical approach to understanding hegemonic projects and the construction of difference(s). We reference the work of postcolonial and critical race feminists who explain how neocolonial and neoimperial state formations are productive of and reliant upon gendered and racialized conceptualizations of citizens, immigrants and of ‘us/them’ dichotomies (McClintock 1995; Chatterjee and Jeganathan 2000; Stoler 2002). Postcolonial theory also explains how a fix- ation on violence ‘over there’ sidesteps how power works via international hierarchy (Chowdhry and Nair 2002). Similarly, we also believe that gender violence, rather than simply a result of war or culture, is vital and pivotal to the possibility of political violence and hegemony in the first place. Recent critical feminist engagements with international political economy (IPE) have also shown how the exploitation of women, and particularly women of color, is not simply an unintended consequence of global capitalism. Rather, the advancement of global capitalism under the dominant ideological ration- ale of neoliberalism depends on women’s secondary gendered status and global class hierarchy (Mies 1998; Peterson 2003; Agathangelou 2004). Drawing on these important literatures, we seek with this Special Issue to push the connections between gender violence and hegemonic projects beyond the ‘effects of power’ view towards an understanding that places the constitutive function of gender violence at the forefront.

Violence, and gendered and intersectional forms of violence, are an extensive global problem connected to power, inequalities, health, economy, crime and security, impacting all societies (Krug et al., 2002). Violence can also be a point of departure to examine and intervene in social life, whether the focus is on social politics,Footnote1 social analysis or theoretical development (Hearn et al., 2016). Indeed, as a driving principle, analyzing and understanding violence is key for its reduction, as a fundamental link between theory and society. The range and depth of both violence and research on violence are immense. Within this range, there is considerable research that examines the co-variationFootnote2 of and interconnections both amongst and between forms of violence (for example, homicide, child abuse, civil conflict) and further aspects of violence (political organizing, policy development against violence, knowledge production, measurement, definitions/inclusions/exclusions). However, much research on violence remains fragmented in different disciplinary and with substantive focuses on different forms or aspects of violence. This paper addresses two linked questions: the extent to which research literature reports on how different forms and aspects of violence co-vary and interconnect, or not; and the need to work towards a more inclusive, more comprehensive conceptualization of violence than more partial approaches. Specifically, the paper addresses two key research questions: How can the extent to which specific forms and aspects of violence co-vary and interconnect, as reported in research literature, be usefully conceptualized and theorized in a more inclusive, more comprehensive way? What difference would a more inclusive, more comprehensive conceptualization of violence make to social politics, social analysis, and social theorizing on and against violence? We address these questions by arguing that the concept of violence regime (Hearn et al., 2020; Strid et al., 2021) – that is, the governance and production of forms and aspects of violence – constitutes a more inclusive and more comprehensive approach to such interconnections (or lack thereof), and a way of dealing with tensions and limitations in more partial frameworks. We also hypothesize that forms and aspects of violence co-vary with each other to constitute a violence regime. Furthermore, we hypothesize that such co-variance is likely to be greater than with other inequalities and measures that are often assumed to ‘cause’ violence: in this view, a violence regime is relatively autonomous rather than merely a subset of other inequalities. In line with Davenport’s (2021) recent call for “integral violence studies”, this paper aims to contribute to overcoming the fragmentation of policy and politics, empirical research and theoretical development on violence, and its different forms and aspects, and to further interdisciplinary research on violence. These are important issues for social politics, social analysis, and social theory. Accordingly, we see violence regimes as a policy concept, an empirical concept, and a theoretical concept. But, there is an immediate problem: namely and simply, what is violence? There are multiple contestations of what violences are – physical violence, assault, sexual violence, coercive control, homicide, genocide, as well as less directly physical violences, such as cultural, symbolic, epistemic and systemic violence (Bourdieu, 1998; Žižek, 2008). Violence includes, but is not limited to, state violence, economic violence, terrorism, interpersonal violence, gender-based violence (GBV), violence against women, anti-lesbian, gay and transgender violence, intimate partner violence, gang violence, hate crime, cyberviolence, and stalking. So, is violence a set of material bodily actions and effects? A range of discursive constructions? Is violence more structural in character, as, for example, through institutions or structural inequalities? Or all of these, intersectionally gendered? In this paper, we use illustrative examples from GBV, whilst not restricting discussion to gendered violence regimes.Footnote3 In this text, violence and violence regimes are understood as material-discursive, including how violence is defined, what is included and excluded as violence, in knowledge production on violence, and as operating across micro/interpersonal, meso/institutional, and macro/(trans)societal scales. Theoretically, we locate ourselves in debates on the close relations of materiality and discourse, such that recognitions and contestations of violence are part of the problem of violence. Indeed, the problem of what violence ‘is’, and how violence is named, defined, limited, understood and explained, is a key question across many realms: everyday life, social politics, social analysis, and social theory more broadly, albeit unevenly. Knowledge production on violence, who gets to define violence, contestations on definitions, are part of violence regimes, thus engaging with wider theoretical debates, such as on regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980). Violence as an open-ended, but not relativist, concept that refers to multiple ways in which humansFootnote4 can be attacked, transgressed, harmed, destroyed, materially-discursively. Violence certainly involves direct physicality, but it is more than that, as with physical harms without direct physical violence. The violence regime approach brings a focus on violence, and re-centres violence – that it is not only concerned with specific ‘types’ of violence but sees violence as both cause and consequence of social realities. As such, this paper draws on and develops the very long tradition of feminist theory, practice and research on violence (for example, Brownmiller, 1975; Hanmer and Maynard, 1997; Hester et al., 1996; Kelly, 1988; MacKinnon, 1982; Moran and Sharpe, 2004; Gordon and Meyer, 2007). We consider uses of violence regimes as a heuristic analytical tool for social politics, social analysis, and social theory. Building on earlier empirical, policy and conceptual work (Hearn et al., 2020; Humbert et al., 2021; Strid et al., 2021), the concept of violence regime forces consideration of different understandings of what is to count as violence, from direct killing to forms of violence often not recognized as violence at all, such as violence to non-humans, colonial violence, slow and environmental violence. Following this introduction, we continue by examining how studies on violence are subject to disciplinary fragmentation, as a precursor to examining five inspirations and ways of moving towards a broadened, more inclusive conceptualization: violence regime. The following section focuses on the notion of regime more directly, building on earlier work, and spells out the violence regime concept. The latter parts of the paper consider three applications of violence regimes – in social politics, social analysis, and social theory. In the first case, violence regimes address and inform politics, policy and policy development, labeled here as social politics, around violence, such as gender-based violence, violence against women (VAW), intimate partner violence (IPV), anti-lesbian, gay and transgender violence. Extending understandings of violence is important for policy formulation, development and implementation, whether working at the UN scale, regionally as in, say, the Council of Europe, nationally or locally. More comprehensive analysis of the complexities of violence is likely to demand transcending both disciplinary and policy area boundaries, with policy responses often depending on where within state (or parastate) machinery violence policy is located, for example, war and militarism in ministries of defence, violent crime in ministries of justice. Second, violence regimes, and indeed intersectional gender violence regimes, are part and parcel of social analysis, including the analysis of the place and relation of violence to societal contexts, broadly based structures of inequality, governance, welfare state regimes, gender regimes, and social movements, and empirical data thereon. Third, violence regimes engage with social theory. One may ask: what assumptions on the construction of the subject, for example, ‘rational’ or individualist, pertain in different social theories, in relation to violence, and the experience of being violated? Specifically, social theory is partly constructed by, through and in relation to violence, including the frequent exclusion of the knowledges of the violated, sometimes but not only through killing. The concluding section discusses further implications of the conceptualization of violence regimes.

Austerity is a term which forms part of the neoliberal agenda designed to ‘roll back the state’. As noted above, strategies include reducing corporation taxes and those paid by wealthy individuals (benefitting predominantly men), cutting public spending (affecting predominantly women), moving public service provision to the private sector and deregulating business and labour (benefitting predominantly male owners of wealth). The language of markets has been essential to this agenda, and the neoliberal assumption of rationality, or homo economics – notably rational man – have been the ideological underpinnings. The rational man, neoliberalism assumes, will pursue his own selfinterest, thereby generating wealth. This relies on the language of empowerment but fails to acknowledge of address the structural obstacles that are placed upon those who do not conform to the category of rational ‘man’. The neoliberal assumptions of ‘rational man’ rely on this particular version of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (cf. Connell, 1987). The rational man in the neoliberal context is unshackled by government constraints, rational in the pursuit of his self-interest, competitive and by extension aggressive in this pursuit. Masculinity and the notion of ‘man’ of course rely on their definition in relation to binary opposites, femininity and woman. In shoring up the interests of rational economic masculinity, this serves to ‘symbolically annihilate’ feminine interests (Tuchmann, 1974), which takes a form of symbolic violence (Spivak, 1988; Bourdieu, 2001). Discourses of wealth creation perpetuate a masculine version of what it is to be productive i.e. a prioritising of a masculinised version of worth and value. To think about the ways in which wealth is masculinised, it is useful not only to consider this in the structural context of neoliberalism and its underlying assumptions, but also in the way this translates into practice. A stated aim of the then UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne’s, austerity measures was to introduce measures that ‘support a strong enterprise led recovery’ and that this economic recovery ‘must have its foundations in the private sector’ (cited in Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012: 135-8). This government endorsement of the benefits of business in pursuit of economic policy has been accompanied by not only descriptive reinforcement of men’s interests but substantive affirmation too. In business boardrooms, we see a dramatic overrepresentation of men. Noticeably, in the UK, who not only are 94.5% of CEOs male, but there are more CEOs called John, than there are women (Hampton Alexander Review, 2018). This despite the overwhelming evidence which cites improved business performance where boards have a greater diversity of representation (Nolan & Moran, 2016). A 2018 Credit Suisse report showed that the numbers of super wealthy are growing, and their wealth is increasing far faster than that of the general population: 0.8% of adults own 44.8% of global wealth (Credit Suisse, 2018). Men are still disproportionately the wealth owners; Forbes rich list counted 2,208 billionaires. Only 244 of those were female. So while women disproportionately bear the costs of austerity, men are disproportionately holding the wealth as beneficiaries of policies and discourses which enable and facilitate this. As noted in table 1 below, during the period of ‘feminised austerity’, men are also over represented as holders of wealth in the UK. (This is in a context where men are constructed as heroic holders and generators of wealth in our popular culture in films such as The Wolf of Wall Street1 ). Over the same time period as the austerity measures analysed (2010-17), the Sunday Times top 10 rich list yielded the following data for the wealthiest in our country: Sunday Times Annual Rich list no of men no of women Top of the Rich List 2010 13 2 Lakshmi Mittal (M) 2011 14 2 Lakshmi Mittal (M) 2012 12 2 Lakshmi Mittal (M) 2013 12 2 Alisher Usmanov (M) 2014 12 1 Sri & Gopi Hinduja (M) 1 With thanks to Candy Yates for this point 12 2015 14 2 Leonard Blavatnik (M) 2016 13 2 David & Simon Reuben (M) 2017 13 2 Sri & Gop[i Hinduja (M) Table 1. Sunday Times top ten wealth holders in the UK by sex 2010-2017 Since the introduction of austerity in the political lexicon in 2010, we see that the top ten holders of wealth are 86% male. So while there is extensive descriptive over representation of men, and it is useful to perhaps briefly explore how these men were discursively positioned in this context. The top wealth owner in 2012, is presented as a generous benefactor willing to sacrifice some of his profits, in order to advance the profits of his company: The Independent’s (1/11/2011) headline ‘Mittal puts his business first with $350m cut to dividend payout’ suggests an altruism on the part of Britain’s wealthiest man at that time. Wealth it seems is a product of ‘meritocracy’ rather than an unequal economic structure: A celebratory article in The Sunday Times, promoted the advantages of Osborne’s policies, which had meant that ‘The billionaire industrialist Jim Ratcliffe has moved back to Britain, six years after relocating to Switzerland to slash the tax bill of his Ineos chemicals empire’ (Sunday Times, 17/7/16). In this positioning the term ‘slash’ is also used, but here presented as a positive trait of masculinity, a necessary measure of wealth creation and success (and indeed it did seem to indicate neoliberal ‘success’ as Ratcliffe was named Britain’s wealthiest man in 2018). Violence is intertwined and celebrated in this neoliberal context as a mechanism through which wealth is created, predominantly by and for men. The violence of the gendered structures which facilitate this wealth creation is obscured. Rather we are presented with ‘objective’ (for which read structurally blind) account of neoliberal masculine economic success. This notion of structural blindness acts to deflect us from asking some of the more challenging questions about why things are the way they are and helps perpetuate a belief that solutions are located in individual and privatised agency. The privatisation of both individual agency and the public sphere; being left to the neoliberal agenda of fighting for survival, has the effect of masculinising notions of freedom by privileging self-reliance and competition over co-operation and compassion. In effect it amounts to an assault on values ascribed to female impacting on the material structures of power and ‘where it should naturally’ be located (Giroux 2001).

In this paper, I discuss a third problem with the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility and market-based solutions to environmental issues: the exacerbation of the gendered burden of environmental harm. As a growing body of literature at the intersection of environmental sociology and gender studies reveals, such individualized approaches fall more heavily on women, particularly those who are tasked with the work of feeding, caring for, and protecting their families. Even environmental advocacy groups that acknowledge the failure of regulatory agencies often perpetuate the notion that individual mothers are ultimately responsible for protecting their children against pollution (MacKendrick & Cairns, 2019). Indeed, everyday precaution in avoiding harmful exposures to toxic chemicals through food and consumer products is becoming another component of responsible mothering subject to moral judgment (MacKendrick, 2014). This departs from earlier modes of maternal framing that focused on community protection and stopping pollution at its source. Women engaged in environmental activism historically justified their work in ways that align with and extend traditionally feminine identities and responsibilities; many women’s environmental organizations during the Progressive era used the language of mothering and “public housekeeping” (Addams, 1915), particularly in relation to keeping urban environments clean and livable (Rome, 2006). Similarly, early women environmental justice organizers presented a community-oriented notion of motherhood that encouraged advocacy outside of the home (Peeples & DeLuca, 2006). But in the age of precautionary and ethical consumption, maternal discourse is increasingly mobilized in a way that prioritizes protecting oneself and one’s own family. Scholars have not only documented a gender gap in precautionary consumption, but also in household-level proenvironmental behavior (Dzialo, 2017; Organo et al., 2013). Yet this gender gap has rarely been treated as problematic by environmental sociologists and is not conceptualized as another example of women’s unpaid labor (Kennedy & Kmec, 2018). This is reflective of the overall absence of gendered and feminist perspectives within environmental sociology and environmental justice scholarship, which several scholars have repeatedly called attention to in the past decade (Dzialo & Kennedy, 2015; McWright & Xiao, 2014; Buckingham & Kulcur, 2009; Banerjee & Bell, 2007). Gendered and/or feminist perspectives are also largely missing from environmental justice policy, discourse, and activism (K. Bell 2016). It is concerning that the domestic scale remains an underexamined site of environmental harm and gendered burden. I argue that precautionary consumption and other forms of individualized environmental risk management add to the “third shift” (Hochschild, 1997), on top of the disproportionate burden of household labor and care work that women already face.1 As stated by Buckingham and Kulcur (2009), the persistent gendered domestic division of labor is a social injustice that is compounded by modern environmental risks. Not only is this third shift a problem in and of itself, in that it is yet another form of unpaid labor performed predominantly by women, but it is also a demobilizing force. Just as the environmental movement gave women the opportunity to impact public life in order to protect their family, today’s calls on women to protect their families push them back into the household and urge them to engage in more household labor and consumerism. Moreover, not only does precautionary consumption offer inadequate protection overall, but it potentially reproduces existing gender inequalities between men and women and also among women of different levels of race and class privilege. Low-income and racial-ethnic minority women are not only more likely to have greater exposure to environmental hazards by way of their geographic location, but they are also less likely to have the time and resources to engage in precautionary consumption and behavior. Thus, the increasing individualization of the environmental movement also potentially exacerbates environmental injustice at the household level. In this paper, I begin with a brief overview of literature that points to the increasing individualization of the environmental movement under neoliberalism. I then explore the politics of motherhood in social movements, and how the maternal role serves both as an impetus for action and as a frame through which mobilization occurs. A key insight offered by this literature is that movements with feminine identities face a “double bind” (Einwohner et al., 2000), in that while such identities may help movement participants establish legitimacy, they may not provide long-term political effectiveness and agency. I then examine how this double bind has played out in women’s environmental activism, while emphasizing that maternalist framing has been a consistent part of a long history of powerful, often successful organizing for environmental protection and justice. The latter half of the paper builds toward an understanding of how maternal responsibility and discourse has taken on a new meaning in the contemporary environmental movement. I conclude by outlining areas for future research on gender and environmental inequality.

From Hegemonic Masculinity to Ecomodern Masculinity Hegemonic masculinity refers to a fluid set of accepted values and practices that constitute the dominant and idealized form of masculinity in a particular time and place (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). As Connell (1995) argues, multiple masculinities are operating at different historical moments, within various strata of society, and across different geographic locations. However, within each of these contexts, one type of masculinity is hegemonic and serves to maintain the dominance of men over women while also creating a hierarchy of masculinities. Recent research reveals how corporate interests manipulate hegemonic masculinity to gain the consensus of target communities, with the aim of reaping higher profits or quashing resistance (Bell and York, 2010; Bell et al., 2015). Naturalization of gender, racial, and class inequalities lies at the foundation of this consensus-building project, whose goal is to preserve corporate legitimacy against economic and environmental crises. As Marxist political theorist Antonio Gramsci noted, hegemony is not fixed or immutable but must continually “be renewed, recreated, defended and modified” to adapt to societal changes (Williams, 1977: 112). This work is done by “organic intellectuals,” who exemplify and articulate class interests (Gramsci 2010[1971]). Demetriou (2001) frames hegemonic masculinity in Gramscian terms, arguing that it must continually hybridize and appropriate “diverse elements from various masculinities” in order to adapt to changing historical moments (p. 348). Messner (2007) explains that beginning in the late 20th century, many professional-class white men began to embrace a “hybrid masculinity,” characterized by the toughness and decisiveness prized in the business and military cultures blended with “situationally appropriate moments of compassion and, sometimes, vulnerability” (p. 466). Part of this ideological maneuver is appealing to the classed, racialized, and gendered aspirations of less powerful people. Thus, hybrid masculinities make it possible for powerful men to reject particular aspects of hegemonic masculinity while retaining others in order to preserve the existing social order. As Messner (2007) relates, the masculine performance of Terminator film star and former Republican California “Governator” Arnold Schwarzenegger provides an illustrative example of how hybrid masculinities function. During his campaign, Schwarzenegger mingled references to his role as a muscular, heterosexual, man-of-action with promises to be “an action hero” for children. Schwarzenegger’s sensitive masculine performance was merely superficial, however; once elected, he waged “class war on California’s public workers” and poor people of color (Messner, 2007: 476). Another example of Schwarzenegger’s hybrid masculinity is a 2008 Time magazine article honoring Schwarzenegger as an “eco-pioneer” for pushing legislation capping California’s greenhouse gases using technological innovations, opining that “these times call for an action hero.” The accompanying photo shows him in business attire posing in front of his $30,000 biofuel-powered Hummer, a military vehicle modified for civilian use as a sport utility vehicle (SUV). In the article Schwarzenegger chides environmentalists who argue against American consumerism as “prohibitionist scolds” and says that he “won’t apologize for living large” (Grunwald, 2008). Hultman (2017) dubs Schwarzenegger’s shallow environmentalism “ecomodern masculinity,” a type of hybrid masculinity that is characterized by a performance of “toughness and determination” mixed with “with well-chosen moments” of sensitivity, concern, and support for “eco-friendly technology” (Hultman, 2017: 246). Undergirding ecomodern masculinity is American EM’s contention that protecting the environment does not conflict with high-energy lifestyles or profit and that it can be achieved through rational technological development and making intelligent consumer choices. Hultman (2017: 246) argues that ecomodern masculinity acts as a “cover-up for continuing down the same modern industrial path that created the problems in the first place,” while reinforcing dominant practices and institutions. A growing body of research examines the ways in which gendered identities are deployed by environmentally destructive industries in their efforts to maintain hegemony in the face of waning public trust (Bell, 2016; Bell and York, 2010; Bell et al., 2015, 2019). However, few studies have examined the ways in which industries coded as “green” might also use gendered identities in similar ways. Marxist sociologists (Foster, 2012; Foster et al., 2011) have long recognized that capitalism is dependent on maintaining inequality while undermining ecological sustainability. Thus, we argue that examining how gendered identities are deployed and manipulated to further capitalist accumulation in the name of environmental protection is a valuable undertaking. In the sections that follow, we provide a brief overview of our case: GreenTech Biofuels.1

Following contemporary analyses of the crises of capitalism—the crisis of overproduction, the banking crisis, the environmental crisis—current voices in feminist economics speak of the crisis of social reproduction. Feminist economists use the term to denote the under-provision of care, which is above all time-consuming and inaccessible to the rationalisation efforts of the capitalist mode of production—and which in principle should not be accessible to rationalisation because of the nature of the reproductive work. Social reproduction work is performed both without pay in private households and—usually for little pay—via the labour market (including cash-in-hand work). Important characteristics of this work include that it cannot be postponed and that it requires interpersonal empathy and high levels of reliability and commitment. The ‘crisis of social reproduction’ indicates that the expansion of the capitalist logic of exploitation also reshapes care labour through the economic imperative of acceleration, rationalisation, and intensification of work. Both sides, those providing and those receiving care, perceive the crisis of social reproduction in the overwork and the excessive demands placed on those people responsible for care labour. Under the prevailing circumstances of the gender-hierarchical division of labour, the vast majority of caregivers are women: women perform by far the greatest share of unpaid familial labour, not only caring for children, but also ensuring that males’ labour is available to the labour market, even though the women are gainfully employed themselves. It is also women who take on most of the social reproduction occurring in the sphere of paid labour, be it in raising and teaching children or caring for the sick and the elderly. An often-used way out of being overburdened because of the crisis in care is delegating reproductive labour in one’s own household to migrant women or racialised women—also known as the ‘global care chain’ (Salazar Parreñas 2015). This is a clear sign of the fact that despite a long-standing debate about the gendered division of labour, men have not taken on their share of unpaid work in everyday care labour. Feminist economists of different schools of thought agree that it is key for the feminist analysis of capitalism to view social reproduction as a realm that is (at least) equivalent to and just as relevant in economic terms as market-based ‘productive gainful employment’—productive because it produces goods and surplus value. From the perspective of the economy overall, investments in social infrastructure—that is, education, care, nursing, etc.—are considered to be consumption expenditure, and unpaid work in private households, to the extent it is viewed as work at all, is considered to be re-productive. These terms and concepts and the premises they involve are the subject of a lively debate among feminists, which I will go into briefly. The concept of re-production was already contradicted by feminists early on: why should only the manufacture of goods for exchange be considered ‘productive’, but not the ‘manufacture’ of life and the maintenance of living processes? On further consideration: why is only the processing of nature considered productive, but not nature as such? These questions are the starting point for ecofeminist analysis of the relationships of society to nature under capitalism. This links the ecological criticism of the exploitation and overuse of natural resources with the feminist criticism of the exploitation and societal appropriation of the (unpaid or underpaid) work performed by women in social reproduction (Mellor 1997). This work is invisible economically, and for this reason it is grossly underestimated because it is work performed by women, which puts it in proximity to nature: because of their potential ability to give birth, women are assumed to be predestined as if ‘by nature’ to care for people who cannot care for themselves. In other words: it is assumed that women are born with competencies for care ‘by nature’ and that they do not need to learn and develop them and thus do not need to be paid. Such competencies are taken for granted—and in fact no society, whether capitalist or not, could survive without women’s social reproduction labour. So, from an ecofeminist perspective, the relationships of society to nature under capitalism are characterised by dual power relations: by subordination and exploitation of nature and of women’s labour which has been declared socially and historically part of nature. Thus, strategies for an environmentally sound and socially just transition to a post-capitalist era must consider the gendered power relations in human–nature relationships: ‘Central to feminist ecological economics is the normative claim that gender equality should not be achieved at the expense of ecological degradation or the exploitation of nature and other species and that environmental sustainability must not be achieved by exploiting feminised labour’ (Cohen and MacGregor 2020: 8). The entire economic sector of the care economy, which includes both paid and unpaid labour, is still disregarded in the debates around the Green New Deal. If the care sector were also discussed under the guiding principle of ‘public investments in infrastructure policy’, then the debate would have to be conducted in a completely different way. After all, the expansion of the care infrastructure would also imply a fundamental change in how the economy is organised in a post-fossil society. There would be a commensurate focus on the overexploitation of women’s labour as the overexploitation of the fossil resources. The creation of jobs in social infrastructure would provide secure livelihoods for women and create new ones—for all genders!—and the labour conditions in these occupations would have to be discussed. Ecofeminist Political Economy of the Green New Deal But what would happen with the unpaid care work in the so-called private households? This is the fundamental weakness of the Green New Deal: it focuses on the public sector of economic activity; the private sphere of people’s ‘own four walls’ and the work performed there are still disregarded, as in the traditional economic debates and theories. So far, the fact that the participation of women in the paid labour markets of industrialised societies has constantly increased in recent years has not resulted in men and women sharing unpaid housework. Since this work must be done, however, private housework and care work have been shifted within middle-class households to migrant women workers. This has been described as the ‘global care chain’ and is discussed critically from a feminist perspective. From an intersectional perspective of dividing care work into paid and unpaid sectors of economic activity, the Green New Deal is to be viewed especially critically because it is limited to the public realm and leaves the power relations in the private sphere untouched.

Green jobs I: Jobs for whom? “Where are the women?” Or, more broadly, “who is being included, who is being excluded, and who is actually present but made invisible?” These basic questions have motivated much feminist research and policy work over the years. Bringing these kinds of feminist demographic questions to examining GovtGNDs, it quickly becomes clear that the GND focus on creating clean energy jobs has paid little attention to the gender and racial makeup of the groups that will likely benefit and those that will likely lose out. Typically, GovtGNDs make two cases regarding “green jobs.” The first is that investing in renewable energy production and environmental management has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of green jobs in areas such as clean technology manufacturing; upgrading of infrastructure; creation of public transit systems; expansion of wind, wave, and solar power; retrofitting buildings with greener heating and cooling systems; and restoring wetlands and forests (Novello and Carlock Citation2019).Footnote3 The second argument, related but distinct, is that current workers in the fossil fuel sector should be supported, so that they are not penalized in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. This argument usually stresses that workers in the fossil fuel industry typically have skills that would be useful for the green jobs envisaged. Many feminists, including those operating within trade unions, the ILO, and liberal think tanks and media (Guerrero and Stock Citation2012: 13; International Labour Organization Citation2015; Littig Citation2017; Baruah Citation2018), point out that the good quality green jobs promoted in many GNDs will not likely provide many opportunities for women and for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) of any gender, in part because of the barriers they face to participating and advancing in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) sector. Women are underrepresented in STEM fields, for reasons including a lack of training and educational opportunities and the disproportionate burden of unpaid labor on women (International Labour Organization Citation2015; Littig Citation2017; Baruah Citation2018). Due to “sticky floors and glass ceilings” – systemic issues ranging from material barriers to gender stereotypes – not only do women struggle to enter these fields, but advancing within them is more challenging (Baruah Citation2018). As of 2019, in the US, for example, fewer than 20 percent of workers in the clean energy production and energy efficiency sectors are women (Muro et al. Citation2019). In the EU, women's representation across all economic activities is 46 percent, but only 25 percent in the energy sector (Czako Citation2020). Similarly, BIPOC are underrepresented in STEM fields. Lack of education opportunities and training, stereotypes, the historical erasure of many Black women and men who have played important roles in STEM fields and other aspects of systemic racism have combined to produce a White-dominated sector, especially at the top. In addition, women and BIPOC tend to be less represented in the “brown economy” sectors, such as oil and gas – from which, in GovtGNDs, many workers will be supported to transition to green jobs. In the US, for example, only 14 percent of those employed in the mining, oil, and gas sector are women, and 87.2 percent of people employed are White (US Bureau of Labor Statistics Citation2021). In the EU, women comprise just 12 percent of workers in mining, and 17 percent in oil and gas (Czako Citation2020). This kind of approach, which emphasizes demographic questions of who is included/excluded and who benefits, often gives rise to policy recommendations centered on improving participation and representation. As such, some feminists call for GNDs to correct for the underrepresentation of women in the STEM sector by: attracting girls into STEM subjects from a young age (Lefton, Madrid, and Sadiku Citation2012; Von Hagen and Willems Citation2012; UN Women Citation2014: 47; Littig Citation2017: 323); ensuring apprenticeships for women in STEM fields (Lefton, Madrid, and Sadiku Citation2012; Von Hagen and Willems Citation2012; Baruah Citation2018); encouraging the sector to target women through recruitment events (Baruah Citation2018); legislating to prevent discrimination and guarantee fair working conditions (Von Hagen and Willems Citation2012; UN Women Citation2014: 47; Petrović Citation2016); and ensuring gender parity in decision-making functions, management boards, and advisory groups (Guerrero and Stock Citation2012; Lefton, Madrid, and Sadiku Citation2012; Littig Citation2017). Intersectional feminists emphasize that these measures must not be race-blind and should enhance the inclusion and advancement of women of color and other BIPOC in green jobs (Williams Citation2014: 185; Williams, Phillips, and Hall Citation2016). What is made evident, then, by this feminist questioning of who would get (what are currently defined as) “green jobs,” is that GovtGNDs could actually deepen preexisting gender and racial inequalities rather than ameliorate them. The policy responses that follow, affirmative measures to ensure that the benefits of expansion in this sector are more widely shared, could at least in part preempt that deepening of inequalities and be a step up for those individual women and BIPOC who benefit from the increased job opportunities. But beyond a more equitable distribution of jobs in expanded green energy and environmental management sectors, these policies would have little impact on the twin environmental and inequalities crises. Green jobs II: Whose labor counts? While asking “who is included/excluded?” often has the effect of leading to calls for greater participation and representation in existing institutions or processes, sometimes these questions do more than that: sometimes they can prompt a questioning and rethinking of basic, definitional conceptualizations in a field. For example, if we ask where are the women and BIPOCs in GNDs, we not only notice that they are poorly represented in green jobs, but also that where they tend to be concentrated is in care jobs (such as healthcare, education, childcare, and care for older persons), which are themselves relatively low carbon. Thus, many feminists point out, if GNDs aim to tackle both climate change and inequalities, investing in care jobs and care infrastructure would serve both ends at once; why, then, are care jobs not considered green jobs? And why do GovtGNDs more broadly neglect a key sector of the economy that is crucially important and already relatively green – the work of care or social reproduction (Röhr and van Heemstra Citation2013; Bauhardt Citation2014; Di Chiro Citation2019; Cohen and MacGregor Citation2020)? Here, of course, feminist analysis makes it clear that exclusion of care jobs from the concept of green jobs is not some kind of natural definitional fact; instead, it is a choice that reflects the ways care is unseen and unvalued because it is assumed to “come naturally” to women and to be “unskilled” (Folbre Citation2002). And in structurally racist societies, that devaluing of care work accounts for its heavy concentration of BIPOC workers. Thus, GovtGNDs rely on and reinforce gendered understandings of what work is seen as valuable, thereby buttressing gendered and racialized inequalities. This kind of feminist questioning of what is missing also reveals GovtGNDs’ silence about unpaid care work. This is even the case in GovtGNDs developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, which finally made it more difficult to ignore the importance of paid care labor. Unpaid social reproduction work is assumed, in GovtGNDs, to be “infinitely available” (Bauhardt Citation2014: 65) – whether it is work “required to maintain everyday life in all societies” (Di Chiro Citation2019: 4) or work that women do to address community needs that arise out of racial and ethnic group disparities (Banks Citation2020). By neglecting unpaid care work, GovtGNDs have also ignored the ways in which their “solutions” are likely to increase the care and provisioning burdens of those carrying it out. Many GNDs focus, for example, on sustainable travel, advocating for more cycling, public transport, and walking, but sustainable transport plans, if not attentive to gender at the design stage, can increase the time and effort of unpaid care work. Similarly, arguments for individual eco-changes (such as using washable diapers) can increase the workload of those carrying out caring labor (Randall Citation2012; Weller Citation2017). When feminists ask not only who but also what is included/excluded in the category of “green jobs,” a different range of actions and policy recommendations follow, designed to create an economy that values and expands the low-carbon care labor not traditionally considered “green work” (Röhr and van Heemstra Citation2013; Dengler and Strunk Citation2018; Cohen and MacGregor Citation2020). These include creating well-paid, high-quality, unionized jobs in the care sector (for example, through supporting a domestic workers’ Bill of Rights); challenging the devaluation of care work as women's work and breaking down the stigmas associated with people who do care work; highlighting the skilled nature of care work, valuing unpaid work and taking steps to promote more equitable sharing of this labor; and promoting measures that make the care sector even greener (Cohen and MacGregor Citation2020; Palladino and Gunn-Wright Citation2021). Thus, we can see that asking what is missing/excluded in how green jobs are conceptualized leads to a more ambitious range of policy proposals than just asking who is excluded from green jobs. These policy proposals would take us further in addressing the intersecting crises we face by making paid work in the care sector plentiful, valued, and rewarded, attractive to both men and women. This would help create an economy that is greener, by creating more jobs in relatively low-carbon sustainable livelihoods. And it would help create an economy that is fairer, as well-paid care work could help tackle gender and racial inequalities, as well as lead to a more gender-diverse and racially diverse group of carers. Clean energy – is it clean? Is it green? If feminist questioning of who and what is included/excluded can lead to destabilizing basic concepts such as green jobs, the concept of “clean energy” is perhaps an even more critical example. Feminist questioning that is not only intersectional, but also rooted in a postcolonial, decolonial, or global justice perspective, interrogates where women in the Global South fit into these plans for green, clean energy; this then necessitates looking at the whole production and disposal cycle, which – in turn – troubles the very concept of clean energy itself. What quickly becomes apparent is that GovtGNDs focus on the parts of green energy production, installation, and consumption that take place in the Global North. And they ignore the elements of the green energy product lifecycle – including the mining of critical minerals for car batteries and solar panels, the production of wind turbines, and e-waste disposal – that typically occur in the Global South and/or on the lands of Indigenous and other poor and marginalized communities in the Global North, often with devastating consequences (Táíwò Citation2019). Mining of lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and other high-value minerals required for renewable energy and other green technologies is already surging, and demand for these and other “clean” energy minerals is expected to increase nearly 500 percent by 2050 (Fleming Citation2021). Mining of these high-value minerals drives land grabbing and violent land dispossession, the pollution of water, air, and soil, the loss of livelihoods and/or toxification of livelihoods, and the socioeconomic harms of community destruction in countries throughout the Global South (Tandon Citation2012; Randriamaro Citation2014; Bell, Daggett, and Labuski Citation2020). Even the briefest look at just one aspect of one example – the mining of lithium in the Andes – hints at the disjuncture between GNDs’ positive images of clean energy and the anything-but-clean impacts of its production. Producing a single ton of lithium takes 500,000 gallons of water; even at present levels of extraction, this causes real problems for communities – and women in particular – across the Andes, as the water sources they depend upon for food production, for drinking, for washing, have been diverted to mining operations or poisoned by chemical leaks from lithium mines (Aronoff et al. Citation2019). Furthermore, it is not only mining that is driving land dispossession and degradation across the Global South, but also the expanding demand for agrofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels. The EU's Renewable Energy Directive, with its targets for EU countries and corporations to reduce emissions through scaling up of forms of energy classed as renewable, including agrofuels, is increasingly the main driver of land dispossession in Africa (TNI Citation2012; Cotula Citation2014; Borras et al. Citation2016). Globally, the demand for agrofuels destroys rainforests, depletes biodiversity, forces Indigenous peoples off their land, and replaces environmentally sustainable smallholder farming with mono-crop, petrochemical-intensive industrialized farming, all with specific adverse impacts on women due to their assigned responsibilities for provisioning their families and communities. At the other end of the “clean energy” lifecycle, e-waste disposal also has devastating impacts. When solar panels, electric batteries, and electronic equipment reach the end of their lifespan, the components are most often shipped to the Global South.Footnote4 This waste is vast – the Americas and Europe produced an estimated 25 million metric tons of e-waste in 2019 (Forti et al. Citation2020). And, with the transition to more renewables, this waste is growing – all the solar panels currently in use, for example, will be entering the waste stream by 2040 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] Citation2011).Footnote5 This e-waste is composed of heavy metals and persistent toxic substances. Women and children in the Global South bear the disproportionate burden of disposing of these toxins, intensifying the harms of long-established patterns for dealing with general waste (McAllister, Magee, and Hale Citation2014; Bell, Daggett, and Labuski Citation2020). Often, they sort through to extract the reusable components – using low-tech tools without protective equipment – at the risk of irreversible damage to their health and fertility (McAllister, Magee, and Hale Citation2014). In sum, feminist questions that focus beyond the US- and Euro-centric purview of GovtGNDs, to the whole life cycle of the production of clean energy, make the very concept of clean energy deeply problematic. They make it clear that what looks clean to eyes in the Global North is not; they abnegate the fantasy of “clean” energy sources that come without negative social and environmental consequences (Dengler and Seebacher Citation2019). Several different kinds of policy implications flow from this awareness. One direction for policy is to focus on ameliorating the conditions faced by those most affected. For example, some of the harms to women and other marginalized groups in the Global South (or North) might be lessened by trying to ensure that decisions about extractive industries are made through local democratic processes, that extraction be subject to free, prior, and informed consent, and that any resettlement would be to locales that are environmentally appropriate for the continuation of people's livelihoods and communities, with adequate financial compensation (Sweetman and Ezpeleta Citation2017). Other measures advocated by feminists include the fair distribution of benefits of extractive activity and the protection of workers’ rights (Daniel and Dolan Citation2020); and legislatively forcing corporations to recycle e-waste at their expense in the Global North and including e-waste concerns in UN Monitoring Committees’ agendas (McAllister, Magee, and Hale Citation2014). A different scale and logic of policy solutions emerges if we acknowledge that the toxic toll paid by people and ecosystems in the Global South for clean energy in the North is part of a larger pattern, a continuation of hundreds of years of colonial relations in which the North has exploited and extracted human and natural resources from the South, downloading to the South the costs of northern prosperity, while ignoring the human and environmental harms. Feminist exploration of these issues leads to calls for policies that seek to transform those political economic relations, as we explore later. Finally, a third direction for policy can arise with the feminist troubling of the idea of “clean” energy. Without the fantasy of clean energy growth as a thoroughly benign solution to the need to drastically cut carbon emissions, policymakers and the public would have to confront questions such as: “should rich countries and communities continue consuming energy at current levels?”, “how much is enough?”, and “what are the purposes to which energy is being put, and do they make sense?”

There has been a large increase in the labor force participation (LFP) of women and a narrowing of the gender wage gap. With these changes, women are more independent of their husbands in determining their economic well-being while of working age. Increased market wages and narrowing of the gender gap increase bargaining power in household financial decision-making (Pollak 2005; Knowles 2007). We might expect women to be more self-sufficient when they reach old age as a result of these drastic changes. Due to Social Security rules, however, wives remain dependent on husbands in old age (Levine, Mitchell, and Phillips 2000). Even while women have increased their LFP and received higher wages, a husband typically works more years than his wife, between maternity leave and child rearing, and receives higher wages. As a result, most women end up relying on spouse and survivor benefits from Social Security. Over the past 50 years, the fraction of women eligible for their own benefit increased by almost 100 percent. In 1940, less than half of female recipients of Social Security were eligible for their own retired worker benefit, with eligibility defined by having at least 40 quarters of covered earnings. Almost three-quarters of current female beneficiaries are eligible to receive a benefit based on their own work history. However, the fraction of women receiving some type of dependent benefits has been well over 50 percent for the past several decades.20 Only since the mid-1990s has this fraction begun to fall (Social Security Administration, various years). Furthermore, more than 90 percent of recent female recipients are entitled to a retired worker benefit smaller than their potential survivor benefit, making eligibility for wives’ own benefits less relevant.21 In all of these cases, wives are impacted by husbands’ choices. Data from SSA on dual beneficiaries, those eligible for both their own worker benefit and a spouse or survivor benefit, show how this dependence has changed over time. For wives receiving spouse benefits, the ratio of own benefit to spouse benefit increases from 1995 to the present. This is expected since women have been earning more in the labor market and working more years over their lifetimes. This ratio has been flat recently, though, for survivor benefits. This suggests that women are just as reliant on survivor benefits as in previous years. The likely explanation for the difference in trend between spousal dual beneficiaries and survivor dual beneficiaries is that the latter group is older than the former. The labor force characteristics of survivor beneficiaries has not changed substantially over recent years. However, we expect a rise in the ratio in the future as women with stronger worker histories (those currently receiving spousal benefits) receive survivor benefits.22

In the alternative situation where the woman dies first, the benefit computation is much simpler: her (assumed to be smaller) benefit simply terminates because she is dead, and the man’s benefit continues unchanged. He cannot receive a benefit as a widower because his own benefit as a worker is larger. Thus, no matter which member of the couple dies first, the larger monthly benefit continues to be paid, while the smaller benefit terminates. The situation is worse for unmarried couples. When one dies, that person’s benefit terminates due to death, but the other member of the couple cannot qualify for a benefit as a surviving spouse. The reduction at the first death is therefore greater, in most cases, especially if the man had the larger benefit and he dies first, as is the usual case. So, how does all that lead to a difference in outcomes for men versus women? Two people living together in one home, married or not, obviously can live more cheaply than they could live apart in two separate homes. Because men have higher mortality rates than women, combined with the fact that the average American husband (or unmarried partner) is 2 to 3 years older than his wife, most women who are part of a couple can anticipate some period living alone. The average time that a formerly partnered woman might expect to live alone is about 9 years. During this time, her standard of living can be expected to drop, due to the absence of the partner— and his retirement income, whatever that might have been—and the fact that she is older and likely has higher health care expenses and fewer assets than the couple had when they were younger and both were alive. Of course, men are also exposed to the risk of a partner dying first and being left alone with higher expenses and fewer assets. But actual experience shows that women are far more likely than men to suffer the consequences of a partner dying first. Most elderly people living in poverty are women. That’s due to several effects, many of which combine: (1) women tend to have lower average earnings than men and consequently lower Social Security benefits, (2) women tend to have less consistent lifetime earnings than men and consequently lower Social Security benefits, and (3) women have a high probability of outliving a male partner and being left alone at an advanced age, with higher per capita expenses and fewer assets than she had when her partner was alive. None of these reasons result from problems that Social Security can effectively solve.

Social security plays a key role in addressing poverty, including gendered poverty. The absence of adequate or appropriate social security adds to the poverty burden faced by women.65 However, gender-neutral social security programmes that assume the unencumbered male worker or citizen is the norm may discriminate against women. Thus, contribution-based pension schemes tend to favour men, who have fewer work interruptions during their lifetimes than women, who often stop working to have children and care for them. Programmes specifically targeted at women that expect them to fulfil socially allocated roles and respon- sibilities may similarly have discriminatory outcomes for women. Social security can discriminate directly against women but more usually does so indirectly.66 Direct discrimination may occur where women are deliberately excluded from participating in a scheme. Indirect discrimination may occur where, for example, social assistance payments are provided to household heads. Since these are usu- ally men because of patriarchal assumptions in families and the wider society, such an approach may have a discriminatory impact. Men are less likely than women to use the income for the benefit of the whole household.67 Access to social security is in some cases more difficult for women who face the danger of violence when collecting payments or within households from men who wish to confiscate their welfare income.68 Women’s caring responsibilities for children, the elderly and sick are often unremunerated or unacknowledged in social security provision. There are limited examples of the use of social security measures to challenge the lack of involvement of men in the care and support of families.69 Feminist efforts to understand women’s poverty in developed countries and the structures that produce it have led to a critique of the modern welfare state and some of the premises of liberal theory underlying it.70 A number of feminist theorists have explored the way in which social policy is gendered.71 They have pointed to the historical premise of the welfare state of a male breadwinner model that casts women, with children, as dependents. Even when women are in the workforce, they often work part-time, are poorly paid, have smaller social security entitlements and therefore still rely on men for support. Welfare states in the developed world and under state socialism have proved generally deficient (to varying degrees) in addressing gender discrimination both in relation to pay and the status of women’s work and benefits; and in relation to their reproductive and caring functions in those societies.72 Comparisons between different welfare regimes have shown variations in the position of women that often correspond to their workforce participation and extent of childcare provision. Even the best welfare models that have moved from male breadwinner to dual breadwinner and even to ‘parent-worker-citizen’ models (as in Sweden) are still failing to adequately overcome gender inequalities.73 While some European countries have tried to address the impact of the gender wage gap and work inter- ruptions faced by women assuming caring functions, many countries perpetu- ate gender inequalities through gender ‘neutrality’ or indirectly target women through cutbacks to existing programmes.74 In some countries, welfare provision has become increasingly punitive, especially for sole mothers, with recipients stigmatised, stereotyped and burdened with conditions.75 Welfare restructuring and cutbacks since the 1980s have been accompanied by a corrosive discourse that casts women recipients of welfare as irresponsible, immoral and lazy and that sees dependency as deviant.76 Recent austerity measures since the global financial crisis of 2008, often involving reductions to sole-parent payments,77 have also been accompanied by negative discourse. More recently, writers in the developing world have conducted analyses of their own countries as well as international trends in the development of gen- dered social policy.78 The lack of adequate welfare safety nets in developing countries has a significant impact on women’s poverty.79 In the past decade some developing countries have introduced social assistance programmes that have had marked impacts on human development.80 While traditional social security systems were often designed around male-dominated formal employment, some recent programmes in developing countries have responded to this imbalance by specifically targeting women (as citizens rather than as workers). Social assistance programmes targeted at women in some developing countries have had positive results but many gaps in provision remain and certain problems have emerged. The development literature illustrates how policies based on patriarchal assumptions about work, family and the economy can reinforce existing gender inequalities.81 Some of the programmes targeted at women have the effect of per- petuating gender divisions by making women responsible for care. This is despite the fact that addressing women’s disproportionate responsibility for care in these societies has been highlighted as a critical consideration for social protection policy.82 Conditions that are attached to such assistance often impose additional burdens on women.83 There is broad consensus amongst feminist writers in this field that social protection programmes that are rights-based and universal have advantages for women but these are most effective when they are alive to the needs and specificities of gender relations and other dynamics in different country contexts. In addition, social assistance without efforts to bring women into work or to formalise informal work with attendant benefits is insufficient.84

The overall purpose of this book is to draw attention to the confining nature of mainstream economic theorising in the policy process and to outline how a feminist economic perspective could contribute to the development of a more inclusive and realistic understanding of state welfare arrangements. The main subject of the book is an exploration of the Citizens’ Basic Income (CBI) proposal and how it presents as an invaluable opportunity to reshape the future of social security provision in advanced capitalist states. The proposal itself involves the granting of a universal and unconditional minimum income guarantee and has evolved in recent decades as a possible reform package that would address effectively the dual and often conflicting objectives of social justice and economic efficiency. However, the CBI proposal remains a theoretical concept in that no advanced capitalist state has implemented a universal, unconditional minimum income guarantee. Within a global context, the reform of social security policy is currently high on the political agenda. This is due mainly to the significant level of public resources dedicated to state-supported income maintenance programmes combined with growing concern over the persistence of widespread poverty and the related problem of social exclusion. Furthermore, concern regarding gender-based inequalities, particularly those directly associated with the operation of modern labour markets, is receiving greater attention in terms of public policy interventions. The ‘social justice’ case for the promotion of gender equality has been strengthened by a heightened awareness regarding the negative consequences of gender-based inequalities on overall economic performance. The concept of ‘gender mainstreaming’ is now considered a principal driving force in the design, implementation and monitoring of all public policies and programmes. The systematic integration of a gender equality perspective into every aspect of policymaking, implied by the concept of gender mainstreaming, is thus considered an important issue across Europe, both at an institutional and a national government level. Although the CBI proposal has evolved in recent decades as a possible reform package that effectively would provide the foundations for transforming the nature of state welfare provision in line with a ‘gender mainstreaming’ strategy, the existing literature is devoid of this perspective. Arguments in favour of a CBI have been presented from a range of academic perspectives and there is a growing body of literature focused on evaluating the concept of a universal unconditional income guarantee with reference to the dynamics of modern socio-economic conditions. However, in line with current debates on the future of social security policy, the existing CBI literature is characterised by an emphasis on ‘paid work’. That is, debates regarding the effects an unconditional income grant would have on individual behaviour have been dominated by analysis of its impact on existing patterns of formal labour market participation. Although the workings of the formal labour market is accepted as an extremely relevant factor in the design of any statesupported income maintenance programme, the prioritising of such above all else is indicative of a biased approach. That is, the focus on the world of paid work demonstrates a gender bias in that the life experiences of many women are largely ignored. Gender concerns are central to any debate on the future of social security policy in that state intervention in the field of income redistribution has differential impacts on men and women. This is due to the very crucial role that gender plays in determining individual behaviour and the failure to adequately account for such implies that current welfare reform agendas are ‘gender blind’. It will be argued that this ‘gender blindness’ is the direct result of an analytical approach to study that treats gender issues as ‘add-ons’ rather than an integral feature of the research process. It is in this respect that parallels can be drawn with the structures and processes associated with mainstream economic analysis. With reference to welfare reform debates, the claim is made that the emphasis on preserving a traditional productivist work-and-pay relationship, evident in the CBI literature, follows from an immutable acceptance of the governing principles associated with neoclassical economic theory in the research process. Gender concerns have remained at the periphery, and any attempts to include women have been made without altering the analytical framework. Conjectures regarding individual responses have been hypothesised within a model based on assumptions applied exclusively to all members of society. Such theorising follows the same pattern as the practice of economics as an academic discipline and as such fails adequately to address issues relating to gender inequalities. In terms of policy responses, this leads to a focus on ‘acting’ upon inequalities as they are identified or arise rather than ‘transforming’ the processes and structures that create and sustain such inequalities. Subsequently, the advantages of the CBI proposal in promoting the equal citizenship rights of women are not adequately considered and in many instances are misunderstood. The aim of this book, then, is to develop a feminist economics perspective on social security reform with a particular emphasis on the CBI proposal. Evidence of the continually dominant influence of mainstream economic theorising in the analytical process will be presented. It will be argued that this represents a biased and exclusive perspective and, when applied, results in policy designed in accordance with a view of how the world should operate. Thus, the subjective nature of the neoclassical approach is exposed and the subsequent influence of value judgements is made explicit. From a feminist economics perspective, attempts to incorporate gender concerns within such an inherently biased analytical framework are limiting. The practice of including issues and concerns specific to women, previously neglected, may serve to enrich the discipline by ensuring that the subject matter studied is a more accurate reflection of real world economic phenomena. However, if in studying this broader subject matter the methods and analytical processes associated with the dominant neo-classical approach remain unaltered, the practice of ‘doing economics’ will fail to provide us with a framework for developing an understanding of the actual nature of such ‘real world economic phenomena’. Accounting for the social construction of gender divisions and the influence this has on individual choice is key in developing an understanding of both the causes and consequences of gender-based inequalities. In terms of welfare reform it is therefore considered crucial that feminist economic theory is embraced, as much of what policy is trying to address results from socially constructed inequalities. Rather than ‘add women and stir’, a feminist economics perspective facilitates transparency in the policy process, effectively by adapting the existing analytical framework to account for the very different social experiences of men and women in market-based economies. Given the current mainstreaming agenda, adopting an approach that serves to transform the research process to ensure the systematic integration of gender as a primary influencing variable is considered desirable and indeed necessary. This introductory chapter will outline the main aspects of the CBI proposal within the context of providing a foundation for transforming the nature of state welfare provision. In presenting the case for adopting a feminist political economy approach in arguing for a CBI, the purpose is to demonstrate why this is considered a necessary next step in current welfare reform debates.

This view of feminist legal theory, however, obscures a more fundamental struggle. A less well-known strand of feminist legal activism has focused upon making social reproduction a public, rather than private, responsibility. The liberal welfare state, which developed during the Progressive Era, New Deal, and post-World War II period, supported male breadwinners and enforced their provision for dependents within hetero-patriarchal family structures.4 As a result, workplace practices and policies took as their model male employees who benefitted from the unpaid labor of wives. Formal equality could help women break into these jobs, but only to the extent that they could mimic the male ideal. The liberal welfare state took for granted that care for children, the sick, and the elderly took place within nuclear families. Caregivers, regardless of gender, did not enjoy full economic citizenship. Families bore the costs of social reproductive labor from health insurance for childbirth to the costs of leave from work largely as a private responsibility. Feminists fought to transform labor and employment laws, family laws, and social welfare policies on the model of working mothers. Sex neutrality was sometimes a means, at other times an obstacle, and, often, an objective orthogonal to the goal of public responsibility for social reproduction. Feminists advocated for laws that valued women's unpaid social reproductive labor and for a welfare state that socialized care. Reva Siegel analyzes women's claims to property rights in their household labor in the antebellum era.5 In the Progressive Era, social feminists prioritized economic justice over equal treatment of the sexes.6 When Lochnerian jurisprudence [*24] struck down protective labor standards, they devised a gendered strategy to win sex-specific standards that they hoped would serve as an entering wedge. The 1908 case of Muller v. Oregon, which upheld a state limit on the hours women could work, is often located in the feminist anti-canon.7 Certainly, the Court's decision reinforced gender stereotypes, suggesting that women were physically weaker than men were and that their primary social role lay in motherhood. Yet this decision was also a pragmatic feminist victory for state protection of working-class women, given the legal constraints of the time. In the post-World War II period, labor feminists reworked the social feminist vision to take account of women's changing economic roles as familial providers and of their shifting identities as workers. They used unions to fight for women's rights both to employment opportunity and to fulfilling lives outside their work, including time spent caring for their families.8 The just organization of social reproduction, they understood, necessitated legal regulation of the labor market and employment relationship. In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, labor feminists intensified and broadened their struggle. Myra Wolfgang, a Detroit organizer for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, opposed the demise of maternalist labor standards she saw as critical to protecting female workers who lacked bargaining power, who were not unionized, and who did not enjoy coverage under federal labor statutes.9 When enforcement of Title VII began to wash away the architecture of maternalist protection, Wolfgang reinterpreted the rise of antidiscrimination law as a potential catalyst to expand labor regulation. She joined Caroline Davis, Director of the Women's Department of the United Auto Workers, in fighting for the extension of protective standards to men.10 Across the country, the Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality (Union WAGE) lobbied the California Industrial Welfare Commission for the extension of labor protection to agricultural and domestic workers and for increases in the minimum wage, overtime pay, and maximum-hours rules.11 Union WAGE opposed the proposed Equal Rights Amendment because of the threat that equal treatment would jeopardize maternalist labor standards, when there existed insufficient political will to [*25] realize universal standards.12 Labor feminists understood that sex discrimination law, in the absence of a strong welfare state, might serve corporate interests rather than workers. Their insight proved prescient, as the assault on unions, demise of the family-wage ideal, growth of feminized service sectors, and contraction of both public welfare and private employment benefits produced an increasingly precarious labor force. While labor feminists advocated a humane workplace that supported workers in their social reproductive roles, the women's liberation movement that blossomed in the late sixties pursued public forms of care provision. One of their most important goals was free, federally funded, community-controlled childcare. The National Organization for Women (NOW) Bill of Rights demanded that "child care facilities be established by law on the same basis as parks, libraries and public schools . . . as a community resource to be used by all citizens from all income levels."13 Radical and socialist feminists believed that universal childcare would liberate women from the constraints of solitary mothering and remediate the extraction of unpaid childrearing labor. Representatives Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug pursued the feminist vision in Congress and, although their specific bill did not advance, they helped to shape the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971. The passage of this Act brought the nation the closest it ever has come toward universal childcare, but the mobilization of the New Right against the legislation yielded a devastating veto from President Nixon.14 In addition to labor regulation and public forms of care, feminists fought for social welfare entitlements for mothers. These efforts ranged from reforms that preserved marriage as a privileged social status to ones that sought to dismantle hetero-patriarchal households as a site of benefit distribution. Betty Blaisdell Berry, the Chair of NOW's Task Force on the Family, worked to achieve "the necessary reforms to make housewife a bonafide occupation. She wanted "homemakers" married women who cared full time and did not engage in paid work to receive both public and private benefits. Berry and fellow NOW activists called for Social Security credits for homemakers, which would protect women against economic vulnerability at the time of divorce or widowhood. Berry's proposal was ambitious in imagining public remuneration of care work, yet it nevertheless [*26] would preserve marital families' legal and economic privilege. By contrast, Margaret Prescod, a Caribbean American public school teacher and activist in Brooklyn, advanced a vision that disestablished marriage as a site of economic citizenship. Prescod cofounded Black Women for Wages for Housework, elaborating upon socialist feminists' use of the metaphor of "wages" to unmask how women's unpaid social reproductive labor sustained capitalism. Prescod linked this transnational movement to the domestic welfare rights struggle for poor women's dignity and economic security.16 Both Berry and Prescod, therefore, sought to revalue women's unpaid care work within the welfare state, though their proposed solutions held different implications for both class and gender. These are just a few examples of dynamic and multi-pronged forms of activism to transform liberalism according to feminist ideals. This history remains largely forgotten in part because conservative opposition overcame feminist advocacy. In place of public support for care, since the 1970s neoliberal governance has facilitated the development of markets that perform social reproductive functions. "State neglect," in the words of historian Sara Matthiesen, has intensified and rendered more difficult the labor of "family making" for those at the social and economic margins.17 Consider some illustrations: The United States is one of only two industrial countries that fails to provide paid maternity leave, and employers are less likely to provide paid family and medical leave as a fringe benefit to low-income workers than to professionals.18 The lack of public childcare and the inadequacies of the daycare market weighs most heavily on mothers, who continue to assume primary responsibility for childrearing Home health [*27] aides disproportionately women of color, often immigrants remain excluded from coverage under federal and state protective labor standards.20 Paid care workers, from childcare workers to home health aides, endure long hours, low wages with few benefits, and, sometimes, dangerous work conditions.21 The COVID19 pandemic laid bare the inadequacies of state support for social reproduction, when school and daycare closures forced women out of the labor market, low-waged female workers of color disproportionately assumed health and economic burdens as, variously, essential workers or laid-off employees, and lack of resources overwhelmed public health systems.22 The pandemic did not produce the crisis in social reproduction; it exposed it. In concluding this Essay, I want to explore the social reproduction of feminist legal theory. Legal education is itself a component of social reproduction. Such education serves as a gatekeeper to the profession that makes, enforces, and reforms society's rules. It possesses the potential either to replicate or to disrupt existing structures of inequality. For these reasons, the version of feminist legal theory taught in most law-school classrooms has realworld consequences. The feminist aspiration toward collective public responsibility for social reproduction persists in legal scholarship. Any attempt at a comprehensive survey in this short Essay would be quixotic, and I merely gesture here toward the breadth of this scholarship. Some are explicitly applying the legal visions of social feminists and socialist feminists to contemporary problems.23 Liberal proposals preserve the divide between state, market, and family but call for workplaces more accommodating of [*28] familial care responsibilities and public subsidies for familial care.24 Race-and class-sensitive analyses of unions and employment structures extend the labor feminist tradition,25 with a particular focus on the challenges facing paid care workers both within and outside of families.26 Martha Fineman and other scholars offer critiques of antidiscrimination ideals and the dominance of equality within certain strands of feminist legal advocacy.27 This literature draws attention to the ways in which society relies on care-work for its eplication and on the resulting obligations to offer public support for dependency.28 Scholars explore the failures of the market to nourish families and call for workplace and welfare reforms to support children, working parents, and the elderly.29 Still others call for expansive state recognition for families that disestablishes marriage and for the distribution of public benefits through relationships other than marriage.30 Comparative analyses of both sex discrimination law and welfare state structures expand the feminist legal imagination.31 Even feminist dissenters from advocacy for entitlements for parents engage with the consequences of the conservative thwarting of feminist advocacy, which produced employer rather than state-sponsored welfare regimes, reinforced heteronormativity, and sublimated feminist goals to competing state interests.32 [*29] Despite the robust field of feminist legal theory, the understanding of feminist practice transmitted in most law-school classrooms remains a narrow one. For the most part, law school curricula remain tethered to the Langdellian case method, which confines legal theory to doctrinal evolution in the courts. This obscures the full scope of feminist legal thought and activism in two ways. To start, legal education focuses on the positive evolution of doctrine and tends to elide alternative paths not taken. Courses do not cover feminist and other forms of critical legal advocacy that did not come to fruition. In addition, the focus on litigation and federal judicial decisions marginalizes the study of state courts as well as legislative and administrative advocacy. Together, these characteristics of legal education emphasize sex-discrimination law and sideline feminist legal thought and activism respecting protective labor standards, social insurance, and welfare entitlements. For example, if they are lucky, students might study Ruth Bader Ginsburg's famous case, Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, which won "mother's benefits" for widower fathers within Social Security.33 They are far less likely to learn of feminist advocacy for Social Security credits for homemakers. Recovering a richer history of feminist legal thought and practice may help chart a course from the neoliberal regime toward the just organization of social reproduction.34 This project of recovery requires broadening the lens of historical analysis to include feminist labor leaders, grassroots activists, and attorneys, and to investigate debates that unfolded at the bargaining table, within feminist commissions and conferences, and before state administrative agencies and legislatures. We possess the seeds of change in feminist legal history and theory; we just need to cultivate them.

The focus of this article is workfare policy in Finland, especially the previous government’s (2015–2019) efforts to open out public employment services to private actors. We show how attempts to implement this reform took place along the lines of strategic governance, a specific form of managerial governance. In recent decades, management practices have been disseminated into policy making and ‘non-political’ actors such as management gurus, university professors and consultants have penetrated the political sphere to the extent that they have been referred to as ‘shadow government’ (Kantola and Seeck, 2011; Ylönen and Kuusela, 2019). These tendencies occur within a broader context of dynamic change within policy making across the globe, namely, the shift from government to governance. This shift refers to a passage from traditional top-down bureaucracy to governance through networks and markets as well as to a greater reliance on non-elected actors in the design, implementation and evaluation of policy (Flinders and Wood, 2014; Sørensen and Torfing, 2017). Within this ecology, managerial governance is a specific form of governance that relies on business management practices and perceives governance as a pragmatic tool for effective problem-solving. It transforms and translates political into economic concerns as it relies on the idea of using economic effectiveness to determine political strategies and objectives (Knafo, 2019). To date, rather than on issues of governance, research on workfare has tended to focus on how the take-up of workfare policies has been at the heart of the political economy of post-Fordism and the reform of welfare states, including of Nordic welfare states such as Finland’s (Adkins and Ylöstalo, 2018; Adkins et al., 2019; Jessop, 1993; Kananen, 2014; Peck, 2001). The workfare principle that whole populations should either be in work or actively seeking work has fundamentally reconfigured the redistributive logic of welfare states. It has transformed the welfarist social right of access to state protection and support in times of unemployment into a set of obligations and compulsions: rather than redistributing resources among populations, workfare regimes focus on moving people into paid work (Jessop, 2002; Kananen, 2014; Peck, 2001). In so doing, workfare regimes and workfare polices cast unemployed populations in particular terms. Rather than as in need of protection from the state, the unemployed became responsible for their own fates and for the provision of their own needs. As this suggests, existing research has established how workfare policies have not only transformed the redistributive logic of the welfare state but also recast the problem of unemployment into an issue of individual enterprise (e.g. Adkins, 2018; Triantafillou, 2011). There is also a rich literature on the effects of formal large-scale policy and administrative changes on the day-to-day operations of workfare (e.g. Bredgaard and Larsen, 2007; van Berkel, 2014). There is, however, far less research about how shifts in governance have facilitated or intensified contested policies such as workfare (although see Elomäki, 2019). Via a focus on policy making and especially on workfare reform in what we term here strategic management mode, in this article we show how the latter treats unemployment as a technical question for which there are different kinds of practical solutions. We show, in other words, how this mode of reform depoliticizes workfare policies. We also elaborate how workfare reform in strategic management mode obscures how workfare policies problematize the behaviour not only of the unemployed but also that of public servants engaged in the provision of services to unemployed populations. What interests us about strategic governance is that while it is presented as a neutral form of policy making that is not tied to any specific policy agenda, it has, nonetheless, enabled an intensification of workfare policies. As well as contributing to the literature on workfare by highlighting how such measures are facilitated and intensified by the policy making environment, this article also contributes to the literature on neoliberalism and the state. Specifically, by showing how strategic policy making enables a depoliticization of workfare policies via the replacement of political concerns with economic imperatives, this article contributes empirical knowledge on the process of the economization of the political. Broadly stated, this process concerns the folding of the economy into state politics via the dissemination of economic values, practices and metrics into policy making (Caliskan and Callon, 2009). While the economization of the political is very often understood as central to the neoliberalization of the state (Brown, 2015), details of its empirical manifestations are, nonetheless, often sketchy. In providing such detail, this article therefore contributes knowledge on how this process operates in practice. To make these interventions this article draws on research carried out in Finland which has long been classified as a Nordic welfare state. In his now embedded and enduring typology of post-Second World War welfare states, Esping-Andersen (1990) described the Nordic welfare state as characterized by the provision of universal basic services and a redistributive social security benefits system financed by progressive taxation. In Finland, however, as in other Nordic states, this model has been undergoing a process of significant transformation. From the 1990s onwards, and via a set of major and wide-ranging reforms, many of the key and organizing Nordic welfare state principles were transformed. The principle of universalism was, for example, replaced with competition (Kananen, 2014; Kantola and Kananen, 2013). While existing research has mapped and drawn attention to specific aspects of these reforms, in this article we emphasize their managerial dimensions. In doing so, we locate Finland as a participant in the global trend of ‘new managerialist governance’ (Sørensen and Torfing, 2017) and in the surge of programmes and policies seeking to promote more ‘effective’ public management (Triantafillou, 2017). We stress how such managerial governance operates as a device of the economization of the political. We focus on two recent and interconnected reforms to this end. The first is an OECD-inspired ‘strategic governance reform’ of the government’s political steering process. The reform aims to make government decision-making processes more strategic by narrowing down policy objectives and aligning them explicitly with fiscal objectives. The second is a reform of employment services, aimed at increasing the role of private employment services in the provision of employment services. What interests us about this reform is not only that it is one that takes place along the lines of strategic governance, but also that it heralds the introduction of a specific form of workfare policies in Finland: the unemployed are activated to work via the incorporation of market mechanisms into public employment services. The opening out of public employment services to private actors has previously drawn scholarly attention especially for pioneer countries such as Australia and the Netherlands (Bredgaard and Larsen, 2007; van Berkel, 2014). Our analysis of the Finnish case allows us to reflect on how policy ideas and reform ‘travel’ as well as on context-specific attempts at implementation (see Helman and Maron, 2019). The article is structured as follows. In the next two sections we provide a discussion on data and methods as well as further conceptual background on ongoing welfare state reform in Finland. We then focus on the process of the enrolment of managerial governance into policy making. First, we analyse this process in regard to the reform of the government’s steering process and second, in relation to the reform of employment services. In the concluding section we discuss how managerial governance serves as a device of the economization of the state.

Chapter Five: Critique of and Implications from Workfare This chapter begins by outlining the key values and assumptions that underpin workfare as an ideological project. While workfare is celebrated by its proponents as a means of ensuring self-sufficiency and self-responsibility amongst welfare recipients, discussion then turns to the negative implications social policy writers attribute to the workfare approach taken to welfare provision in the New Zealand context. The critique of workfare offered by feminists is then presented. Unlike much of the mainstream social policy literature in New Zealand, the feminist critique directly problematises workfare’s emphasis on paid employment in relation to the increasing prevalence of precarious employment opportunities. As such, this literature highlights a fundamental contradiction in modern welfare provision – how can paid employment after welfare be better for welfare recipients, when such employment is precarious? This literature also addresses a gap in precarious employment research that does not always consider the experiences of welfare recipients as a source of potentially-precarious labour, establishing a clear connection between workfare and precarious employment which this research hopes to highlight further in the New Zealand context. Why Workfare? As T. Baker and Davis (2018) see it, the approach taken to workfare is largely reliant on whether the reasons for unemployment are considered to be structural (related to the conditions of the labour market, for example) or individual (for instance, related to the behaviour of the individual). When both structural and individual circumstances are accounted for, workfare is likely to be ‘soft’; when only individual circumstances are considered causal, workfare is likely to be ‘hard’. This becomes relevant when we consider how welfare-to-work reform has been justified in the New Zealand context. There is first a moral component to reasoning in favour of workfare reform, in line with the influential work of US academic Lawrence Mead (Rainford, 2004). Workfare proponents like Mead see welfare receipt as ‘trapping’ recipients in the welfare system, encouraging recipients’ reliance on welfare and lack of self-responsibility and independence (Kingfisher & Goldsmith, 2001). Welfare recipients are perceived to be self-interested actors who lack the ‘right’ values or are ‘morally weak’, and who only operate in the ‘right way’ when incentivised to do so (Cheyne et al., 2008; Humpage & Baillie, 2016; O’Brien, 2005). Flowing from this moral component is the rhetoric of ‘welfare dependency’, which has formed the basis of much welfare-to-work reform in New Zealand since the mid-1980s (Humpage & Baillie, 2016; Lunt, 2009). Associated with oft-racialised notions of welfare recipients as ‘scrounging’, ‘work shy’, promiscuous and a ‘threat to social order’ (Lunt, 2008, 2009; Rainford, 2004; Standing, 2011b), arguments for workfare reform based on ‘welfare dependency’ as the problem assume that benefit receipt is a self-perpetuating lifestyle choice, which results in a lack of responsibility for oneself, a lack of self-reliance, an increase in passivity and a decrease in the ‘work ethic’. The ‘culture of worklessness’ that proliferates is then argued to foster dependency amongst not only welfare recipients themselves, but a generational dependency on the State amongst their families (D. Bedggood, 1999; Humpage & Baillie, 2016; O’Brien, 2005; Standing, 2011b; Woodhams, 2012). Workfare reforms introduced in response to the welfare dependency problem therefore operate to pathologise individual welfare recipients, framing them as having a figurative illness which is responsible for their need of a benefit rather than the structural factors they experience (Oak, 2015; Woodhams, 2012). In contrast, participating in paid employment is simultaneously framed as an ‘honorific’ independence (Fraser & Gordon, 1994), enabling welfare recipients to fulfil their responsibilities and moral obligations and thus be absolved of their dependency (Beder, 2000). Workfare is consequently seen as one way in which people can be integrated into society, and both function and contribute more optimally within it (Standing, 1990, 2011b). The second component to favouring workfare is the binary between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, a dichotomy fundamentally related to notions of dependency (O’Brien, 2005; Standing, 1990). Those who cannot provide for themselves are deemed ‘deserving’ and genuinely dependent, and so continue to have their welfare provided for by the State (D. Bedggood, 1999; Kingfisher, 2013), while the ‘undeserving’ – typically non-working women, Māori and Pasifika, youth, and the ‘early-retired’ (Lunt, 2008) - are associated with negative ‘dependence’ and so experience punitive welfare provision. A further feature of workfare is that the parameters of who fits where within this binary are constantly redefined, such that an increasing number of people come to fall outside of the ‘deserving’ category and are therefore subject to more punitive treatment. As noted by Humpage and Baillie (2016), for instance, the workfare agenda has now encroached upon parents with dependent children, and those who are sick or disabled, working to incentivise these groups to become individually responsible for their circumstances despite these groups traditionally being excluded from work tests and obligations due to their legitimate need of welfare support. While O’Brien (2011, p. 26) sees the deserving-undeserving distinction as having “no place in contemporary welfare systems”, and its negative implications for the public’s trust in both each other and in the welfare system as a whole are known (Humpage, 2015), this distinction is still evident in recent welfare reforms that aim to provide financial aid to those participating in-work, as the ‘deserving’, and to punish (through sanctions or reduced benefit levels) those who do not as the ‘undeserving’ (see Elizabeth & Larner, 2009; Humpage, 2015). The notion of ‘dependency’ that underpins the vast majority of welfare reform is highly problematic, not least because it is consistently unclear as to what ‘dependence’ on welfare actually means (Cheyne et al., 2008; O’Brien, 2012a, 2013). Aside from the fact that there is little to no evidence suggesting that welfare receipt encourages dependency (Hodgetts et al., 2017), Jackson (2011) also points out that New Zealand is one of the best performing countries in relation to ‘long-term dependency’ levels as defined and measured by the OECD. The most powerful critique of the dependency argument, however, is made on the basis that dependency is not the result of individuals’ self-interest or lack of work ethic, but of the structural circumstances individuals are subject to. Dependence has been shown to be a consequence of both social and economic factors (D. Bedggood, 1999), where the conditions of the labour market dictate the level of welfare ‘dependence’: people enter benefit receipt as a rational response to fluctuations in the number of labour market opportunities available, not as a response out of ‘indolence’ (Cheyne et al., 2008; Jackson, 2011; O’Brien, 2005; Standing, 1990, 2011b). In fact, as discussed by Parker and Patterson (2003), research in New Zealand found high incidence of both previous work history and motivation to work amongst benefit recipients. Available data demonstrates these arguments further. In 2010, the Ministry of Social Development published Future Liability: Estimating time on benefit and associated cost, an investigative report that measured both the future duration and future cost of benefit receipt in New Zealand. Measuring future liability as the cost of benefit (based on benefit rates) plus expected time on benefit (where duration is potentially noncontinuous and only projected up until an individual reaches 65 years of age), the Ministry of Social Development (2010) estimated the average future duration of receipt for all benefits to be between eight and 11 years. However, there were considerable differences in the estimated duration of benefit receipt by benefit type.

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The guarantee of an income through a job is the first step toward the elimination of the welfare mess.44 Job guarantee theorists do not base their case for a federal jobs program on economic or other technical arguments alone. From Minsky onwards, JG advocates have also been especially concerned about the political feasibility of their preferred employment policy. Although they devote considerable attention to the technical macroeconomic argument for their employment-focused approach to labour market regulation and social welfare policy, they do so within a framework constrained by what they believe is possible in a political economy where the taxation of wages represents an important source of government revenue (or, at least, is perceived to by voters). This leads many JG thinkers to take a rather disapproving view of cash transfer programs, especially “welfare.” 45 In short, they proceed from the belief that social policy needs to be justified to the broader electorate, many of whom do not wish to see their “tax dollars” redistributed to those not engaged in waged labour. In this way, JG advocates often mirror discourses that stigmatize “welfare,” in the process framing unwaged social reproductive labour as outside the definition of “work.” JG theorists’ problematic centring of paid work and critiques of “welfare” have received little critical attention. In Minsky’s writing in particular, there is an underlying connection between concerns about political feasibility and a normative belief about the supposed importance of “earned” income. For example, Minsky argues that: Thoroughgoing reform [of employment and social welfare policy], based upon an understanding of how our economy works and principles consistent with human dignity and independence, is needed. The principles that should underlie the reform are an affirmation of both the dignity of labor and the social value of receiving income as a right because it is earned. Thus, thoroughgoing reform requires the manipulation of the economy so that there are jobs for all—the young, able-bodied adults, the handicapped, and the aged.46 Minsky further contends that “earned” income reinforces the behavioural rules of a capitalist economy by rewarding effort and generating labour discipline, whereas welfare payments potentially undermine such qualities and create dependence on “unearned” income, which is, additionally, inflationary and destabilizing, according to this argument. Moreover, because similar beliefs about “welfare dependency” and the stigmatization of welfare recipients are widespread throughout the working (and voting) public, social welfare policies must justify themselves on these terms. The “average taxpayer,” according to this reasoning, must perceive a material benefit from social policy and feel as though their prudent labour market behaviour is rewarded beyond the wage. They should see their taxes pay for programs beneficial to themselves and others engaged in paid employment.47 That JG theorists’ ostensibly rational economic and political critique of cash transfer programs might reinforce the social stigma attached to welfare does not seem to be considered. The conceptualization of welfare as a problem—indeed, as a “mess”—among JG writers is embedded in a producerist view of the economy and the place of paid employment within it.48 Minsky, Wray, Kelton, and other JG writers frame “productive” labour as central to human dignity and use this framing to build a normative foundation for their arguments in favour of full employment and welfare reform. However, the ways in which they position waged labour as central to both human flourishing and sound economic policy also obscure the vital contributions of unpaid social reproductive labour to capitalist economies, as well as the ways in which capitalist market exchange fails to register the value of unwaged work.49 As Nancy Fraser argues, the realm of production remains structurally dependent on “the hidden abode” of largely feminized and unpaid reproductive labour.50 Indeed, as many feminist political economists demonstrate, a central point of political contestation is precisely how the lines of demarcation are drawn between production for exchange, waged labour, and market commodifcation on the one hand, and social reproduction, unpaid labour, and decommodification, on the other. Melinda Cooper, for example, has shown how neoliberal policymakers have often utilized neoconservative “family values” discourse as part of their push for free market reforms. According to Cooper, the neoliberal marketization of ever-greater areas of social life crucially depends on shifting caring responsibilities into the space of the family—the site of unpaid reproductive labour.51 As governments of various political stripes impose austerity on public services, more of the work of social reproduction is offloaded onto “the family.” Minsky’s case for a “welfare policy” focused centrally on increasing labour force participation has unfortunately contributed to this general thrust towards valorizing paid employment at the expense of a critical feminist approach to the relationship between paid and unpaid work, and the decommodification of social supports necessary to more equitably redistribute the labour of care.

In recent years, a job guarantee (JG) has (re)emerged as a policy proposal among Left and Left-of-Centre politicians, and as a movement demand among labour and social activists across North America, particularly in the United States.1 In its most popular iteration, the JG is positioned by American proponents as a form of guaranteed employment that is administered through a federal jobs program, available to all those unable to secure private or other public sector employment, and paid at the level of a minimum “living” wage.2 At this most basic level—which draws on a lengthy intellectual and policy tradition concerned with guaranteed employment—the JG is understood as a means through which to achieve full employment by having government act as an “employer of last resort.” 3 Additionally, the JG is now commonly proposed alongside a range of other progressive policies associated with the recent growth of the democratic socialist and progressive Left in the United States. In this sense, the JG fits together with other pillars of the current democratic socialist agenda (Medicare-for-all, Green New Deal, and tuition-free public college), all of which aim to build and expand the Left’s political constituency through the appeal of universal social programs.4 When attached to other social policy objectives, the JG has been advanced as part of the framework to address climate change through a Green New Deal,5 as a mechanism to tackle racial injustice and inequality,6 as a way to improve labour standards throughout the economy,7 and as a means to maintain or boost economic demand while narrowing wage and income inequality.8 Some proponents of the JG advance a fairly narrow set of economic claims, while others tie the idea to a broader suite of policies and objectives associated with the emergent progressive Left. Academics and activists are found in both camps, yet contemporary JG advocates spend much less time discussing the historical origins of the JG, and, when they do, the discussions frequently lack a critical evaluation of how its implementation could impact other labour and social welfare policies. As a seemingly universal political demand aimed at tackling involuntary unemployment and low-wage work (and perhaps used to address the climate crisis through a “just transition”), the idea has thus found considerable contemporary purchase. However, its association with a particular variant of PostKeynesian thinking concerned with unemployment, inflation, and social welfare benefits remains less explored. In this article, I critically engage with writing about the JG from two angles. First, by exploring the history of the JG proposal in the work of Post-Keynesian economist Hyman Minsky, I show how the JG emerged in part as a response to the inflationary crisis of the 1970s and the breakdown of postwar welfare capitalism. Looking at the intellectual and political origins of the JG allows a critical evaluation of claims made by contemporary proponents, most notably L. Randall Wray and his associates at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.9 In short, Wray et al.’s claim that the JG’s capacity to raise wages and improve working conditions throughout the labour market by drying up labour surpluses is, at best, overstated, and, at worst, highly unlikely given how Minsky and others previously framed the JG’s role as an economic stabilizer, that is, as a way to maintain full employment without the inflationary consequences associated with the Phillip’s Curve employment-inflation trade-off. For Minsky and others, the JG, although it is a progressive alternative to the mix of monetarist policy, neoliberal austerity, and “human capital” supply-side approaches to the labour market then becoming hegemonic, was nevertheless also about taming inflation, facilitating wage restraint, and reducing welfare dependency. Second, using insights from feminist political economy,10 I also explore the ways that JG proponents often rely on a narrow and gendered conceptualization of (waged) work that both obscures uncompensated social reproductive labour (still performed largely by women), and displays a disdain (sometimes explicit and other times somewhat veiled) for “cash benefit” forms of social welfare. I contend that, at its core, the JG is characterized by a political suspicion of the welfare state and a producerist orientation to questions of work, income, and labour force participation. Given the deep connection between neoliberalism and the restructuring of social welfare policy towards various forms of “workfare,” 11 this article argues for a cautious and critical approach to the job guarantee that both takes account of its intellectual origins and registers the risks it poses in further eroding other components of the North American welfare state.