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Across the globe, the economy is characterized by growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and finance increasingly sets the terms on which production unfolds.1 However, the economy does not unfold in a vacuum; rather, economic processes themselves are imbued with meanings and emerge through the actions and interactions of subjects whose selves are constituted not only within capitalist injunctions but through gender, race, nation, and other categories of difference. Feminists have been making this argument about capitalism for some time,2 but work on neoliberalism suggests that forms of power that work increasingly on and through the self make such questions ever more relevant in the current period.3 Gender has enabled, fueled, legitimated, and stabilized shifts in the nature of capitalism, and within this, discourses around masculinity have been crucial to both the emergence and ongoing functioning of neoliberalism as a transnational system. The narrative below will take us into spaces in which we can see these processes at work and so further specify their implications. The 1970s saw the dispersal of production, made possible by technology and propelled by the first deregulatory phase of neoliberalism,4 but also incited by the glimmering promise of virgin labor—uniquely, innocently malleable and dexterous young third-world women, new to the workplace and disposed to obey.5 The disassembly of industrial production, along with the growing political commitment to shape as well as “free” markets,6 in turn intensified a booming transnational financial sector, itself articulated through a celebration of the peculiarly masculine art of “risk management.”7 Thus, these overlapping but successive historical developments were propelled and made palatable through gendered rhetorics, and as such their consequences have been especially marked for poor men around the globe, who have been economically blindsided by growing national class inequalities even as they find themselves passed over for their female peers in the fastest growing sectors of the transnational economy. Gender has always been understood to be a central element in reproductive labor of course. However, it is in the traditional heart of capitalism, in production and finance, that the ideological work of revealing gender’s operations is most counterintuitive, and catching these developments in process is a tricky business. General theoretical claims that the economy is gendered cannot demonstrate the contextually specific consequences of this fact and thus do little to illuminate how and why this social fact matters. On the other hand, large-scale empirical reviews of capitalist development, whether macrohistorical or statistical, can miss the social—often discursive—processes on the ground that shape the structures they describe, too often imbuing those descriptions with an aura of inevitability that undermines our ability to see how the economy actually functions and blunting our collective critical capacity. In this article I delve into the particular, using two case studies: one in production, positioned early in the neoliberal period as capital fled its traditional heartlands; the other in finance, situated in the early 2000s as neoliberal policy makers intervened to establish a capital-friendly architecture for global markets.8 In each case, I illuminate the way these gendered rhetorics operate on the ground and to what effect. As such, my claim is neither strictly “theoretical” nor strictly “empirical” but rather straddles the two realms, using a grounded description of how social processes unfold in place to theorize the intimate relationship between gender and political economy. In this context, ethnographic data make men visible—as men— within the sphere of the economy and thus reveal the role of masculinity in the ongoing evolution of neoliberal globalization. ENGENDERING NEOLIBERALISM Since the 1960s, capital’s flight from the purportedly agentic, breadwinning, first world man and its search for the grail of the cheap, docile and dexterous, thirdworld woman has both propelled and stabilized the global dispersal of production. Entering the scene shortly thereafter, financial capital began its dizzying global ascent,9 fueled in its turn by the double-barreled invocation of “masculine recklessness” and “masculine rationality,” so memorably captured in Michael Lewis’s bestselling 1989 Liar’s Poker. 10 These gendered meanings do not of course “account” for the trajectories of global capitalism, as if any single element could. In theory, gender is not necessary to capitalism’s functioning at all. However, economies don’t work “in theory.” And in capitalism as it has actually developed historically, and especially in its contemporary neoliberal instantiation, gendered discourses and subjects play a fundamental role in its operations.11 Gender’s structuring of capitalism can be usefully separated into two modalities. First, as a purportedly biological duality, gendered references root the social in an inexorable “nature.”12 Thus, gender functions as a discursive ground against which other claims can be made and stabilized.13 And second, gendered discourses inter-pellate and produce masculine and feminine subjects—selves capable of intelligible social action.14 Both of these processes are based more on form than content. Despite its expressive reputation, gender describes not a pair of identities but a set of contrasts. Whenever we invoke a feminine subject, it operates in contradistinction to some idea of the masculine, however inflected that may be by race or class, and whether the “masculine” in question is read onto a male body or not. Like many social categories, gender is also a fractal, a set of relations that remains identical across scales.15 The distinction between masculine and feminine can be endlessly subdivided, as each side of the line can always be repartitioned into its own relatively masculine and feminine components. A single set of practices can be coded as masculine from one vantage point and feminine from another, even within the same social space. This multidirectional flexibility makes gender fertile terrain upon which to make truth claims about the rest of the social world and provides a plethora of interpellatory moments within which selves can be produced. Within this ongoing process of reference and subdivision, masculinity and femininity play different roles. In the modern West, the masculine term is confounded with the human.16 Thus its dominant role is expressed by its invisibility; it goes without saying. As the norm, it is simultaneously the general case, the unspecified, and the standard.17 Femininity, on the other hand, is effectively subsumed within the masculine. Thus, when femininity is noted, it generally emerges as the articulated modification of that assumed norm, always marked, frequently on the body.18 The fact that the human is confounded with the masculine means that men are little studied as men. Although in the last two decades we see more feminist writing on men and masculinity,19 even in feminist work the need to make “woman” visible within the human continues to produce an overidentification of “gender” with the study of women, and as elsewhere we find this tendency in the study of transnational processes.20 This is particularly problematic because masculinity’s tendency to function without being specifically articulated makes its role in the overall illegibility of processes of domination pivotal, and this function is undoubtedly at work in the current neoliberal period. Focusing on masculinity also has the corollary benefit of helping us get some purchase on the rising chorus of anxiety about men and boys that has emerged over the course of the last quarter century in domestic popular discourse in the United States.21 Given all that, in the following pages I will make a compensatory move, discussing gender but bringing the masculine term to the forefront of my analysis, delineating masculinity’s role as an unarticulated backdrop in the dispersal of transnational assembly, and as a central actor in the growth and enactment of contemporary finance.

Unleashing women’s economic potential will make economic growth and recovery faster and more equitable. Economic empowerment makes other rights possible for women. (Michele Bachelet, former Executive Director of UN Women) The first “financial empowerment” trope is based on the idea that the private sector, governments, international institutions and civil society all have a role to play in improving women’s access to credit (generally provided by private lenders), which is key to their empowerment. While this is part of a much longer historical trajectory in the underdeveloped world that has been perpetuated though microcredit and other initiatives, banks and other lenders—including payday and high-cost lenders—have also come to adopt the message that their pro- ducts serve a social purpose as they help to empower individual borrowers. Despite decades of evidence from the field of GAD that disturbs the notion of a direct link between financial access and women’s empowerment,22 “financial empowerment” has become increasingly central to the international aid industry and the development arms of many states (with DFID, for instance, arguing that the empowerment of women through financial inclusion is key to alleviating poverty globally).23 At the international level, the OECD recently developed a new initiative called the International Network on Financial Education, which has a special focus on women’s financial empowerment through education.24 In June 2013, the OECD, whose project on gender equality is focused on the “Three Es: Employment, Education and Entrepreneurship”, also teamed up with the G20 and the World Bank to host a conference on financial empowerment. The pervasiveness of the “financial empowerment” trope becomes even more evident when it is considered in relation to the overlapping tropes about the need to “bank the unbanked”, which is advocated by the World Bank among others, and to promote “financial inclusion” among the world’s poor.25 Without ever defining empowerment, the report underlying the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Mobile Money programmes, for example, discusses the need to empower women by reducing the gender gap in mobile phone ownership, which is closely linked to financial inclusion via mobile banking.26 In many of these instances, the term “empowerment” has been de-linked from questions of broader social transformation, individualised and transferred onto individual women’s bodies through the production of entrepreneurial subjects. This is not merely a discursive move as evidenced, for instance, in research done by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) that has tracked where the money for women’s rights is actually going. In 2011, the group surveyed 1,119 women’s organisations in over 140 countries and actually found a decline in support from many of the donors that have historically funded them.27 They also found funding from corporations, individual philanthropists and social enterprises to be almost non-existent.28 This suggests that the broader move to corporate-led initiatives will have important implications for grassroots women’s social organis- ations, which are increasingly having to rely on membership fees, individual donations and income-generating activities. As Eyben and Napier-Moore document in their genealogy of the use of the term “empowerment” by development institutions, current usages of the term differ from that of the 1990s when women’s empowerment was elevated from being something necessary for “development” to being a matter of social justice in its own right. Indeed, one of the successes of the gender and development movement was the location of empowerment within broader ideas about participation, power and equality. A decade and a half later, though the term is often used in contradic- tory ways (including within particular institutions themselves), it has become a much more technical term that is often narrowly associated with microcredit pro- grammes and political quotas for women. Empowerment here comes from the presence of women’s bodies in particular institutions rather than the promotion of gender issues per se. It is also linked to women’s ability to engage in paid labour and/or entrepreneurship.29 Empowerment has also been linked to results-based instrumentalist research agendas that seek to show how empowerment delivers specific development out- comes. An example of such a (TBF) research agenda is the “Third Billion Index” developed in 2010 by Strategy& (formerly Booz & Co., which is part of the global PwC group). This index ranks countries in terms of “how effectively they are empowering women as economic agents in the marketplace”. Women’s econ- omic participation is then correlated to countries’ general economic growth and well-being, mainly in the areas of health, early childhood development, security and freedom. In a recent report—for which Cherie Blair wrote an introduction— it is noted that women’s empowerment is no longer only the business of govern- ments and NGOs, but also the responsibility of the private sector, which is coming to realise that “women’s full participation in the world of work is not merely a social good but an economic necessity”.30 The private sector has a role to play in, among other areas, supporting female entrepreneurs and financing women-owned business. The Third Billion Index draws some of its inspiration from the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index. The purpose of the index is to identify the gap between men and women in the areas of (1) economic participation and opportunity, (2) educational attainment, (3) health and survival and (4) political empowerment. These gaps are then mapped onto the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report and various measurements of GDP. Although its focus is wider than women’s economic participation, the WEF (which is a private, business-led international organisation) similarly claims that there is a “strong correlation between a country’s gender gap and its national competitiveness”. This means that those countries with the smallest gender gaps, namely in the areas of political and economic participation, health and education, are also the most competitive countries globally.31 According to the WEF, “[a] country’s competitiveness depends on its human talent—the skills, education and productivity of its workforce. Because women account for one-half of a country’s potential talent base, a nation’s competitiveness in the long term depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilises its women”.32 Drawing on the first theoretical premise established above, it is a rather bitter irony that while these indexes do recognise the importance of a healthy and edu- cated workforce for the functioning of economies, they fail to acknowledge the work that is involved in these forms of biological and social reproduction. Rather, reproductive labour as a whole is obscured, as the index fails to account for household and domestic-related phenomena, including unpaid work. Accord- ing to Chant and Brickell, the same can be said for the Third Billion Index, the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Gender Inequality Index.33 While unpaid reproductive labour is systematically ignored, women—or more specifically, women’s bodily capacities—are produced as “marketizable and exploitable commodities”.34 Drawing on the third premise, it also becomes evident that an exclusive focus on measuring gaps between men and women obscures much more complex gender dynamics at work under neoliberalism.35 In particular, it obscures the ways in which certain gender gaps, or gaps between women as a group and men as a group, are narrowing compared to gaps among women (i.e. along class, racial and other lines) and among men. For example, while the gap between male and female par- ticipation in the labour force has been declining globally since 1990, this has largely been due to a worldwide fall in male labour force participation rates.36 At the same time, according to the WEF’s methodology, where gaps have been closed, the index does not go on to measure those areas where women have achieved more than men. As such, it does not capture the closing of gaps as the result of falls in the political, economic and social attainments of men and boys. Thus, while women’s bodily capacities are valued as potentially untapped commodities, those of men and boys are devalued. Returning to the issue of the broader promotion of women’s financial empower- ment, a perspective of the body draws attention to the forms of gendered violence that have been shown to accompany particular forms of financial deepening and attendant collection techniques. Lamia Karim’s recent study of Bangladesh is only one of a plethora of studies documenting the link between microcredit and increased violence against women in the household and in public (i.e. through flog- ging and other means).37 Violence and aggressive intimidation techniques have also been used by debt collectors against women in the US, who are seen as more likely to submit to aggressive tactics than men, not least because their caring obligations tend to render them less geographically mobile.38 Debt-related suicide has also been documented across the globe, in countries at a range of levels of economic development.39 While issues of financial empowerment are deeply intertwined with the pro- motion of entrepreneurship as an almost unambiguous good, this also fails to capture the specific conditions under which different groups of people engage in this form of work, which has a differential impact on the production of bodies. As Sébastien Rioux reminds us, “Marx was particularly attentive to the ways in which capital is inscribed on the bodies and in the flesh of laborers, documenting as he did how long hours of work, unregulated environment, and dangerous working conditions produced tired, diseased, maimed, unhealthy, overworked, stunted and injured bodies”.40 Although I cannot fully survey the conditions under which different entrepreneurs labour, it has been well documented by groups such as the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor that women in the advanced OECD countries are much more likely to turn to entrepreneurship because of the earning potential it offers than women in the developing world who are more likely to engage in this work due to a lack of alternatives.41 World Bank research shows that while sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of women entrepreneurs of any region, they tend to have smaller businesses (which are often concentrated in the so-called “informal” sector), to be self-employed rather than employ others, to be concentrated in low value-added businesses and to have a lower value of return than men.42 In terms of finance, this then suggests that the latter group of women are prob- ably more likely to be borrowing to finance their immediate reproduction (as described by Federici above) than the former, where the link is less direct. They are also likely to work under difficult physical conditions. In one study of over 422 women street vendors in South Africa, for example, 54 per cent reported a work-related illness or injury. A significantly larger proportion of self-employed women reported illness or injuries, with 47 per cent reporting having received burns during their work, 12 per cent reporting cuts, 21 per cent reporting headaches and 11 per cent complaining of musculoskeletal problems. Approximately one in four women also reported some form of abuse while working, such as sexual har- assment, physical abuse or robbery.43

What would a different system of global economic governance look like that might better fulfil commitments to gender equality and human rights? A gendered analysis of global economic governance would begin from the premise that the social forces engaged in global capitalism and its economic governance are not only structured along the lines of class, race and ethnicity but also are gendered in terms of their prevailing ideas, institutions and power potentials. Some guiding questions might include those listed in Box 7.2. Each of these components of social forces that could reshape global economic governance will now be considered in turn. These consist principally of two broad types: ideologies that justify or legitimate a given political order, and the commonly held predispositions or assumptions that lead people to treat the economic and social world and its interactions as if they are self-evident or part of the ‘common [figure 7.2 OMITTED] sense,’ which structures what is conceived of as possible in the realm of policy/politics. From a gender perspective it is crucial to underline how both the ideology of disciplinary neoliberalism as well as the ‘common sense’ that governs the prevailing concepts of global economic governance does not take into account the economy of daily life: how people exist on a daily and intergenerational basis through the interaction of paid and unpaid work. The dominant perspective ignores the way in which economies are not only a set of financial transactions but also a collection of work and labour processes, some of which are paid and others unpaid, and how each of these processes involves distinct sets of social relations as well as economic inputs and outputs. To understand why this is the case we need to think through the way that production for the market place is related to how families and communities provide the very conditions for production to occur. Thus, productive activities in a capitalist system normally refer to the processes of creating goods and services that can directly create profit. By contrast, the reproductive economy consists of people, and it involves activities and processes that are not merely associated with biological reproduction but also the feeding, caring, replenishing, and daily maintenance and socialization of family, household and community members. Reproductive work and voluntary community work could in principle, be done by men or women – but provisioning has been socially constituted as mainly the responsibility of women rather than men in most societies (Elson 1998). However, it is impossible to conceive of production in the absence of the reproductive economy since it encompasses work carried out by human beings for direct support of the productive sector through for example the produced input of labour. Indeed, US researchers have estimated that accounting for all unpaid domestic work would add 80 per cent to GDP (Zuckerman 2014). However, at best, in the perspectives that prevail in the governing discourses of global economic governance, provisioning remains largely invisible and thus outside of the scope of public policy. At worst it is a lacunae or ‘strategic silence’ in the generic frameworks of knowledge that constitute orthodox economics. By contrast a key focus and purpose of feminist economics is to make this unpaid work visible and thus to reconstitute our understanding of the ‘economic’ in order to restructure the provision of resources (including time) and care in a more equal fashion between women and men, in both private and public institutions. A feminist perspective therefore suggests a wider vision of the economy that sees national output as a product of the interaction of the domestic sector alongside the public, private and financial sectors, producing services that include the reproduction of the labour force on a daily and generational basis. Whilst outside the formal production boundary, this work affects the quantity and quality of labour supplied to production; it also affects ‘the stability of the social framework in which market and state are embedded’ (Elson 2002). Such a vision of the economy, if integrated into the institutions of global economic governance, would transform economic analysis and policy prescriptions. For example, policy makers would include social reproduction (including the ‘care economy’) in considerations of labour market, social, monetary and fiscal decisions since social reproduction normally depends on some form of income support. This can happen through wages, transfers by governments or access to arable land and informal sector activities. Conversely, many of the insecurities that are inherent in the labour market and other forms of access to money are absorbed and mediated at the household level. The degree to which households can respond to market downturns and crises – the extent to which women’s unpaid labour can act as a shock absorber – in turn affects the way economic growth occurs. Whilst many economists recognize gender relations as a factor of analysis at the microeconomic level, macroeconomics remains focused on aggregates and policy objectives such as price stability. The traditional policy instruments of macroeconomics such as fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policies are constructed as if they are gender-neutral (Cagatay and Erturk 2004). If by contrast, there is a recognition that macroeconomic policies rest upon a set of distributive relations across different sectors of the economy and involve distributive choices across various social groups (Elson and Cagatay 2000), then gender relations (along with class, race and ethnicity) should be incorporated into the analysis of those distributive social relations. This would mean integrating an analysis of the gendered divisions of labour and decision making in the different spheres of economic activity. This ‘bottom up’ approach whereby economic policy would be steered by the daily realities of women and men as they experience the intersections of social reproduction, production and finance would go a long way towards ‘re-embedding’ economics in society. Such an approach would ask how people meet their daily needs, what the requirements are for human well-being, how they are being met, what constraints exist to meet such needs, and what economic policies support or undermine daily needs and well-being. Such a focus on the unpaid economy requires a commitment of public investment in basic infrastructure such as access to fuel and fresh drinking water as well as social infrastructure such as health and care services. It will also require some redistribution in the remaining unpaid work between women and men, boys and girls. This would require reconsidering what is meant by progress, efficiency, growth and development. Women’s movements and other civil society groups have argued that we cannot go back to the model of economic development that existed before the crisis as this signalled growing inequalities, environmental destruction and, a growing global domestic crisis witnessed in the huge shifts in social and family arrangements. Restoring growth – a return to normalcy – is insufficient if the goal is a more just, equitable (in terms of class, race/ethnicity, caste and region) and sustainable (conserving natural resources) development (Jain and Elson 2010: 19). This does not mean ‘anti-growth’.8 Economic growth – if it is defined as the increase in the real use-value of economic activity – can mean many different things with different environmental and social implications. If it is simply measured according to conventional national income accounts premised upon exchange-value it can mean more private automobiles or better public transport; more strip mining or child care centres. Thus thinking about organizing the economy in a different way to avoid environmental degradation and to focus on needed social investments and ‘decent’ work which provides sufficient income and recognizes workers’ rights would be part of a new common sense and growth strategy premised upon human needs. For example an element that would be central to a new growth strategy would be food sovereignty, that is, local and democratic control over the provisioning of food, something that has not been delivered by the liberalization of international trade in food. Recognizing that women make over half of the agricultural work force in developing countries, better land rights for women and more equitable public investment and regulation of markets to support women farmers would undergird this new approach (Jain and Elson 2010). In economics, students are demanding a more real world-based curriculum of study that moves away from the neoclassical free market theories and abstractions that dominate teaching and modelling.9 Reform of the educational curriculum more generally and particularly in the field of economics, is a key aspect of creating a new ‘common sense’ of economic literacy that can underpin new frameworks of global economic governance. This will require a revolution in the way in which economics is both taught in schools and universities and discussed in political discourse and particularly in the media, in ways that encourage a variety of different viewpoints and policy prescriptions. It will also require greater representation of heterodox (including feminist) economics in the policy community to realize a more encompassing, democratic model of global economic governance. This means that what is considered a crisis and how winners and losers are identified will also depend on the type of knowledge at the heart of governance: educational efforts of transnational feminist advocacy networks have been important for challenging orthodox economic understandings of global economic governance. They have played a particularly important role in issue creation and agenda setting and influencing policy discourses towards the acceptance of a more heterodox, socially embedded economics (for example, the International Gender and Trade Network, the Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics, the Development Alternatives Network for Women (DAWN) and Women in Development Europe (WIDE).10

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.

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.

A second important function of the state is to ensure that existing resources are redistributed in society. The issue is complex, since there are no clear answers as to what constitutes precisely the optimal level of redistribution. Should everyone have access to the same quantity of resources, or should some resources be allocated to some specific groups and individuals? If so, who should be targeted? Why? How? In sum, the redistribution of resources rests on normative considerations about equality and differences among citizens. Modern societies have provided some answers to these questions with the establishment of the welfare state. Although some early initiatives appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, the welfare state as we know it today was implemented during the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War in the case of Canada. Broadly speaking, the welfare state can be defined as fulfilling a social-solidarity function, by providing some basic social rights (e.g., access to free healthcare services and universal education), and offering minimal economic security to all (through pensions, social assistance, employment insurance, etc.). Nowadays, public policies associated with the welfare state makes up most of the modern state activities. As Fig. 23.1 indicates, more than 60 per cent of all Canadian public spending is dedicated to funding of healthcare, education, and social services, the three sectors commonly associated with the welfare state. Fig. 23.1 figure 1 The Canadian welfare state. (Source: author’s computations with data compiled by Statistics Canada. Canadian Classification of Functions of Government (CCOFOG) by Consolidated Government Component. CANSIM database, Table 10-10-0005-01; accessed, March 15, 2019) Full size image Public Expenditures At first sight, public services provided by the welfare state do not appear to target women and men differently: all people, regardless of gender, are entitled to receive public services, such as healthcare services, education, and professional training. The same is true for sexual minorities: individuals cannot be denied a public service (e.g., healthcare) because of non-heterosexual desires and practices or because they self-identify as genderqueer or gender non-conforming. There are some obvious exceptions, such as programmes designed for maternity leave or to provide specific medical care (e.g., gender-affirming surgery), but these instances are infrequent. In practice, however, the welfare state is far from being as gender neutral as is often claimed. Its policies are based on some preconceived ideas that advantage some and disadvantage others. One factor that many feminist scholars have identified as a cause of this inequality is the inability (or unwillingness) of the welfare state to consider the contribution of unpaid work and care activities (Sainsbury 2013). Social-assistance programmes provide a good illustration of this situation. In Canada, most of these programmes implicitly assume the superiority of private markets to generate personal income. Therefore, social-assistance programmes seek to provide minimal basic income to those unable to enter the labour market and earn an income. The data presented in Table 23.3 show the major sources of incomes of women and men for various age groups in Canada. As we can see, the earnings of women lag those of men at all stages of life. This inequality is created primarily by private-market mechanisms (labour, investment, and private retirement income). Although this imbalance is alleviated by government transfers, it does not disappear. In reality, government transfers marginally correct the income difference. For instance, government transfers reduce the income gap between women and men aged twenty-five to sixty-four years by about only one-tenth.Footnote4 The situation is even more puzzling for elderly women: on average, men receive more government transfers than women, even though their market income is higher. Table 23.3 Major sources of income, per capita, by age group and gender, 2017 Full size table Gender differences are also noticeable for specific categories of government transfers. For instance, women rely more on public pensions than men do.Footnote5 Furthermore, women receive more support from pension programmes that specifically target low-income Canadians, such as the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) and the Spouse’s Allowance (SPA). Meanwhile, women are the primary beneficiaries of child benefits. It must be noted that the federal child-benefit programme does discriminate on the basis of gender, as women are explicitly identified as the usual beneficiary. On average, women aged between twenty-five and sixty-four years receive $2400 per year in child benefits.Footnote6 This amount is higher for women with low income, especially for single parents (additional help is provided with social-assistance programmes). Although significant, these amounts do not cover all the costs related to raising children, especially when both parents are in the labour market. For instance, a recent study has shown that the median cost of childcare services was between $6500 and $8000 per year per child in various parts of CanadaFootnote7 (Maire 2014).

Economic policies (both macroeconomic and microeconomic policies) are often thought of as gender neutral. Budgeting is generally considered a gender-neutral policy instrument. But that is a mistake: the budget is not gender neutral, but rather gender blind. Some examples of gender biases in taxation, both explicit and implicit, have been analysed in the previous section. Moreover, budgeting policies can hide gender biases too. Public accounting policies are not gender sensitive and have a negative impact on women compared to men. It must be understood that by maintaining gender inequality, these policies also have a negative impact from an economic point of view, making it difficult for all categories to access work or business. It is clear that governmental budgets reflect political priorities. If we neglect this distinct impact on people, we perpetuate economic disparities and disable the improvement of social roles various groups individuals hold. National or local budgets do not affect individuals directly, but the choices contained in the national or local budget, impacting the market demand or public services, influence employment, family life, healthcare, price level and so on. Individuals in general have different economic roles and, consequently, different economic and social power. In most cases, women and minorities are at a disadvantage. The apparent neutrality of the public budget hides the fact that, often, women and third-gender persons do not have the same variety of choices (political, social, economic) in relation to others. If we consider gender inequality as inefficient, both from the point of view of access to work and business, and as a lack of participation in political life, it becomes clear that the government (and parliament) can use the money raised through taxes to reduce inequality. By orienting public finances, it is possible to redistribute wealth and fight against women’s poverty and gender inequality. Public spending encompasses gender bias and produces gender-disparate effects on distribution of public services and wealth. Usually, government budget is considered as a monetary quantification of political objectives,86 but we must understand that the public budget is the result of political negotiations and it is influenced by political and social contests and values. Public budget is the reflection of the government’s interpretation of these values through the use of public expenditures. Very often public policies do not consider the unpaid work of women enough, especially during economic crises.87 Women become the last resort of families, compensating for insufficient public healthcare or social services. Public budgets do not recognise the role of women (nor individuals of third-gender and non-binary individuals) in the economy and society. To achieve equity and redistribution of wealth, considering the limited public resources, it is necessary to set the objectives of public finance taking into account these needs.88 Recently, UN statements (Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, especially action n. 5) reiterated the need to adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality. Fiscal policies determine the composition of expenditure, and expenditures can consent investments and benefits to influence private behaviours in a gender responsive way. A high level of taxation and a similar level of public expenditures can contribute to an inclusive growth,89sustaining investments that reduce gender gap. Moreover, austerity measures after the financial crisis were executed without regard to gender bias. By cutting public expenditures or reducing taxation, governments cannot drive budget priorities towards improving the opportunities for minorities, boosting welcoming culture towards gender equality and avoiding the lack of integration into social life.

A wage-price spiral is the stuff of inflationary nightmares. It refers to a situation when prices gallop higher—perhaps because of a sudden shock or policy missteps, or both—and wages race upward to keep pace with them, in turn feeding through to yet more price rises and yet more wage increases, and so on in a vicious circle. It can seem as if the world’s economies have been living this horror: in America hourly earnings rose by about 6% last year, the biggest annual increase in four decades. In Britain wages excluding bonuses are rising at an annual clip of about 7%. On June 14th, when the Federal Reserve elected to leave interest rates unchanged after ten consecutive increases, Jerome Powell, its chairman, warned that he was watching wage trends as one test of whether the central bank might resume raising rates in July.

But the dangers that appear in nightmares usually bear little resemblance to the threats worth worrying about in reality. The world’s uncomfortable ride with inflation over the past two years seems to point to a similar conclusion about wage-price spirals: they are a caricature of what happens to an economy with an inflation problem.

Wage growth is the other principal villain widely accepted as a solid assumption. Between June 2021 and July 2022, workers discovered they could demand and get higher wages. The reasons included the flood of government stimulus money that encouraged many workers to stay home rather than return to work. There was also the phenomenon of the Great Resignation, aka the Big Quit. There were more jobs than people who wanted them, so employers had to pony up.

When inflation began to tick up, economists fretted that surging labor costs would force companies to raise prices which, in turn, would encourage workers to demand more to keep pace, and so on — a wage growth spiral.

The idea that wage‐​price spirals cause inflation – that higher prices lead to higher wage demands, which beget further higher prices and then higher wages again and again – is a long‐​standing myth, and a dangerous one given it can lead to such misguided policy.

Economically, showing that wage demands do not create inflation is fairly simple. Take a hypothetical company with a big, unionised workforce. Suddenly the union demands a competition‐​busting 20 percent pay rise, and the firm reluctantly acquiesces, raising its prices to compensate.

Persistent wage and price growth in the latest data may raise concern that wages and prices are feeding on each other and likely to accelerate over a sustained period, an outcome known as a wage-price spiral. If such a spiral emerges, the fear is that inflation would keep rising and expectations become unanchored.

However, in similar episodes from the past, this worry turned out to be unfounded, according to our earlier analysis highlighted in  and chapter of the October 2022  Updating that analysis to include the latest data through the third quarter of last year, we still conclude that wage-price spiral risks remain contained.

The experts were worried about a so-called wage-price spiral. This occurs when workers expect inflation to keep rising, so demand — and achieve — higher salaries to keep up with price rises. Businesses then raise the prices of goods and services to cover higher labor costs, at the same time as workers have more disposable income to increase demand. This creates an inflationary loop, or in the language of economists, “second-round effects.”

This is argued to have happened in the 1970s, when inflation hit 23% in the U.K. and 14% in the U.S. in 1980.

Back when , many people were worried about a wage-price spiral. This means that wages were going up, and businesses would have to increase prices, which would lead to more wage increases, and so on.

Now, a  Rising wages, the paper concludes, are only responsible for about a tenth of a percentage point of the increase in the Fed’s preferred personal consumption expenditures price index.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell and his colleagues have made major mistakes in their battle with inflation.

They instituted the fastest increase ever in interest rates despite evidence that many of inflation’s drivers, such as  and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, were immune to interest rate changes.

Economists have long argued that increases in worker pay can lead to improvements in productivity—indeed, that it can actually be profitable to pay workers higher wages. As Alfred Marshall, the father of modern economics, argued almost 125 years ago, "any change in the distribution of wealth which gives more to the wage receivers and less to the capitalists is likely, other things being equal, to hasten the increase of material production." Since then, economists have compiled rich data validating Marshall's hypothesis that paying higher wages generates savings:

Higher wages motivate employees to work harder. Janet Yellen (1984) suggested that higher wages create the conditions for workers to be more productive, pointing to "reduced shirking by employees due to a higher cost of job loss; lower turnover; an improvement in the average quality of job applicants and improved morale." Among the studies documenting this point are Levine (1992), which analyzed a sample of large (mostly Fortune 500) manufacturing companies, and Holzer (1990), which used data from a national sample of firms finding that "high-wage firms can sometimes offset more than half of their higher wage costs through improved productivity and lower hiring and turnover cost." Reich et al. (2003) surveyed employers at the San Francisco airport after a broad-based increase in wages and found that the employers of the majority of affected workers reported that their overall performance had improved. Mas (2006) analyzed the case of New Jersey police officers who were granted a wage increase of 17 percent, and who were 12 percent more productive in clearing cases than those who were refused the increase.

Since 2014, CAP has demonstrated that an increase in the minimum wage would significantly decrease the use of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as millions of workers are currently paid so little that they must rely on the public social safety net. Indeed, an increase to the federal minimum wage (and the elimination of the subminimum wage for people who work for tips and people with disabilities) would have broad benefits for the economy beyond the wages of affected workers. Wage increases—particularly for those at the bottom of the income spectrum—increase community-level economic activity and support local businesses; reduce the amount by which taxpayers subsidize corporations for the low wages they pay; and reduce the pay inequalities for women and people of color that depress overall economic growth.

An increase to the minimum wage would be far from divisive: American voters have repeatedly signaled broad, bipartisan support for raising the minimum wage to $15. In November, 61 percent of Florida voters supported a ballot measure to do just that, even as the state’s voters backed Donald Trump for reelection. The percentage of Americans who say that they support raising the minimum wage has grown during the pandemic—66 percent of Americans supported raising the minimum wage in February 2020, while 72 percent supported it by August 2020.

An even more intriguing possibility is that the job guarantee would eliminate the need for the Fed to adjust interest rates.

Here’s how that would work: Currently, Fed officials operate on the assumption that some amount of unemployment is necessary to control inflation. As workers’ bargaining power rises, an arms race sets in across businesses. Workers claim more revenue as compensation, capitalists try to preserve their cut by raising prices, then workers demand higher wages for the increased cost of living. Wash, rinse, repeat. The result is the wage-price spiral, delivering higher inflation.

(L. Randall, Levy Economics Institute, “Job Guarantee,” The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, pg online @ https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_3080-1 //um-ef)

An unemployed buffer stock (‘reserve army of the unemployed’) is supposed to work in a similar manner: with a large body of unemployed workers, employers can refuse demands for wage increases by threatening to hire replacement workers from among the unemployed. However, the unemployed buffer stock is not very effective at setting a wage floor. Since the unemployed do not have jobs, their wage is zero—meaning the floor wage is zero. However, the lower limit to wages will actually be above zero for three reasons: there will be some limit above zero because no one would work without a nonzero wage, there may be an effective minimum wage law in place, and there is likely some social assistance available to those without jobs so employers need to pay a positive wage to induce workers to move off welfare and into jobs. Supporters of the JG argue that the employed buffer stock is more effective in stabilizing wages. Not only does it establish a firm wage floor, but it also attenuates wage inflation more effectively. The unemployed buffer stock will tend to consist disproportionately of workers with less education, skills, and experience—just like the employed buffer stock. However, the employed buffer stock have the advantage that they are working. All else equal, employers prefer to hire those who are already working—who are demonstrating at least some work readiness. Further, their skills can be maintained on the job and may even be enhanced if there is training on the job. By contrast, those who are unemployed may be thought to be losing skills and perhaps developing undesirable behaviours. As time spent in unemployment grows, workers are perceived as less employable, and their probability of obtaining a job falls. It is well established that long term unemployment is associated with development of a variety of health and social problems. For these reasons, advocates of the JG argue that the employed buffer stock is actually more effective.

Like many Black families, Johnson and her husband are bearing the brunt of inflation – with prices rising to the highest rates the US has seen in more than 40 years. Researchers say Black families will suffer the worst effects of rising inflation because they lag behind their White counterparts in income, wealth, financial savings and home ownership.

The disparity leaves many Black Americans without the funds to help offset the rising consumer prices and puts greater pressure on their monthly income, economists say. Some economists fear that if lawmakers don’t act soon to combat inflation, Black families may be forced to go without necessities as the threat of another recession looms.

The concept of an Unconditional Basic Income has become a hot topic on the interwebs. Conservative Charles Murray started things up in 2006 with the publication of  which created a brief stir and then sank into oblivion because (surprise!) conservatives were distinctly uninterested in cutting unconditional checks to lazy welfare bums.

Then it came out of hibernation a few months ago for reasons that escape me. At the time, I vaguely figured that much of the credit belonged to Vox’s Dylan Matthews for his tireless advocacy of a UBI. It also, of course, had something to do with the explosion of Bernie mania. Bernie doesn’t actually support a UBI, but he’s said that it’s “something that must be explored” and it pretty plainly fits into his general worldview. Nonetheless, after another 15 minutes of fame, it went into hibernation again. But it refused to die, emerging from its lair yet again a few weeks ago. Considering the fact that a UBI has less chance of being enacted than a law guaranteeing everyone a pet unicorn, this is a little odd. What’s going on?