The rational, homo oeconomicus subject is one that perpetuates a paradigm of economic utility, environmental disaster, and inevitable extinction. A divergence from this paradigm is necessary to create new lines of flight away from gendered violence.

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.