The alternative is to reject the universalizing discourses of anti-capitalism through feminist discourse analysis

Adding to this extensive body of feminist literature, this paper interrogates crisis governance as discursively gendered, and the effects of this. A discursive approach is significant because it does not assume, as per liberal approaches, a foundational economic rationality to economic strategy, or, as per Marxism, the central truth of class struggle as universal. A discursive approach that centralises gender in understanding the reproduction of crisis governance discourses under- stands governance and its outcomes as a complex amalgamation of meaning and practice, founded by and reproduced through culturally produced and pervasively gendered ideas, assumptions and values about the world. A commitment to non- essentialism challenges, at fundamental and unsettling levels, some of the core categories of conventional forms of analysis. This contrasts with mainstream (international political economy) scholarship’s framing of human behaviour in terms of faceless, desocialised units of analysis and its reproduction of a model of society as a self-regulating machine explainable by scientific laws adapted from modern philosophy and Newtonian science. It also contrasts with critical scholar- ship’s preference for the Marxist view of economic relations as (pre)determined by the nature of class struggle. While some materialist (feminist) approaches articulate women’s disprivilege as a historical constant and something of a cultural given, discourse analysis of gendered governance, instead, understands privilege, discrimination and inequality as socially, and culturally, produced and variable across time and place, resisting the rooting of economic relations in class relations and showing a greater interest in the gendered cultural practices (including gendered recruitment and promotion practices, discriminatory forms of lending, gendered assessments of credit worthiness and so on) that enable the reproduction of gendered power in the global political economy. A discursive approach to gender and governance necessitates the analysis of norms and standards in the global political economy that many hold to be true, essential and universal, but a committed critique of which reveals as power-laden, regulatory and highly restrictive identity categories (Griffin, 2009: 1). Rather than positing the primacy of ‘the economic’, which swallows whole concepts such as culture, gender, race, production, consumption and representation, this paper looks to the cultural conditions of embodiments of capitalism, specifically neo- liberal global governance and the discourses of governance that neo-liberalism reproduces. To be sure, these discourses emanate from various and diverse actors, institutions, organisations and initiatives, including individual (state) governments and groupings of these (such as the G7 and G10); supra-national bureaucracies such as the European Union (EU); intergovernmental organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the UN; non-governmental organisations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF); and private financial governance initiatives (which are not available for public scrutiny) such as those instituted by the Bank for International Settlements and the International Organization of Securities Commissions. By asking us to confront in quite radical and imaginative ways how we know what we think we know and thus what we exclude from our analyses, a discursive research strategy is always strongly political.