Capitalism and economic preservation strategies rely on gendered hierarchies

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).