Description
This paper considers how we might develop a decentred feminist IPE of crisis. As many feminist scholars have pointed out (Brickell; Hozic & True), a feminist engagement with crisis moves us beyond specific ‘crisis points’ (economic collapse, war, pandemics), and develops understandings of how crisis is constitutive of, and experienced via, slow structural inequalities – or ‘crisis ordinary’. Such an approach highlights how particular populations, marked by race, gender and the uneven processes of environmental degradation, experience vulnerability and precarity. As many feminist scholars argue a ‘social reproduction lens’ provides a unique vantage point for thinking about how crisis is experienced in everyday lives. The everyday/ordinary nature of crisis we suggest is best understood through a more expansive, decentred and provincialized social reproduction approach. This is one that disrupts mainstream (Western centric) narratives of capitalism, the state, the household and the division between waged/unwaged work embedded in much social reproduction theorizing, whilst simultaneously highlighting how context and location matters in thinking through the spaces, temporalities and violences of everyday life. Decentring social reproduction analysis in this way is, moreover, vital in terms of the development of relational forms of feminist solidarity.
