Description
This article narrates the search for a methodology of the household. It builds on the feminist tradition of narrating scholarship and develops a conscious attempt to integrate ourselves and our histories through reflexive practice into our research. Building on insights from feminist feminist multidisciplinary research we develop four moves to transform the household from a conceptual black-box or, at best, another sphere hierarchically below the state and the market (and thus subordinate to it) into a heuristic device that informs methodology, where theory and practice interface. Firstly, we assign agency to the household, thus transforming it from a receiving unit into an agential object of analysis. Secondly, we provide a roadmap for (re-)distributive mechanisms within and across households. Thirdly, we account for harm that is produced by political economic phenomena, whether this exists as violence, pain or deprivation, and fourthly, we locate the household in time and space to account for the multi-scalar political economic connections that manifest at the intersections of the social forces of gender, race, and class. Through these four moves that constitute the search for a methodology of the household, we bring into focus how the household acts as a force in socio-economic transformation by producing, reproducing, and consolidating financialized capitalism. The paper concludes with the call for a shared research agenda that forges a new path beyond just challenging existing scholarship to actualizing feminist critique as a critical methodology of international political economy.
