Description
Donald Trump has reignited debates about trade policy, generating much discussion in public and private spaces about the implications of tariffs, protectionism, and the future of the liberal trading regime. Now, more than ever, it is important for feminists to develop the tools to analyse and theorize the impacts of trade on social reproduction, and on gendered and intersectional forms of inequality. While critical approaches to IPE have long focused on trade, feminist IPE has been relatively silent. This may be partly because trade has tended to be understood as a form of ‘high’ politics rather than as a set of social relations that are integrally connected to everyday life and relations of social reproduction. Addressing this oversight, our paper develops a feminist political economy analysis of trade that offers an historically informed account of how global trade and trade governance are rooted in social power relations, including the social relations of gender. We show how key ideas, institutions and relations of power have shaped global trade relations in ways that subordinate, devalue, marketize and exploit economic activities, rationalities and values associated with femininity and feminized, racialized and class-based ‘others’. Drawing primarily on work being done by a growing number of civil society organizations engaging with the mainstreaming of gender in trade policy, we outline what a more progressive and ecologically sustainable feminist future might look like: an essential task in these troubling times.
