Feminist political economy

Penny Griffin

Chapter 42 in Handbook on Gender in World Politics, 2026, pp 281-287 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter surveys the diverse and critical field of feminist political economy. It emphasizes that feminist scholars, drawing from materialist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial perspectives, challenge the gender-blind assumptions within mainstream economics, development studies, and global governance. A core contribution is the focus on the reproductive economy—the often-uncounted domestic and care work that underpins capitalist systems. By centering gender, feminists expose how economic processes, from structural adjustment programs to financial crises, are built upon and perpetuate intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, and class. The chapter traces the evolution from ‘women-in-development’ approaches to more complex ‘gender and development’ frameworks, which analyze gender as a socially constructed system of power. Despite being marginalized within the International Political Economy (IPE), feminist political economy offers a crucial lens for understanding the gendered foundations of neoliberalism, the feminization of labor, and the unequal impacts of austerity, providing a powerful critique of contemporary global economic relations.

Keywords: Feminist Political Economy; Social Reproduction; Gender and Development; Neoliberalism; Intersectional Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803923765
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