Gendered Political Economy and Feminist Analysis

Abstract

This chapter will discuss some of the most important insights which have emerged to provide the embryo of a gendered political economy. It will then outline some of the questions which a gendered political economy must address in order to aid its development as a new area both of political economy and of feminist analysis. The majority of useful work to have emerged over the last twenty years and the last five years in particular comes from two interconnected sources: first, the new field of feminist economics and second, some of the gender and development literature. The first area, feminist economics, provides both a critique of the mainstream of economics and is part of moves to refashion that discipline. This challenge is expressed both in terms of the need for a gendered understanding of institutions and economic processes and through its critique of the assumptions underlying rational choice, the nature of the household and the public/private divide. In the second area recent work, inspired by the gender and development tradition and undertaken by both feminist economists and other social scientists, has examined the place of gender relations in the emerging global economy and changing international division of labour. This research has focused on the relevance of gender as an analytic category at both the macro and micro levels by looking at structural adjustment in the Third World and restructuring globally.