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“The feminist economy urges us to re-examine how we think about what we need to survive and relate to each other.”
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What It Means (and What It Will Take) to Build a Feminist Economy
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Lauren Jacobs and Cindy Wiesner explore the connections between US-based and global movements, the conditions and experiments necessary to build a feminist economy, and how we can center life and sustainability in our work and beyond.
Check out highlights from their conversation below and read the full piece here [[link removed]] .
On the feminist economy
Racism and gender oppression are the pillars that function to maintain capitalism. To counter that, we need a gender justice feminist analysis and a racial justice abolitionist analysis incorporated into the economy that we want to build.
A feminist analysis of the economy raises the question of how we measure success. What are the standards for how we're living? From an extractive, capitalist sense, the measure of success is based on profit, the stock market, and competition. When you think about that question from a feminist point of view, the measure is whether we are in right relationship with ourselves, other people, and nature.
On authoritarianism and the gendered division of labor
Authoritarianism is dependent on a patriarchal model of the economy and an exploitative relationship to the natural world, where the planet and its resources are viewed as here for the taking. It’s also dependent on a patriarchal model of the family, where the father figure can discipline and reward. Authoritarianism reproduces a division of labor in the political sphere that is based on very strict, old gender models.
What we would call “social reproduction” or “familiar reproduction” is usually within the private sphere. It includes agricultural and domestic work — cooking, laundry, childcare, service work, elder care — all work that is necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of life. Part of the early feminist fights around the economy was for the recognition, valuing, and paying of that work.
On sustainability and transformation
The feminist economy centers around the sustainability of life. Part of forging this paradigm involves centering the care of human life and nature, and understanding that we are interdependent with each other and eco-dependent on our planet. This perspective asks: what is our relationship to our body? What is the construction of autonomy? How do we get to self-determination, not only for women, non-binary people, intersex and trans people, but for all people?
So many of our movements are envisioning alternative systems to justice; they’re exploring how to design justice systems that are not based on oppression or the reinforcement of a patriarchal punitive model. When we think about restorative, transformative justice where the objective is re-socialization, that in itself is a core component of feminist praxis.
Read their full conversation [[link removed]]
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