Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises

Of all of the lies, fragile alliances, and predatory financial dealings that have been revealed in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, we have yet to come to terms with the ways in which structural inequalities around gender and race factor into (and indeed make possible) the current economic order. Scandalous Economics is about "silences" - the astonishing neglect of gender and race in explanations of the Global Financial Crisis. But, it is also about "noises" - the sexual scandals and gendered austerity policies that have relegated public debate, and the crisis itself, into political oblivion. While feminist economists and movements such as Occupy Wall Street have pointed to the distributional inequalities that are an effect of financial deregulation, scholars haven't really grappled with the representational inequalities inherent in the way we view the politics of the market. For example, capitalism won't be made more equitable simply by appointing women to leadership positions within financial firms or corporations. And the next crisis will not be averted if our understandings of gendered inequalities are framed by sexual scandals in media and popular culture. We need to look at the activities and the privileges of the advantaged - the "TED women" of the crisis -- as much as the victimization of the disadvantaged - to fully grasp the interplay between gender and economy in this fragile age of restoration. Scandalous Economics breaks new ground by doing precisely this. It argues that normalization of the post-GFC economic order in the face of its obvious breakdown(s) has been facilitated by co-optation of feminist and queer perspectives into national and international responses to the crisis. Scandalous Economics builds upon the Occupy movement and other critical analysis of the GFC to comprehensively examine gendered material, ideational and representational dimensions that have served to make the crisis and its effects, 'the new normal' in Europe and America as well as Latin America and Asia. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume - Anna M. Agathangelou (PhD Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University) is an Associate Professor at York University, Toronto and former fellow, Program on Science, Technology and Society, J.F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard. She is co-editor of Arab Revolutions and World Transformations (with Nevzat Soguk) (Routledge 2013), the co-author of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (with L.H.M. Ling) (Routledge 2009), the author of Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (Palgrave 2004). She just completed a co-edited volume with Kyle D. Killian titled Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De) Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives (Routledge, 2016). Ian Bruff is Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. He has published widely on capitalist diversity, neoliberalism, and social theory. He recently completed a large cross-country project on the diversity of contemporary capitalism(s) with Matthias Ebenau, Christian May and Andreas Nolke, which produced two German-language collections in 2013 (with Westfalisches Dampfboot and the journal Peripherie) plus an English-language special issue in 2014 (the journal Capital & Class) and an English-language volume in 2015 (with Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently researching the political economy of authoritarian neoliberalism in Europe, and acts as the Managing Editor of the Transforming Capitalism book series published by Rowman & Littlefield International. Marieke de Goede is Professor of Political Science at University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on the intersections between finance and security, and contemporary preemptive security politics. She is author of Virtue, Fortune and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (2005) and Speculative Security: the Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies (2012). De Goede is Associate Editor of Security Dialogue. Juanita Elias is an Associate Professor in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research is on gender and International Political Economy, domestic worker migration in Asia, and the gendered nature of economic competitiveness promotion in Malaysia. Recent publications can be found in the journals Asian Studies Review, Globalizations, International Political Sociology and International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is the co-editor of the books The Gendered Political Economy of the Household in Asia (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013 - with Samanthi Gunawardana) and The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2016 - with Lena Rethel). Penny Griffin is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research explores the processes, practices and effects of the contemporary global political economy with a view to understanding how these shape and are shaped by gender identity(ies) and includes publications with Routledge (Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why Women Are in Refrigerators and Other Stories), Palgrave Macmillan (Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance, winner of the 2010 BISA IPEG book prize) and in the journals New Political Economy, the Review of International Political Economy and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. Aida A. Hozic is Associate Professor of International Relations and Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Science, University of Florida. She is the author of Hollyworld: Space, Power and Fantasy in the American Economy (Cornell, 2002) and numerous articles situated at the intersection of international political economy, cultural studies and international security. In addition to her home institution, she has taught at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, and University of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is a recipient of several Fulbright grants, John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in international security, Open Society Fellowship and other research and program grants. Johnna Montgomerie is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she teaches on the Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) degree and contributes to the newly established Political Economy Research Centre (www.perc.org ). She has published widely on financialisation and debt; her current research explores alternatives to austerity, which, together with co-author Daniela Tepe-Belfrage, forms part of an ESRC seminar series Rethinking Recovery running until end of 2016. Celeste Montoya is associate professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is author of From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women. She has published articles in journals such as International Organization, Politics & Gender, Social Politics, and Publius. Elisabeth Prugl is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva where she directs the Institute's Programme on Gender and Global Change. In the course of her academic career in the US and Switzerland her research and teaching have focused on gender politics in international governance. She currently directs research projects on gender experts and gender expertise in international organizations, gender and armed conflict, and gender and land commercialization. Her recent publications include "Neoliberalising Feminism" (New Political Economy, online September 2014) and "Equality Means Business" (International Political Economy 2014, Vol. 22, 6, with Jacqui True). Adrienne Roberts is a lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of international political economy, feminist political economy, gender and finance, debt and debt-driven development. Her work has been published in journals that include New Political Economy, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Critical Sociology. She is co-editor of the Rowman & Littlefield International book series 'Global Political Economies of Gender and Sexuality' and co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of International Political Economy of Gender, published by Edward Elgar. Guillermina Seri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Union College, serving as the Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) since the Fall 2015. Seri is the author of Seguridad: Crime, Police Power, and Democracy in Argentina (Continuum, 2012; Bloomsbury, 2013), now preparing a volume on unlawful governance in democracies, and she teaches courses in political theory and Latin American Politics. Nicola Smith is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research explores the intersections between feminist political economy and queer theory, and recent publications include Queer Sex Work (Routledge, 2015, edited with Mary Laing and Katy Pilcher), Global Social Justice (Routledge, 2014/2011, edited with Heather Widdows) and Body/State (Ashgate, edited with Angus Cameron and Jen Dickinson)'. Daniela Tepe-Belfrage is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield. She currently holds a Faculty of Social Science Research Fellowship. Her research is concerned with Feminist Political Economy, Critical Theory, Austerity, British Politics, Politics of Caring and Parenting. Her research has been published as a monograph with Palgrave Macmillan (2012) The Myth about Global Civil Society: Domestic Politics to Ban Landmines and in journals that include International Politics, Public Administration, Review of International Political Economy and Capital & Class. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook on Gender in Global Politics, published by Edward Elgar and a Special Issue on Inequality and Insecurity in British Household in British Politics. Jacqui True is Professor of Politics & International Relations and Australian Research Council Professorial Future Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests are in the political economy of post-conflict societies, the prevention of mass sexual and gender-based violence, and feminist methodologies for international relations. She is author of The Political Economy of Violence Against Women (Oxford University Press, 2012), winner of the American Political Science Association's 2012 biennial prize for the best book in human rights and the British International Studies Association International Political Economy 2013 best book award. Wanda Vrasti is a writer and researcher living in Berlin. Her PhD dissertation, entitled Volunteer Tourism in the Global South: How to Be Good in Neoliberal Times, was published with Routledge in 2012. She has taught social studies courses to graduate and undergraduate students at the Humboldt University, where her research interests broadened to include: Marxist political economy, social movements theories, radical feminism, and the politics (and perspective) of labor. Following from that and a growing interest in visual modes of representing capital, Wanda is currently making a film about the production of surplus labor as the key to Germany's economic success model. Stefanie Wohl, Dr. phil., is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna and Head of the Team "European and International Studies." She has held guest professorships at the University of Kassel, Germany, and at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on European Integration, Gender, State Theory and democratic development. Among her recent publications is: "Gender Inequalities in the Crisis of Capitalism: Spain and France Compared" in Ian Bruff, Matthias Ebenau and Christian May (eds.) 2015: New Directions in Comparative Capitalisms Research: Critical and Global Perspectives, London/NY (Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 101 -117 (together with Julia Lux).