This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might better integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about the nature of the “everyday” political economy. At the same time, we hope that this intervention might also draw attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the gendered structures and practices of the global political economy in feminist security studies (FSS).
We note that a neglect of everyday gendered practices of violence in IPE is, in part, a reflection of the overall marginalization of gender within this field (Elias Reference Elias, Shields, Bruff and Macartney2011). True (Reference True2012), however, has opened up important lines of debate—showing how violence against women both underpins and is perpetuated by the process of global economic transformation. Policy reports from key global economic governance institutions such as the World Bank (2013) have nonetheless displayed a propensity to present violence against women as an economic “cost” without examining the structures and processes that enable violence against women to take shape within the contemporary global economic system. While we, like True, are deeply skeptical of this approach, we do, nonetheless, seek to interrogate the “costs” of violence by focusing on the everyday human, as opposed to just the economic, cost of this violence.
Within the study of IPE, one particular opening into which a discussion of gendered violence can make an important contribution is the recent turn to the “everyday” (Hobson and Seabrooke Reference Hobson and Seabrooke2007)—a development that has largely neglected the contributions of feminist scholarship. This includes International Relations (Enloe Reference Enloe1989) and feminist scholarship on the nature, experience, and methodological significance of the everyday (Scheper-Hughes Reference Scheper-Hughes1992; Smith Reference Smith1987). Hobson and Seabrooke's everyday IPE approach in particular can be critiqued for its propensity to present the “everyday” as a site of mundane acts of political agency—a perspective that jars somewhat when read against Scheper-Hughes’ ethnography of the “violence of everyday life” as experienced by poor mothers in the Brazilian favelas of the 1980s. Here, the everyday is an ambiguous and contradictory space in which injustices of political economic inequality are manifested in women's emotional responses to child bearing, rearing, and mortality (specifically, poor women's acceptance of their children's death) (1992, 341). Scheper-Hughes' work echoes Smith's (Reference Smith1987) commitment to studying the everyday as “embedded in a socially organized context” (p. 90) but which must also be understood as “an actual material setting, an actual local and particular place in the world.” It is this local material world that is emphasized by Bourgeois and Scheper-Hughes (Reference Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes2004) in their rejection of all-encompassing (top-down) theories of neoliberalism as structural violence—instead pointing to how it is the lived experiences of those on the ground that generate the most useful insights that enable us to connect everyday acts and forms of violence to broader political economic structures and systems.
In order to illustrate our argument, we outline three strands of the violence of everyday life in the global political economy: (1) the pervasiveness of violence within feminized global zones of work, such as export processing zones or the expanding market for migrant domestic work; (2) women's experience of violence in public spaces, particularly that relating to mobility and public transport; and (3) the relationship between women's subordination in the household and forms of violence.
The experience of violence by women factory workers is important to consider in developing an FPE approach to everyday violence not least because of the tendency to equate women's entry into paid employment with forms of “empowerment” that undermine patriarchal household relations. If we return to Elson and Pearson's (Reference Elson, Pearson, Young, Wolkowitz and McCullagh1981) classic work on this topic, we see how gender relations are not merely decomposed, but also recomposed and intensified when women enter paid employment—for example, the uses of sexual harassment as a way of securing workplace discipline (Muñoz Reference Muñoz2008). An understanding of the gendered violence of global factory production must, furthermore, recognize how the emergence of export processing industrialization is, in many respects, an effective “scaling-up” of the working practices of the informal and/or homeworking sectors to the global economy (Cross Reference Cross2010), serving to reproduce the structures of domination and inequality of the household within global zones of work. These blurred lines between the global and the household are, furthermore, evident in the emergence of large-scale movements of migrant women to take up employment as domestic workers, exposing women to multiple forms of violence by the state and individuals (Elias Reference Elias2013).
The recomposition and/or intensification of violent gender relations is also evident in relation to the violence that women experience in the everyday act of going to work; their mobility invites violence. Rises in women's engagement in economic activity outside of the home increases their visibility in public spaces and yet also results in women experiencing forms of disciplining or “backlash” that stem from perceptions of women as stepping out of place. Urbanization and urban poverty bring about new experiences of everyday violence for women. We see poorly supported, overcrowded public transportation systems within urban areas as a key site for gender violence. Travel on public transport is always mediated by class. The poor, in particular, need to travel long distances to get to work. The issue of sexual harassment and assault on public transport—something that is frequently dismissed as an inconvenience rather than an act of violence—is one that speaks particularly well to developing an understanding of gender violence as an “everyday” phenomena.
The relationship between women's subordination in the household and violence is most frequently understood in terms of the issue of domestic violence. Global political economic transformations do play out in households in ways that empower women, making them less vulnerable to violence, but also in ways that significantly disempower women. For example, Baxi, Rai, and Ali (Reference Baxi, Rai and Ali2006) found in their study of so-called “honour” crimes in India that one motivating factor in disciplining young women through household and community violence was the fear that the liberalization of the Indian economy, increasing migration of young men and women to cities, and the influx of television programmes from the West would lead to the erosion of traditional gendered social practices of marriage. The performance of this violence was also suggestive of the elision of governance of communities with the governance of polity—caste-based village councils (khap panchayats) being allowed to decree punishment with full knowledge of the state/secular local government (Baxi, Rai, and Ali Reference Baxi, Rai and Ali2006).
Beyond these specific examples, in thinking about the violence of everyday life within the household from a political economy perspective, it is also important to broaden notions of violence to include not just direct physical attack, but also forms of violence that impact on women's bodily integrity in terms of access to adequate nutrition or healthcare. We would also add the psychological violence that stems from the way in which women's work in the domestic sphere remains unrecognized, unrewarded, and misrepresented (Waring Reference Waring1988). Thus, in outlining a theory of “depletion” through social reproduction, Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas (Reference Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas2014) underscore how the nonrecognition of the socially reproductive work that takes place within households can lead to discursive, bodily, emotional, and citizenship-entitlement harm. By showing how macrolevel nonrecognition of socially reproductive work is intimately connected to everyday depletion of individuals, households, and communities, Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas develop a materialist feminist understanding of everyday systemic violence. In this framework, harm occurs when there is a measurable deterioration in the health and well-being of individuals and the sustainability of households and communities and when the inflows required to sustain social reproductive work fall below a threshold of sustainability (Reference Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas2014, 6). In times of crises, economic downturn, war, and social conflict, there can be an intensification of this harm. So, by revealing the links between IPE and the everyday social reproductive work, we can analyze how women's productive and social reproductive commitments under late capitalism are experienced on the ground.
There is, we note, something of a gap within feminist studies of the household and social reproduction in political economy when it comes to the issue of violence. Although there exist multiple strands of feminist political economy analysis (Elias Reference Elias, Shields, Bruff and Macartney2011), we focus on the more materialist-oriented social reproduction literature since this is where we locate ourselves as scholars. We feel that it is useful to think through how a theory of violence might be embedded into studies of social reproduction, and one way to do this is by mobilizing the concept of depletion. For example, by situating factory or domestic workers within broader sets of socially reproductive relations, it is possible to point to the costs and harms that are experienced by female workers in low-paid, labor-intensive work—the harms to their health and well-being (including emotional well-being) and broader harms to the community and (global) household.
Outlining the ways in which we think a focus on the “everyday” in IPE opens up space for discussions of violence as a gendered phenomenon. This, then, is an intervention we hope serves as a starting point for developing further conversations within feminist IR (while at the same time ensuring that we continue to have conversations with nonfeminist critical IPE scholars). This short piece is not a critique of FSS for its lack of attention to the everyday political economy (or even the not-so-everyday political economy of neoliberal economic restructuring). Rather, this piece is a contribution to this Critical Perspectives section, which provides a forum for thinking about ways in which we can re-engage.
We recognize that for many FSS scholars focused on unpacking the discursive construction of militarized and/or securitized identities, an engagement with the more materialist focus of much recent feminist political economy scholarship may not be particularly attractive. However, our intention is that through demonstrating the strong and clear links between social reproduction, the everyday political economy, and issues of violence against women, we can encourage a dialogue across these subfields. In doing so, we also hope that we can inspire more FSS scholars to start thinking about links between violence and everyday political economy.
