Among academic and civil society organizations, the financial and economic crisis seems to be a pressing topic. In September 2016, Central European University organized a conference on “Gender and the Economic Crisis” that reflected on the economic crisis and its effects not only on various groups and intersecting identities, but also on national and transnational institutional structures and different forms of feminist resistance. As I write, the European research project called “TransCrisis” also investigates “the EU’s transborder crisis management capacity” and its impact, among others on European gender, race/ethnicity and disability. A new book edited by Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo on Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions, and Intersectionality has just been released (Palgrave 2017). Merely a few years after the global financial crisis whose effects still reverberate, genuine interest for knowledge and understanding has generated new projects and policy analyses that engage the different responses of economies, states and civil society actors. These endeavors answer crucial questions about macroeconomics, political and economic paradigms, and their effects on the lived experiences of people.

It is in this wider context that I welcome Aida A. Hozić and Jaqui True’s anthology, Scandalous Economics. Gender and the Politics of Financial Crisis. The book is a dense and powerful collection of individual contributions divided into four parts—“Scandalous Gendering,” “Scandalous Obfuscations,” “Scandalous Sex” and “Scandalizing Reimagining”—, followed by an Afterword, “Gendering the Crisis.” Three sets of questions unite the sections: who benefits and who loses from the crisis?; who defines and narrates the crisis?; and who is becoming through the crisis? (p. 13). Despite the common denominator that runs across the volume, the contributors have powerful and individual voices. Yet they provide diversity, not division, to the book. As the two editors admit in the “Introduction,” the book is an ambitious project that “explores how scandals—and scandalous uses of and/or neglect of gender—have helped narrate the global financial crisis (GFC) into political oblivion” (p. 3). Gender, scandal and crisis (grounded in the work of the Czech philosopher Karel Kosík) constitute the three key concepts of the book, an analytic matrix that furnishes provocative analysis and arguments, sometimes gently intersected or made more explicit and visible. At the same time, there are multiple lenses embraced within the analysis as the volume highlights the interplay between gender and inequality, class, race, ethnicity and/or sexuality (p. 4–5). One review cannot convey the substantial contribution of the authors to understanding a range of issues, including: the gendered dimensions of financial crises; the connections between financialization, austerity and gender; the role of language in confronting or supporting power hierarchies; the gendered ideologies that cut through the GFC; the measures designed for recovery (of whom?) and their disciplining effects on households and individuals or points of resistance; and the role played by scandals in society, especially during crisis, and the importance of their media depiction. Some chapters are more conceptually driven, others are more reflective. There is a visible empirical line that enriches the arguments, and the examples drawn from various parts of the world (Asia, Latin America, Europe, US), combined with more in-depth individual case studies (Greece, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain), add to the attractiveness of the book. The analysis strengthens another simple, but profoundly complicated idea in terms of operationalization: the need for a critical feminist perspective on the GFC (and on political economy more generally).

The first part of the book examines representations of gender in financial crises and how the rhetoric of responsible women saving finance and economy was reenacted during and after the crisis. One important argument presented here is that women are perceived as a curative force after the GFC. If macho masculinity and male irresponsibility were identified as the root causes of the crisis, then financially savvy and more temperate women have been depicted as the new saviors. Media and international organizations as well as financial firms supported the idea that women will rebuild the economy. Despite the fact that the crisis revealed gender discrimination in the financial sector, this gender imagery is hardly benign, as it feeds the Otherness of women and the myth of a new femininity in finance. The third chapter critically examines the women’s leadership manifestos of Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sheryl Sandberg and Deborah Spar. Jacqui True concludes that their narratives “hardly challenge masculinist power in organizations or structural inequalities in the global economy” and that “their rallying cries to women do not address their material situations and that of their households” (p. 53). Why? Because they are silent on solutions to gender inequalities such as redistributive economic policies and representative gender quotas (p. 53). They have already been co-opted by capitalist structures and won’t be able to provide change from within. This powerful critique has been developed by theorists and researchers of descriptive and substantive representation who notice that advancing women in decision making does not guarantee change in policy or the betterment of women’s lives. Nevertheless, in the contemporary turbulent international political arena, with illiberal decisions regularly affecting women’s lives, it is interesting to note how Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO, donated $1 million to Planned Parenthood to support women’s sexual and reproductive rights under attack in the US under Donald Trump’s administration. Sheryl Sandberg may not be disruptive enough (at all) of the financial system, but it may nonetheless be important for Planned Parenthood to have access to capital, and it was not Mark Zuckerberg to offer the donation. The point I am making is simple: is it possible to teach and learn the lesson of solidarity in dark times? Whom would it help? What will be the costs?

The second section deals with responses of states (in Europe, Latin America and Asia) to financial crisis, and their strong preference for austerity as a way of approaching budgetary imbalance. The section reveals how states transposed neoliberal ideas into policy and institutional change, leading to the decline of social rights through changing governance at national, supranational and European levels. The themes of competitiveness and growth are well developed in the section, together with the household theme (strengthened further in the last section). Along the four chapters we come to understand how policies tried to discipline households, thereby intensifying the crisis of social reproduction. The financial crisis was another opportunity to reinforce structural inequality and not reform the foundations of policy making. I particularly appreciate the eighth chapter, “’To Double Oppression, Double Rebellion’: Women, Capital, and Crisis in ‘Post-Neoliberal’ Latin America,” by Guillermina Seri, because it underscores that our knowledge needs to expand and include all parts of the world. Seri opens wide doors for the readers to see the economic status quo in Latin America and how it relies on the exploitation of women and on forms of violence against them (p. 127). The chapter “contends that femicide has emerged as the main scandal resulting from the crisis in the region” (p. 127). Throughout the collection, True’s 2012 book The Political Economy of Violence Against Women stands as an important reference point for the effects of the economic crisis and austerity measures on violence against women. Violence against women had risen so much during the crisis that women displayed this message in a 2012 march: “stop women from disappearing in democracy.” Seri not only highlights inequality and marginalization, but she also reflects on women’s mobilization and resistance against commodification of life, privatization of natural resources and violence.

The other fine chapters in this section amplify this theme.

The third section focuses on the intersection between sex and crisis. Celeste Monoya’s opening chapter, “Exploits and Exploitations: A Micro and Macro Analysis of the ‘DSK Affair,’” focuses on the sex scandal involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then Director of the IMF, who was accused by Nafissatou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea working as a chambermaid, of having sexually assaulted her. The analysis is carefully developed, the author creates a gentle balance between micro and macro structural power asymmetries as the chapter reflects on ‘DSK Affair’ through two angles, one focused on DSK and Diallo, and the other pivoting around the relationship between the IMF and Guinea. Montoya argues that disrupting the micro and macro rape script is mandatory in order to understand power relations across society. Aida A. Hozić also analyses the institution of scandal in connection with phone-hacking in the UK, an affair that shocked Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in 2011. In chapter 11, Penny Griffin examines how media representations of the crisis approached the human body, how “the global financial crisis has been represented and embodied across high-selling, ‘reputable’ news media sources” (p. 188). The analysis is challenging and contributes another important dimension to the book. It is hilarious and outrageous to see Time magazine’s cover from October 13, 2008 showing “The new hard times” where only men are depicted as facing the hardships of this recession. Unlike previous crises, more women were active on the labor market, and this being the case, the logical conclusion would have been that women too might suffer the effects of hard times.

The book’s final section tries to depict alternatives to capitalism, and reflects on how the crisis managed to shape new subjectivities and new modes of resistance (for instance through queer economics, and the gendered dimensions of Occupy). Anna Aganthangelou examines the discourses accompanying interventions in Greece and notices how the justifications for intervention offered by corporations, bankers, the World Bank, and the IMF draw “on metaphors of race, biology, technology, and social difference” (see for instance Germany as “visionary” and Greece as “feminized” and “lazy).” Nicola Smith asks what it would mean to queer the political economy. She argues that there is an important intersection between economy and sexuality and taking into account their more obvious elision, queer and Marxist studies have not developed a strong connection. Smith deploys a critique of the narrow equal rights agenda (or single issue agenda) that focuses on marriage rights than on social and economic inequality. Judging by my country’s experience, where Romanian LGBT couples have no legislative protection and conservative religious groups are struggling to amend the Constitution so that a family will be defined as the union between a man and a woman, access to formal rights is important. Also, the single issue agenda might encompass social and economic effects. Civil partnership if recognized will also provide for a minimum social and economic protection for LGBT couples (for instance when applying for credit the couples’ income will be considered). Advancing legal rights need not be decoupled from a social and economic agenda; these spheres can support each other. In her chapter, Wanda Vrasti re-appropriates the writings of materialist feminists from the ‘70s and also feminist art and science fiction. Silvia Federici’s notion of “self-reproducing” movements is employed to reflect upon the Occupy movement. The theme of the household is resurrected again, this time in connection with the wages for housework movement. In the Afterword of the book, Marieke de Goede reflects on how to develop authentic and substantial anti-capitalist critiques and maintains that “retreating behind entrenched gendered boundaries is a sign of limited imagination with which contemporary politics and business have dealt with the crisis fallout” (p. 279).

Scandalous Economics. Gender and the Politics of Financial Crisis is a landmark account of the global financial crisis and of the politics of articulating alternatives to the existing economic and political order. The chapters challenge the dominant narratives of the crisis and warn against co-opting feminist and queer perspectives into the dominant language of neoliberal policy responses to the crisis, which threatens to normalize the current economic order that feeds inequality. They offer sharp critiques of financial institutions and macroeconomic models while reflecting on the gender dimensions of the economy. The book is an important contribution to International Political Economy and International Relations as well as to the scholarship of Gender and Politics. While each of its individual contributions has closure, the overall effect of the volume is to engender eagerness for more work of this kind that links the themes of gender, intersectionality and the global political economy.