A common lament among international political economy (IPE) scholars during the depths of the Great Recession was that there was not enough IPE scholarship about the Great Recession. Even now, a decade after it started, there remains a paucity of peer-reviewed research on the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. The deficit in more critical IPE perspectives, such as feminism or queer theory, has been even greater.
Aida H. Hozic and Jacqui True's edited volume Scandalous Economics is an ambitious effort to fill this void, with fourteen chapters from sixteen authors on the gendered nature of both the financial crisis and its effects on the global political economy. In their introduction to the volume, Hozic and True explain that their purpose is to “challenge the dominant narrative of the crisis as a series of contagious events exogenous to the global capitalist system” (p. 5) More importantly, the book strives to “show how feminist political economy analysis contributes important and distinctive insights to the critical enterprise” of international political economy. One of the themes that several of the chapters discuss is the role that “scandal” plays in reaction to the crisis. A scandal operates as a socially-constructed narrative that helps to discipline restive actors during the Great Recession.
Reviewing Scandalous Economics is something of a challenge, for several reasons. The first is my own privileged position in the discipline in relation to the contributors. In her chapter, Anna Agathangelou argues that “the foundations of (neoliberal) global finance are intrinsically gendered, since they are predicated on masculinist subjectivities, particularly those based on the privileging and experiences of middle-class, white, Western men” (p. 183). I have little choice at this point but to awkwardly out myself as a mainstream IPE scholar who has written about the financial crisis without any discussion of gender. My very identity resembles her remark, so take my criticisms in that context.
The greater challenge is assessing the value-added of a feminist political economy approach to explaining the 2008 financial crisis. Critical approaches should be able to identify problems and causes overlooked by mainstream scholarship. Hozic and True’s volume succeeds on problem identification. Several of the chapters focus on the post-crisis narrative of empowering women in finance to correct the aggressive, masculine approach to investment. The first part of the book contains insightful chapters by Elisabeth Prügl, Jacqui True, and Adrienne Roberts that deconstruct business-friendly narratives regarding women and finance. Chapters by Celeste Montoya, Penny Griffin, and Aida Hozic pick up on the gendered theme of scandal, looking at how the Fleet Street hacking scandal and the “DSK affair” help to illuminate how to interpret the post-crisis global political economy. These are areas that have been neglected by mainstream IPE scholarship, and those portions of the book make for interesting reading.
Scandalous Economics is less convincing on its ability to derive novel explanations for the crisis and response. Many of the authors note in passing that a key origin of the crisis was the targeting of subprime mortgages to female-headed and minority households, but the notion is not developed at all. Most of the chapters excoriate globalization and neoliberalism for subordinating all aspects of society to the free market. This echoes Karl Polanyi’s 1944 critique of capitalism (even though he is barely referenced in this volume), which is not terribly distinctive.
Part of the problem might be that for critical feminist scholarship, the crisis itself is simply a noticeable blemish on an already garish portrait of capitalism. Author after author rails against the invidious and gendered nature of neoliberalism. In her chapter, Adrienne Roberts warns that “the extension and deepening of global finance have perpetuated inequalities at the intersections of gender, class, race, and nationality” (p. 58). The hostility to liberal feminism, viewed in Scandalous Economics as “add women and stir,” is not subtle.
From this lens of analysis, the crisis itself simply reinforced the neoliberal economic paradigm. While this might be consistent with critical feminism, it does not leave much room for subtle descriptive inference or an exploration in the variation of post-crisis behavior. Agathangelou casually asserts in her chapter that the ordoliberalism of Germany is little different from Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism, a claim that obfuscates far more than it reveals. I could not figure out from this volume which situation was worse for women from the developed world: the ability to cross borders to serve as domestic labor in the developed world, or the post-2008 restrictions on migration. Indeed, for all of globalization’s ills, it is curious that not a single contributor mentions the decline in extreme poverty that has persisted after 2008—surely a trend that benefits marginalized groups more than most.
What is particularly curious are the elements of post-crisis response that are clearly gendered but go unexplored in this volume. Many of the chapters focus on the quick turn to fiscal austerity after the crisis. Ian Bruff and Stefanie Wöhl note in their chapter on the eurozone, for example, that “masculinized norms have proved to be integral to the gendered nature of the response to crisis” (p. 97). Such a statement willfully omits Angela Merkel’s repeated invocations of the “thrifty Swabian housewife” to promote the virtues of austerity to Germany and the rest of Europe. Given Merkel’s pivotal role, it is shocking to see no mention whatsoever of her housewife metaphor, freighted with its politics of social reproduction.
The nature of edited volumes is that the lag time between production and publication is long. This is a particular shame for Scandalous Economics. The chapters that discuss Greece do not mention the rise of Syriza and its significance for the political economy of the eurozone. More generally, there is no discussion of the incipient wave of populist nationalism that has affected many of the countries discussed in the volume. Mainstream IPE scholarship is scrambling to explain this phenomenon; the feminist perspective offered by Hozic, True, and their contributors would no doubt add a valuable alternative perspective.
