What are feminist economics? Confronting institutional, empirical and methodological biases
Economics is a study of human behaviour and a system of knowledge and organisation as much as it is political, ideological and power-based. In fact, any discipline that engages with the dynamics of human relations, especially if they touch on identity politics, rights, and participatory principles, has to contend with human behaviour, and thus with the materiality of bodies and our modality of being-in-the-world. [i]
Heterodox, or pluralist economics, depending on the focus of their investigations, present a challenge to established systems of knowledge in order to counter institutional biases. What is considered to be the radical self-interested behaviour of economic agents, is but a part of the totality of human action. Heterodox economics, then, refers to the various disciplines that take up the foundational principles of economics and re-calibrate them as a study of human development.
Feminism can be understood as a challenge to existing socio-cultural and political conditions through critical opposition to them, thus qualifying the value-unneutrality of feminist inquiries. This methodological bias goes against the grain of fairness and neutrality, conditionalities in epistemological research that pivot round the notion of impartiality.[ii] The tacit acceptance of the value-neutrality and sensible nature of this dictum hinges on sameness and difference, two of the most clearly coalesced, and conflicting tenets of feminist thought.
I would like to clarify the complications of making such an assumption, substantive though it may be. Feminist epistemologies attempt to correct for the value-unneutrality that gender occasions.[iii] Central to these frameworks is how gender situates knowing subjects: what is known and how. How is knowledge known? Through formalised schooling, culture, general interest, research methods or cognitive styles. For my purpose here, the question of how gender impacts and affects the production and distribution of knowledge and meaning is explored through embodiment and experience as methods of knowing.
Feminist theory is not sufficiently cohesive in its viewpoints to offer the only methodological framework that supports this project.[iv] Feminisms differ, but converge on two points: a rejection of essentialism; and an agreement that no single social group or demographic category should be granted epistemic privilege when making an inquiry into the nature of social justice. That is, one ought to eschew the idea that groups – including women – have a fixed nature and conform in thought, behaviour and desires. On the whole, feminisms espouse respect for the fact that there are many ways to be a woman. On that basis, a critical inquiry into sexism should not take as given that all women have the same experience, or that there exists a top-down mechanism of domination that systematically subordinates women, despite historical antecedents to that effect.
Feminism invokes a plurality of meanings. The category woman is itself a representation that already assumes a material reality. There is a qualified certainty expressed in radical materialist feminism over the designation woman, but equally there is danger in un-fixing woman from the culturally assigned sexual differentiation of her body. Untethering the body from the institutions and frameworks through which it engages is to foreclose the opportunity to destabilise the sexist attitudes that are fuelled by culture.
One such institution is the field of economics. Economics stakes its epistemic methodologies on objective scientific principles, which insofar as can be determined, are gender-neutral, but not necessarily value-free. Claims to reason, equality and truth are– and remain – carefully weighed and selectively bestowed through formal channels, suggesting the very notion of this universal transcendence is hierarchical. When societies have as their ‘natural basis the inequality of men,’ then there exists an ontological framework for equality based on inequality. [v] Feminist economics considers the foundational tenets of the discipline and reconceptualises them through an intersectional perspective of what it means to negotiate the world through the subjective experience of being.
Being is determined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and socio-economic positioning. These qualifiers are further compounded by opportunities: for education, for security, for livelihood and mobility and for expression – all of which are conditioned by the parameters of the body politic. Being gendered is just one of many social stratifiers [vi] that function as operational frameworks, which do not offer a totalising view of the world. By dint of us being in-the-world, there can be no purity or neutrality to which the phenomenological investigation of some schools of feminisms aspire: the condition of being-in-the-world assumes the natural, the given and the constructed factions of being cannot be elegantly separated. Think of adding sugar to tea; once the crystals have dissolved their previously reconstituted manufactured form is irretrievable. Yet, this integral framework can shape the subjective self without necessarily falling back on a reductionist biological account, [vii] or becoming irretrievably stuck in the binary of sexual difference.[viii]
Furthermore, the feminist precept ‘the personal is political’ does not deny a distinction between public and private. [ix] It does indicate there is a social division between public and private discourses, moderated by institutions that are deemed the right forum in which to discuss the ‘woman problem.’ [x] A challenge to the conceptualisation of care and other forms of social reproduction, for example, as passive units within the economy, is apt. Oft conceived as the domestic, and hence private, sphere of policy, feminist economists highlight the value of this work as the material foundation for the reproduction (labour), management (resources) and continuation (human capital, savings and investment) of the meta-economy.
References and Additional Reading
[i] Being, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, refers to the lived experience of the body through the senses.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New York, 2012)
[ii] MacKinnon 2006:121
MacKinnon, Catharine, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)
[iii] Feminist epistemologies are classified by Sarah Harding The Science Question in Feminism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) as: empiricism, standpoint theory and post-modernism. Feminist epistemologies were developed in the 1980s, to address the gender bias in scientific study and research. The last 25 years have seen a convergence of these methods, focusing on the ways in which gender is implicated in every facet of the world we live in. See also Sarah Harding (1990) “Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques” in Linda Nicholson ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
[iv] Cited theorists like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault are a resource; it is within the constructive aspects of the theory (and not the man and his perceived position within society, culture or academia) that I can position my inquiry. This inquiry is limited in that I do not seek to untangle each author’s politics or belief systems; delve into their thoughts, reclaim them as proto-feminists, or critique them as anti-feminist; or for that matter, survey their views on women in general.
[v] Marx, Karl (1867), p. 997. Das Kapital
Marx, Karl (1867), Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, (Penguin Books: London, 1976)
[vi] Merleau-Ponty (1945)
[vii] Toril Moi What is a Woman? And Other Essays, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
[viii] From Freud’s (1923) claim that the ego (and the id) is ‘foremost a bodily ego’; but also from de Beauvoir (1949) that the experiences of embodiment are not a consequence of anatomy but of the situation of women.
Sigmund Freud (1923) The Ego and the Id in Jon Sletvold,. (2013). ‘The ego and the id revisited Freud and Damasio on the body ego/self’ The International journal of Psychoanalysis. 94:5, pp. 1019-32.
N.B. Freud does not use the phrase ‘bodily ego’ recurrently. Freud’s preoccupation was with identity, and marginally, with how mind is related to body. Here, it is argued throughout that mind and body are unified, as the embodied self.
[ix] Carol Hanisch, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation 1969
<http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html> [18 April 2015]
[x] Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen. “Class and Gender Inequalities and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications.” Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1982, pp. 157–176.
