Special issue on Feminism and Capitalism

Why is feminism so good at understanding capitalism? Because gender, like capital, is never separate or pure in its expressions. Feminism has theorized gender as an intersecting system that configures and distributes power not just between female-identified and male-identified persons and within households, but also between classes and between producers and reproducers. It does so within and across these boundaries, and it questions the boundaries themselves. Always relational, feminism is adept at thinking about gender and capital as constitutive and in relation to difference—of sexuality and sex, race and caste, disability and debility, public and private, rural and urban, human and nonhuman animal, and Global North and Global South. Feminism is a critique of knowledge formations. This includes critiques of “classical” Marxism and how capitalism is approached by the disciplines of history, economics, anthropology, geography, science, and by ethnic studies and area studies. Whether decolonial or postcolonial, anti-capitalist feminism challenges the telos of modernity by asking where women’s liberation under capitalism dead-ends rather than progresses, and by questioning the Western-centrism of feminist knowledge production that does not scrutinize its own provenance. In its commitment to alternative worlds, feminism embraces humans, especially those gendered female, as embodied producers of situated knowledge, connected to kin and community, not the disembodied individual rationalists nor the “free” wage laborers capitalism depends on. Feminism is transdisciplinary in its choice of methodologies to apprehend capitalism. At times it is transnational, and at others, location-specific in tracing out the gendered workings of capital at multiple scales. Feminism is always auto-interrogatory, which makes it agile in its response to capitalism in its always restless and mutating forms.

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Leslie Salzinger
Seeing with the Pandemic: Social Reproduction in the Spotlight
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Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam
Housekeeping: Labor in the Pandemic University
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Jiwoon Yulee
A Feminist Critique of Labor Precarity and Neoliberal Forgetting: Life Stories of Feminized Laboring Subjects in South Korea
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Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani
The Gender of Value: Punctuated Violence and the Labor of Care
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Ana Hernández
Socialist Feminism in Venezuela:
Revolution on Three Fronts
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Débora de Fina Gonzalez
“A Rapist in Your Path”:
Feminist Artivism in the Chilean Social Revolt
(News and Views)
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Sushmita Chatterjee and Kiran Asher
Animal Sightings and Citings under COVID Capitalism:
Beyond Liberal Sentimentalism
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Kirin Joya Makker
Womb Chair Speaks (Art Essay)
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Elaine McCrate
Contemporary American Capitalism, Gender, and Work Schedule Instability
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Mercer Gary
Disability and Debility under Neoliberal Globalization
(Review Essay)
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Nina Medvedeva
Belong Anywhere? Airbnb’s Corporate Narratives as Emotional Governance
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Leifa Mayers
Gendered “Risk” and Racialized Inheritance:
Toward a Feminist Analysis of Debt in US Higher Education
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Lily Cox-Richard and Susan Richmond
Fieldwork: Lily Cox-Richard in Conversation
with Susan Richmond (Art Essay)
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Shana Ye
The Drama of Chinese Feminism: Neoliberal Agency,
Post-Socialist Coloniality, and Post-Cold War Transnational Feminist Praxis
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Ka-ming Wu
The Pink Flaneur: Feminist Public Citizenship and Urban Infrastructure in China
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Kathi Weeks
Scaling-Up: A Marxist Feminist Archive
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