Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I offer, here, a feminist vision of a global maternal gift economy and describe pathways to moving towards it from exactly where we currently are, both collectively and individually.
The challenges ahead of us are big and may, at times, seem insurmountable. They require a different type of leadership. The women working for climate justice show what feminist leadership is all about and why we need it.
On International Women’s day, March 8, 2022, we launched an animation called ‘For feminist agroecologies’ that invites you to ask yourself questions about your food, and about what food system you want to contribute to.
A socialist-feminist approach cuts through this technical complexity by demanding that the work of reproduction, of caring work and domestic responsibilities, typically undertaken by women and girls, be recognised and valued in equal measure to that of production.
These and other feminist practices depend on face-to-face interactions, a disposition to change, trust and shared experiences. New municipalism offers a great opportunity to experiment with these innovations. It is one we must embrace.
We take the feminisation of politics to mean ‘making politics more feminist’, but that does not simply mean seeing more women in traditional positions of power.
A primary goal of the Community Economies literature is to “decenter” capitalism as the reference point for thinking about alternative economic projects. Why must everything be seen through the normative lens of capitalism?
Feminist movements that are anti-racist, decolonial, anti- and post-colonial, including indigenous feminism, offer other ways of thinking about the link between feminism and food. Specifically borne from the context of Turtle Island and Abya Yala, decoloniality offers a particularly powerful lens.
Given the rapidly changing attitudes towards care work and reproductive labor as our globalized society combats COVID-19, it may finally be time to recognize gender liberation as a practical and necessary achievement.
When it comes to the feminist movement, monuments to individuals are “a standing historic lie” because women’s rights have been won “by a steady history of millions of women and men… working together at the best of times, separately at the worst.” Wagner believes that to honor individuals for such achievements today is to disempower the movement itself.
Change needs to be systemic to match the scale of the emergency and the inequalities uncovered and reproduced by the pandemic. This crisis can and should be used as a collective learning point for a transformation towards an alternative feminist degrowth future.
It’s much easier to teach students how to shift curves, solve equations, and run regressions, than to carefully observe economic life and think deeply and critically about it. Students also tend to feel comfortable – and even feel powerful – when told “here, we are handing you the exact tools and models you need to use to understand how the economy works.”
