How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in strongPolitical Economystrong.pdfVIP

New Political Economy, Vol. 10, No. 4, December 2005 How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in Political Economy V. SPIKE PETERSON Work cannot be understood without examining how gender is embedded in all social relations.1 Our collective fear [is] that the new political economy will fail to adopt a gendered analysis at its core, and will implicitly accept the androcentric bias that has characterized the discipline to date.2 What is the state of debate regarding gendered political economy? Answering this question depends on the existence of a debate, who is presumed to be participating and, especially, how we understand ‘gender’. Among self-proclaimed feminist scholars we can readily identify a range of positions on ‘gender and political economy’. While disciplinary locations prompt some of the variation,3 the most telling differences – or points of debate – reflect varying theoretical (epistemo- logical, methodological) orientations to the study of gender. The range of feminist research constitutes a continuum of overlapping positions that (as clarified below) reflects varying positivist and constructivist (also postmodernist/poststructuralist) orientations. The former mixes feminist and traditional political economy tools to study how men and women – gender understood empirically – are differently affected by, and differently affect, political economy; the latter foregrounds the feminist tool of ‘analytical gender’ to study how masculinity and femininity – gender understood as a meaning system – produce, and are produced by, political economy. Hence, there is a range of positions and, while feminists share a commitment to the centrality of gender, they do debate how to study it. It is more difficult to assess how and to what extent less visibly ‘feminist’ scho- lars participate in the debate. While we see little