Crisis Management by Subjectivation: Toward a Feminist Neo-Gramscian Framework for the Analysis of Europe's Multiple Crisis

Abstract

The ongoing global crisis not only poses challenges for critical empirical analyses, it also forces us to reconsider central analytical concepts. This paper takes the multiple crisis as a starting point to reconsider notions of (state) power, hegemony, and subjectivation in contemporary crisis management. We discuss recent analyses by feminist and neo-Gramscian scholars, highlight their valuable contributions to a richer understanding of current crisis politics, and argue for their mutual complementarity. Neo-Gramscian perspectives, which productively highlight the current conjuncture's increasing (lack of) hegemonic qualities, need to be confronted with feminist insights regarding the current transformations of gender orders. In combining these approaches, we develop the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’. To illustrate this we refer to the example of Greece: increasingly coercive and authoritarian modes of governance parallel the re-privatization of reproductive work and increasing reliance on gendered division of labor, traditional concepts of privacy, and gendered knowledge of care and the practices associated with it for the reproduction of social cohesion. With the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’ we hence refer to the fact that austerity policies draw on a gendered (re-)allocation and subjective incorporation of social responsibilities as hidden resources of stability and hegemony. The crisis, through its management, is displaced into the gendered subjects themselves.

Keywords:

• feminist IPE
• neo-Gramscian IPE
• hegemony
• subjectivation
• crisis
• austerity

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Birgit Sauer, Alex Demirović, Gundula Ludwig, and Ove Sutter as well as three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Bruff distances his own analysis from Gill's ‘new constitutionalism’ because, he claims, Gill sees the law as merely an instrument of (transnational) capital (2014, p. 116). While this may be true, both authors share an understanding of the political, ideological, and economic dimensions of the current crisis in which ‘in the absence of a hegemonic aura, neoliberal practices are less able to garner the consent or even the reluctant acquiescence necessary for more “normal” modes of governance’ (Bruff, 2014, p. 115).

2 We remain skeptical about the wider applicability of Gramsci's concept of Caesarism to the current phase of crisis constitutionalism. Gramsci developed the term drawing on Marx's analysis of ‘Bonapartism’. It is based on the assumption of an equilibrium or stalemate of social forces – where ‘they balance each other in such a way that a continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction’ (1971, p. 219) – which allows a third force to intervene. European crisis management, however, is characterized by the opposite: an overwhelming social and political power of neoliberal, transnational capital.

3 Of course, feminist economists initially insisted on the interconnectedness of these realms and indicated the ‘productive’ nature of ‘reproductive’ labor (see for instance the seminal work of Elson, 1998). However, the notion of the state in neo-Gramscian and Feminist IPE differs, as the former goes well beyond the welfare state and focuses on the form, transformation, and exercise of power instead.

4 The fact that Greece as a conservative welfare state witnessed a considerable expansion after joining the European Union is of twofold relevance here: First the comprehensive setup as well as the sudden and massive retrenchment currently seen allows to observe re-privatization processes as described above in time lapse. Second, its historical familialism provides exactly these images of gendered division of labor now implicitly deployed in the austerity politics. (cf. Lyberaki & Tinios 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina Hajek

Katharina Hajek worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna. Currently she is holding a Marietta-Blau Grant and is a Visiting Scholar at the Center of Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies, Technical University of Berlin, and a Ph.D. Candidate at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Vienna University. Her fields of research include feminist political theory, feminist political economy, biopolitics, German social and family policy, and the social effects of the current European crisis and political crisis management. She published in PROKLA, Femina Politica and the Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften and is co-editor of Queer zum Staat: Heteronormativitätskritische Perspektiven auf Staat, Macht und Gesellschaft (2012).

Benjamin Opratko

Benjamin Opratko is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, and a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. He is the author of Hegemonie. Politische Theorie nach Antonio Gramsci (2012/2014) and co-editor of Gramsci global. Neogramscianische Perspektiven in der Internationalen Politischen Ökonomie (2011).