TY - JOUR

T1 - Crisis Management by Subjectivation

T2 - Toward a Feminist Neo-Gramscian Framework for the Analysis of Europe's Multiple Crisis

AU - Hajek, Katharina

AU - Opratko, Benjamin

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2015 Taylor & Francis.

PY - 2016/3/3

Y1 - 2016/3/3

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - austerity

KW - crisis

KW - feminist IPE

KW - hegemony

KW - neo-Gramscian IPE

KW - subjectivation

KW - Sociology

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84958739934&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/14747731.2015.1102380

DO - 10.1080/14747731.2015.1102380

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:84958739934

VL - 13

SP - 217

EP - 231

JO - Globalizations

JF - Globalizations

SN - 1474-7731

IS - 2

ER -