Retooling Our Political Imaginations through a Feminist Politics of Economic Difference

Abstract

In this chapter I want to make a case for the importance of the essay ‘Building Community Economies: Women and the Politics of Place’ and the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham more broadly, for the myriad people and social movements who are cocreating new forms and stories of (post-capitalist) politics today. This means on the one hand recognizing the importance of this work outside the field of gender and development studies, and inversely acknowledging the centrality of feminism, women and critical theories of development in reframing our understandings of what an effective post-capitalist politics looks like. In fact I believe that this piece — and the epistemic tools it provides us with — can prove indispensable in getting us out of a certain interpretive impasse when it comes to making sense of various anti and post-capitalist social movements, including the alterglobalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s, and more recently Occupy Wall Street and the 15-M movement, among others. My goal with this chapter is to arrive at a better understanding of how to employ the kind of theoretical and epistemological tools offered by Gibson-Graham, as well as to better understand the obstacles preventing this perspective from gaining more traction.