ABSTRACT
Feminist economics has contributed immeasurably to challenging the core assumptions of neoclassical economics, which project a particular apprehension of economic conduct as a universal human tendency. It has uncovered gender as the social metaphor that drives much of economic theory.Yet the project of a feminist economic analysis is itself constantly challenged by the multifaceted nature of domination and difference, which both render a distinct feminist economic subject ultimately ungraspable. By difference here I do not particularly mean Derridean textual différence but, rather, the more generic, constantly shifting – and, indeed, deferred – sexual and social male/female difference.2 An inherent tension lies in the fact that the recurring presence of female subordination through time and place produces a facility for making the case for a feminist economics. At the same time, however, women share their economic subalternity with a large number of men who have been historically constructed as irrational, deviant, or “less developed” and to whom the market/nonmarket divide, which many see as the root of the gender bias in economics, also applies.
