ABSTRACT
Hewitson and Charusheela employ feminist poststructural and postcolonial theory to explore how economists, in theory and practice, address basic issues of equality and difference, and subjectivity and agency. They examine the tools and assumptions of economics to raise questions about the status of subjects and agents in economics: who are they and what are their characteristics? What kind of knowledge do they produce and what kind of knowledge do they exclude? How do they help us construct (describe and change) real life? Their chapters provide some answers to these questions. They demonstrate in particular how elements of mainstream economic theories of choice and exchange work to produce specific, not necessarily consistent, gendered notions of subjectivity and agency. They also indicate how these theories can simultaneously exclude sexual and cultural differences, and ‘explain’ the obvious differences in economic outcomes between groups.
