ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of feminist and gender studies approaches to financialization. These approaches allow us to consider not only the different effects of financial practices on women, but also the ways in which finance is intertwined with the development of gendered subjectivities. Given the salience of crises and austerity policies as consequences of financialization, much feminist work concerns their distributional effects, which generally disadvantage women and people of color. With the 2008 global financial crisis, analysts of gendered distributional effects turned to Europe and the US. Feminist scholars describe how macroeconomic policy biases undergird the crisis and disproportionately impact women. As far as policy responses to the financial crisis go, feminist scholars have exposed gendered effects of stimulus and recovery efforts. For example in Germany, where post-crisis recovery was comparatively swift, male-dominated sectors benefitted more from supposedly “gender-neutral” tools like extension of temporary work benefits.
