ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the relationship between gendered inequalities and global political economy (GPE). It addresses that the encouragement of (over)consumption has severe environmental effects. The chapter exposes how neoliberal globalization has exacerbated the disposability of resources and bodies, particularly those that are most gendered, racialized, and classed, ultimately threatening the planet itself. It shows the power of gender persists through masculinist, racist, classist, and heteronormative assumptions and objectives in economic and geopolitical thinking and practice. The power of gender operates to reproduce divisions of labor and responsibility in social reproduction and formal production that favor short-term neoliberal objectives and sustain commitments to competition and growth—but at the price of long-term crises of social reproduction and environmental sustainability. The chapter observes how policymaking remains largely top-down, formulaic, and overreliant on growth and quantifiable indicators, often at the expense of being focused on provisioning, human well-being, and social and environmental sustainability, contributing to generally as the crisis of sustainability.
