Crisis Management by Subjectivation: Toward a Feminist Neo-Gramscian Framework for the Analysis of Europe's Multiple Crisis

The ongoing global crisis not only poses challenges for critical empirical analyses, it also forces us to reconsider central analytical concepts. This paper takes the multiple crisis as a starting point to reconsider notions of (state) power, hegemony, and subjectivation in contemporary crisis management. We discuss recent analyses by feminist and neo-Gramscian scholars, highlight their valuable contributions to a richer understanding of current crisis politics, and argue for their mutual complementarity. Neo-Gramscian perspectives, which productively highlight the current conjuncture's increasing (lack of) hegemonic qualities, need to be confronted with feminist insights regarding the current transformations of gender orders. In combining these approaches, we develop the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’. To illustrate this we refer to the example of Greece: increasingly coercive and authoritarian modes of governance parallel the re-privatization of reproductive work and increasing reliance on gendered division of labor, traditional concepts of privacy, and gendered knowledge of care and the practices associated with it for the reproduction of social cohesion. With the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’ we hence refer to the fact that austerity policies draw on a gendered (re-)allocation and subjective incorporation of social responsibilities as hidden resources of stability and hegemony. The crisis, through its management, is displaced into the gendered subjects themselves.