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

This paper addresses the limitations of existing International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship in analyzing the post-2008 European crisis. While neo-Gramscian scholars have effectively highlighted the shift toward authoritarian crisis management, the authors argue that these analyses often overlook the gendered dimensions of social reproduction. By integrating feminist insights with neo-Gramscian theory, the authors develop a new conceptual framework to better understand how neoliberal austerity regimes maintain stability.

The authors introduce the concept of 'crisis management by subjectivation' to describe how austerity policies function. Rather than relying solely on top-down coercion or broad social consensus, these policies displace the costs of the crisis into the private sphere. By cutting public services and welfare, states force the re-privatization of reproductive work—such as caregiving and household maintenance—onto individuals. This process relies on traditional gendered divisions of labor and knowledge, effectively turning gendered subjects into the primary 'resources' for maintaining social cohesion during times of economic instability.

This framework is significant because it challenges the 'hydraulic' model of hegemony, which assumes that as consent decreases, coercion must automatically increase. The authors demonstrate that crisis management is more complex: it actively shapes and utilizes gendered identities to sustain neoliberal projects. By analyzing the crisis through this lens, researchers can better understand how austerity is not just an economic policy, but a transformative project that reconfigures the relationship between the state, the economy, and the individual. This approach provides a necessary tool for identifying both the hidden mechanisms of neoliberal stability and the potential sites for resistance.