Refashioning IPE: what and how gender analysis teaches international (global) political economy

It remains the case that, in spite of the consistently high quality and quantity of gender analysis, gender has not been able to achieve more than a marginal status in International Political Economy (IPE). Increasingly visible as a category of analysis, gender remains trivialized in the minds of both the mainstream and more critical IPE approaches, as a category pertaining only to the lives of women, women's labour rights and women's social movements. This essay therefore analyses what mainstream and critical IPE approaches do and do not say about the constitution of the global political economy. My central argument is that a gender(ed) IPE analysis is absolutely central to fully understanding and explaining the processes and practices of the global political economy, but that the dominant studies and practices of IPE tend not to take into account the contributions of gender based analyses. A critique of the detailed content of gender approaches in IPE is, however, not the main purpose of this review; rather, gender and feminist analyses are the lenses with which to view IPE, with its exclusions, silences and marginalisations, as well as its openings and future paths, not the other way around.