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The Feminist Subversion of the Economy

Contributions for a Dignified Life Against Capital

Amaia Prez Orozco author Liz Mason-Deese Mason-Deese translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Common Notions

Published:17th Nov '22

Should be back in stock very soon

The Feminist Subversion of the Economy cover

  • Trade coverage in main industry publications(Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal, Choice)
  • Review coverage in relevant outlets (In These Times, n+1, Teen Vogue, Democratic Left, Jacobin, etc)
  • Online and Zoom events around the world
  • We are hoping to be able to bring Amaia Pérez Orozco and Liz Mason-Deese to tour the US—participating in both large gatherings (at universities and bookstores) and small impassioned events.
  • Postcard direct mailing to anchor bookstores
  • Emails to Common Notions email list, relevant newsletters and listservs
  • Galleys available 
  • Online/social media campaign including giveaways 
  • Promotion through the author’s social media
  • Bookseller/Library mailing and promotions, including conference giveaways 
  • Reading group guide 
  • Promotion through activist newsletters and social media 

What does a dignified life—transforming gendered labor divisions and a racialized, exploitative, feminized care economy—look like and how can we collectively build it.

The political response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the pressures on the global capitalist economies has, once again, imposed the priority of markets over life. Add to this the climate crisis and, undoubtedly, the task of sustaining life continues to be privatized, made invisible, and feminized.We must ask: what does a dignified life look like, especially one that transforms the gendered labor divisions and a racialized, exploitative feminized care economy that falls mainly on the shoulders of women—from the household to the wider effects of the capitalist economy on social reproduction.

At the same time, these questions are intimately connected with considerations of our environment. The Feminist Subversion of the Economy makes the conection between patriarchy, capitalism, and ecological crisis—and rallies women, the LGBTQ+ community, and movements worldwide to center gender and social reproduction in a vision for a just ecology and economy.

Public intellectual, academic, and activist Amaia Pérez Orozco offers a vision beyond the myths of development (unlimited growth), wealth (accumulation of capital), and work (limited to waged labor) and, at the same time, accounts for the tasks, networks, and economic subjects that, materially and daily, guarantee that life keeps going. 

Newly translated and updated in collaboration with Liz Mason-Desse, who has won a PEN translation award for her work on feminist economics, The Feminist Subversion of the Economy shows the urgent need to radically and democratically discuss what we mean by a dignified life and how we can organize to sustain life collectively.

“Through a rigorous, relentless exposure of the destructive logic governing capitalist development, Orozco sets the foundations for a feminist politics capable of subverting the myths propagated by capitalist economy and radically transforming the conditions and ends of our social reproduction. A must not only for feminists movements but for all engaged in the struggle to create a more just society.”—Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero and Caliban and the Witch

“Amaia Pérez Orozco skillfully recenters the feminist critique of contemporary capitalist economics on the practices of sustaining life.  The result is analytically rich and politically provocative.”—Kathi Weeks,

Feminist Subversion of the Economy well articulates the road to creating a clear commitment to achieve the interconnections and solidarity that will create and sustain a better world. Amaia Perez Orozco’s contributions for life against capital remind us of our humanness, and the contributions of ecofeminism to dismantling hierarchies, exploitation, and invisibleness, in order to fulfill our collective responsibilities to establish a good life for all.—Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development, Department of Africana Studies, John Jay College, City University of New York; and author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

“In the last decade, feminist political economy has experienced an efflorescence, as a generation of new thinkers has critically revised the practice of reading the interconnected spheres of misery produced by capitalism, in all its debilitating forms. Why? Because such heterodox, ruptural feminisms offer the most robust theorization of the multidimensional confluence of ecological devastation, state-sanctioned racism, deteriorating mental and physical wellbeing, colonial exploitation, reliance on unpaid work (including care), heteropatriarchal division and social murder. These crises are synthetically and historically produced in and through capitalism, a global totality and the epicenter of these problems. Amaia Pérez Orozco’s The Feminist Subversion of the Economy is not just the exemplar of this critical-analytic tradition; this book is a further contribution towards the construction of “a solid base from which to fight”; a “utopian horizon”; a life-sustaining collectively-pedagogical project of “buen convivir”; and a feminist degrowth transition. This book will compel you think differently--and even better, with others!--as to how we can create a life-sustaining economy.”—Kai Bosworth, author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century

ISBN: 9781942173199

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

288 pages