Invisible hands or hearts? A feminist critique of consumerism and market centrism

This short commentary introduces some key threads of feminist critique to the economy and market-centrism that foreground processes of care, intimacy and interdependency that are currently largely invisible and undervalued. In so doing, we propose that there are some common themes underpinning more radically progressive feminist understandings of the economy that can unsettle some of our discipline's taken-for-granted assumptions about the role and nature of markets and consumption. First, they do so by resisting the subordination of our human economic activity to market activity, second, by foregrounding vulnerability and interdependence rather than individual (consumer) agency and sovereignty, and third, by questioning the reduction of our values to market value.