An intersection that counts: Gender studies and economic sociology

Jeanne Lazarus
A few years ago, I agreed to take responsibility for the course “Sociology of Gender” in the Sociology master’s program at Sciences Po. During the first session, the ten students who had chosen the course – all young women, passionate about the topic and highly committed – protested when they saw the syllabus. “What?” they said. “This isn’t a ‘real’ gender studies course – it’s an economic sociology course in disguise.”

Maud Simonet
In 1975, Silvia Federici, an Italian feminist living in the United States, wrote one of her most famous texts, “Wages Against Housework,” beginning with the sentence: “They say it is love, we say it is unwaged work” (Federici 1975). This line by Federici is now taken up on placards during feminist strikes in Argentina and Spain. It has undoubtedly become one of the slogans of the new global feminist dynamic (Delage and Gallot 2019). But it can also be found reworked, rewritten, and reappropriated in contemporary struggles ...

Marie Trespeuch
Surrogacy has been recognized by the World Health Organization as an assisted reproductive technology (ART) since 2009. It is a means of addressing infertility, similar to artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization (IVF). It concerns women who do not have a uterus or have pathologies preventing pregnancy, as well as male couples. Through in vitro fertilization, it is now possible to create embryos in test tubes and transfer the embryo into a woman’s uterus, who may or may not be the biological mother.

Isabelle Guérin
In France, the press has recently devoted growing attention to what is now called “economic domestic violence”: women who cannot leave their partners because they do not have access to a bank account, because mortgages are jointly held, or because rent has become unaffordable on a single income. A survey shows that 44 percent of French women in relationships would be unable to pay rent without external help if they had to leave (IFOP and Crédit Mutuel 2024). These are numbers. But they point to a very concrete experience ...

Jeanne Lazarus and Lisa Adkins
Lisa Adkins, you are a sociologist, an economic sociologist, but also a specialist of feminist theory. You’ve written many articles in feminist theory journals, and you’ve been joint editor in chief of Australian Feminist Studies. How do you think these two dimensions intersect? It’s a great question, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. What it made me reflect on, especially the framing of the question in terms of intersection, is that much twentieth-century feminism was concerned with women’s relationship to the economy, particularly around questions of labor, both paid and unpaid.

Hope Harvey · 2025
Doubled Up: Shared Households and the Precarious Lives of Families
Princeton: Princeton University Press
Reviewer: Amber Howard

Alexander Reisenbichler · 2025
Through the Roof: Housing, Capitalism, and the State in America and Germany
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Reviewer: Angie Jo

Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli · 2025
Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers
New York: W. W. Norton & Company
Reviewer: David Straub