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The state is often described in transition: public spaces are rearranged by private companies, national social welfare is being privatized to some extent, and supranational institutions have more influence on national policies. “A view from the kitchen” (Diane Elson) is helpful for understanding the changing dynamics of states and societies because different women are affected by these policies in different and often ambiguous ways: women of the globalized South migrate to the North, creating global care chains, while women in Western industrialized countries are confronted with changing welfare regimes, leaving mainly highly educated women to profit from this situation. This article contributes to feminist debates on economic globalization and state internationalization. Our feminist materialist perspective allows a critical view on dominance and power in “governance”. Thus, the article adds to feminist debates on globalization from the perspective of state transformation and to debates on governance from the perspective of state transformation grounded in gendered social relations.

This article develops a gendered state-theoretical materialist framework to show how capitalism as an economic system and the nation-state reproduce gendered hierarchies on multiple levels. With a focus on the symbolic masculine cultural order and its hegemonic political rationality of governing, the current economic crisis and its effects on gender regimes is discussed more specifically. In a case study on a new economic governance form called ‘Sixpack’ within the European Union, the effects of these policies and their symbolic meanings are highlighted. The article therefore challenges the varieties of capitalism literature on gender, arguing that a broader framework of analysis is necessary to capture the intersectional dimensions of domination in capitalism for different subject positions.

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In times of crisis, certain characteristics of the capitalist mode of production, social reproduction 1 and the symbolic realm of societal formation become more clearly visible than would otherwise be the case. Capitalism's inherent contradictions come to the fore and constructions of social norms that serve to reproduce the capitalist order may be rearranged or deepened. Additionally, '[o]nce a crisis strikes, inequalities are reinforced as the ability to respond to the shock differs between more powerful and weaker players' (Fukuda-Parr et al., 2013, p. 15). This includes the power asymmetries between capital and labour, as well as inequalities of gender and ethnicity. In the post-2007 world of crisis, it is therefore even more surprising that theoretical approaches in Comparative Capitalisms (CC) research continue to exclude the social construction of gender, ethnicity and gender inequality. Even though gender is sometimes part of the analysis, broader questions of social reproduction, the hegemonic gender order of states and societies and their interplay with firm-centred decisions, are not related to one another. During times of capitalist crisis, the public-private divide and accompanying unpaid labour in the social reproduction of private households is often reinforced, as one of several dimensions of inequality, in order to secure the capitalist mode of production. A range of well-known feminist economics and political economy scholars have shown this, especially regarding the Asian crisis in the late 1990s and numerous crises in