Valuing Nature: Teresa Brennan's Economic Theory‪.‬

Despite academic turf wars among US feminist theorists between the 'high theory' of those in the humanities and the 'in the field' activism of those in the social sciences, there are fortunately still feminist theorists who creatively defy disciplinary mandates. One example of this creative scholarship is a recent book by J. K. Gibson-Graham titled The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) that combines post-structuralist feminist and queer theory with political economic analysis, seeking new ways to combine class analysis with the new social movement concerns of race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. (1) The main purpose of the book is to show that various critical discourses about capitalism negatively influence our conceptions of possibilities for resistance. Gibson-Graham warns against the 'globalization script' that constructs people as victims of a mystifying and all-powerful new global capitalist order. She argues that this globalization script may be contributing to the very problem of mass political acquiescence that left activists and intellectuals are seeking to solve. Any theorist who acknowledges that discourse plays an important role in constructing political subjects and thus political possibilities can appreciate the main thesis of Gibson-Graham's work. But there are also limits to her argument. Consider the recent protests against the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. Despite Gibson-Graham's claim that the globalization script is politically disempowering, we may very well see a sustained international protest movement invigorated by a critique of the totalizing ambitions of the World Trade Organization and the global economy more generally. Resistance to such totality is the motivation behind some of the most vibrant protests that the United States has witnessed in years. Gibson-Graham argues that a general focus on totalizing, capitalist processes 'discursively produces' disempowered political subjects, but the World Trade Organization protests suggest that this is not necessarily the case.