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The feminist movement has demonstrated how the precarity caused by neoliberal policies constitutes a specific economy of violence in which femicide and travesticides are its culminating scene. And it has put that economy of violence on the public agenda. We could synthesize it as such: we have developed a multilayered comprehension of the different forms of violence that also complicates and enriches the challenges for dismantling it. We were able to conclude that femicides and travesticides are political crimes because the connection had previously been drawn between gender-based violence and labor violence, between racist violence and institutional violence, between the violence of the legal system and economic and financial violence. What explodes as “domestic violence” cannot be understood without this map of the whole, without this diagram of links. When we speak of violence against women, lesbians, and trans people we are getting at the heart of the system of capitalist violence, the violence necessary to sustain it in its current phase of cruelty..

(Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, "Taking Debt out of the Closet", 2021) Excerpts A Feminist Reading of Debt

Starting in the early 1980s, fashionable opinion held that unfettered free markets, a reduced role for the state, and integration into the global economy provided the best formula for development. International financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), pressed developing countries to conform to the formula as a condition of their loans. In policy circles, this formula came to be known as the “Washington Consensus.” Today the consensus is breaking up. Its legitimacy is declining in the face of slow economic growth, crippling instability in global financial markets, growing inequality, and the degradation of working conditions for large numbers of people.

(Mark Levinson, "The Cracking Washington Consensus", 2025) Dissident Magazine Article

debt is introduced at an increasingly early age,for 18-year-old boys and girls seeking their first insertion into the labor market. Debt is proposed as a “structure” of obligation for those incipient and precarious labor trajectories. While employment is intermittent, debt is long term. Thus, it functions as continuity in terms of its obligation in the face of the discontinuity of income, making those incomes (that are increasingly used to make interest and installment payments) even more fragile, and as a growing blackmail forcing people to accept any type of working conditions. What type of moral education is necessary for indebted and precarious youth? It is not a coincidence that the government tries to impose financial education in schools at the same time as it rejects the implementation of Comprehensive Sexual Education (ESI), which is translated into budget cuts, outsourcing it to religious NGOs, and restricting it to a preventative norm. Sexual education is limited and redirected to constrict its ability to open imaginaries and to legitimate the practice of other relations and desires beyond the heteronormative family.

(Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, "A Feminist Reading of Debt" 2021)

The international strikes of women, lesbians, trans persons, and travestis allows for debating and making visible in a feminist register a map of the heterogeneity of labor. Diverse feminisms have put forth a method of struggle that lives up to the challenge of the current composition of what we call territories and bodies in struggle, starting from struggles against neo-extractivist dispossession and from migrant, precarious, neighborhood, domestic, community work. That movement also produced elements for understanding waged labor, as well as the dynamic of labor unions, in a new way.

(Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, "10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance)", 2020)

The group of Chicago-trained, Chilean economists has been widely called the "Chicago Boys" for their training at the University of Chicago and collaboration with each other upon their return to Chile...While the Chicago Boys held various positions in academia and business, they did not play an integral role in Chilean politics and policy making until after the 1973 coup that brought the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet to power. As academics at the Universidad Católica, the Chicago Boys emphasized monetarism and free market societies. These teachings starkly contrasted with the structuralist and Marxist economic thought in Chile and in most of Latin America at the time. For this reason, the presence of these economists in Chile was never completely accepted by the economic and academic communities that dominated Chilean society

(Valerie Brender, ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS IN CHILE: THE FORMATION OF THE CHICAGO BOYS, 2010)

Feminist economics allows us to understand the specific forms of the exploitation of women and feminized bodies in a capitalist society. Therefore, and in order to do so, it expands the very notion of the economy, including everything from the sexual division of labor to modes of oppressing desire. The first objective is to be able to perceive, conceptualize, and measure a differential in the exploitation of women, lesbians, trans persons, and travestis. It is about something much more extensive than accounting for the activities carried out by women and feminized bodies. And this is due to the second objective of feminist economics – which is a critique of political economy and not a demand for quotas in a competitive neoliberal world: disobeying, subverting, and transforming the capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal order. It is in this context that the question of the differential of exploitation must be situated today. And the point of departure for this question is the concrete site of the beginning of that differential: reproduction..

(Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, "10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance)", 2020)

We want to propose a concept of reproduction that emerges through the politicization of reproductive tasks which are de-confined from the home because of the crisis. What this means is that these labors are spread out over an expanded social terrain and achieve new social prestige, embodied in feminized forms of leadership that refuse to be recognized in monetary terms or in terms of territorial authority.

(Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, "10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance)", 2020)

What does it mean to take debt out of the closet? To take each individual’s, each household’s, each family’s debt out of the closet, first we have to talk about it. It means narrating it and conceptualizing it in order to understand how it functions; investigating how it is interwoven with different economies. It means making visible how it extracts value from certain forms of life and how it intervenes in processes of production and reproduction of life. It means asking: In which territories does it gain strength? What types of obedience does it produce? Taking it out of the closet means making it visible and situating it as a common problem, de-individualizing it. Because taking debt out of the closet involves challenging its power to shame and guilt and its power to function as a “private issue,” which we can only face by managing our accounts alone.

(Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, "Taking Debt out of the Closet", 2021) Excerpts A Feminist Reading of Debt

The consequence of these developments has been not only an increase of women’s unpaid labour to compensate for the missing social services, but the ‘financialisation of reproduction’, which is that women must now turn to the market and resort to bank loans and credit cards to acquire what in the past the state provided. This phenomenon, which has turned every aspect of our daily reproduction into a means of capital accumulation, has also led to a significant increase in women’s debt, a now global phenomenon to which the microfinance programs and international financial agencies have promoted, presumably to end female poverty in the world, have greatly contributed.

(Silvia Federici. "Women, Money and Debt: Notes for a Feminist Reappropriation Movement", 2018)

Social reproduction that spills over onto popular and community territories appears to be correcting and replacing public infrastructure, while also critiquing its dispossession. Today popular economies construct common infrastructure for the provision of services that are called basic although they are not: from health care to urbanization, from electricity to education, from security to food. The feminist strike challenges the way in which conservatives have taken advantage of this displacement of the domestic to the social fabric of the territory. Popular economies as a reproductive and productive fabric connected to the feminist strike question the concrete forms of the precarization of existence on all planes and demonstrate the level of dispossession in urban and suburban territories, which is the reality that drives and enables new forms of exploitation and value extraction. But they also challenge the philanthropic and moralizing attempt to codify those tasks in terms of servility, naturalization, and biology.

(Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, "10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance)", 2020)

In the Argentine crisis that exploded in 2001, it was women who carried out a foundational gesture: when confronted with the devastation caused by unemployment, they took charge of creating spaces for the reproduction of life in, and in collective and communitarian forms. The devastation was especially felt among men, whose numbers as “heads of household” declined; alcoholism and depression were recurring images for many of those suddenly evicted from their jobs. The formation of movements of the unemployed implied, in this sense, two decisive things. On one hand, the politicization of reproductive tasks that were extended to the neighborhood, breaking through the barriers of domestic confinement. It was this work of reproduction that was capable of building the infrastructure necessary for the blockades, spatially displacing the picket from the factory gate to the routes of communication. On the other, these movements demonstrated the political nature of these tasks by producing a community value (a production of value based on the spheres of the reproduction of life) capable of organizing resources, experiences, and demands which refused the condemnation of the unemployed to the categorization of “exclusion.” With this gesture they challenged, in practice, the reproduction of the home understood as the “private” sphere and inaugurated the territory as a new social factory.

(Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, "10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance)", 2020)