Feminist political economy in geography: Why now, what is different, and what for?

Feminist scholarship is proliferating at the margins of political, urban, and economic geography and migrating to the (somewhat amorphous) centers of these sub-disciplines. In this intervention, we associate this ‘feminist upsurge’ with the desire to reconsider economic geographers’ theoretical and conceptual toolkits in the face of multi-dimensional crises. We undertake a collective effort to think through this upsurge from our respective commitments to feminist political economy (FPE). We organize our reflections on FPE in geography around three key questions. First, how are the tools of feminist political economic analysis useful for tackling the urgent questions the current conjuncture presents? In other words, why now? Second, what are the lines of continuity and difference marking current FPE analysis in geography from past interventions? As is often the case with geography's ‘turns’, there is a danger that the longer history (and more tangled genealogy) of critical approaches gets swept aside in the tide of the new. We ask what is, and is not, different about the contemporary conjuncture to which FPE is responding and the way in which it responds? Third, our aim is not solely to understand more accurately how difference matters to capitalism. We conclude by asking to what end do we mobilize feminist political economy? Or, simply, what for?