Frugal femininities and profligate masculinities: Gender performances, ethnicity and the political economy of the Eurozone crisis

Critical accounts of the Eurozone crisis and its social and political fallout have often centred class as a tool for inquiry (e.g. Bieling, 2015; Lapavitsas et al., 2012; Ryner, 2015). Gendered accounts, less frequently used as a tool for analysis, focused mostly on gendered consequences of the crisis and its management (Jacquot, 2017; Karamessini & Rubery, 2013) , while intersectional accounts of the crisis, rarer still, drew attention to the question: “Whose crisis counts” (Bassel & Emejulu, 2017, S. 33)? Whose crisis was it in the first place, and whose experiences of precariousness or insecurity count as constituting a “crisis” that requires universal attention and immediate policy action; and similarly whose recovery counts (Cavaghan & O’Dwyer, 2018)? Yet with a few exceptions (Bruff & Wöhl, 2016; O’Dwyer, 2018), neither gender nor intersectionality have been used as tools to analyse the political logics of the crisis and its management; how class, gender, ethnicity and race have been mobilised politically to justify an austerity-driven redistribution of resources in the context of the crisis. This paper seeks to begin addressing this missing link with an agential focus, through performances and mediatised representations of key actors in the public discourse of the crisis. Drawing on case studies of ECB presidents Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, and of heads of government Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi, the paper examines the dynamics of performances and media representations on the contested terrain of crisis politics, and how meanings of gender and ethnicity are deployed in that context. The paper argues that through representations of frugal femininities, and disciplinary and profligate masculinities, gender and ethnicity provide rich metaphorical resources to associate politico-economic decisions with dominant cultural and moral discourses, producing (de)legitimising effects that enable certain crisis responses and silence others. It thus seeks to contribute to conceptualising how power relations of gender and ethnicity are mobilised in the practices of elite actors, and mediatised to a wider audience, in the context of crisis ‘events’ (Brassett & Clarke, 2012); and therefore to understand the contingency of intersectional world-making in the political economy.