‘Protecting people’s lives and livelihoods’: gender, social reproduction and fiscal policy during the UK COVID-19 crisis

This article analyses two ‘fiscal events’ that took place in the UK in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on their content as well as how they were discursively represented in three widely read newspapers that span the political spectrum. It develops and deploys a feminist political economy (FPE) approach that seeks to understand how fiscal policy, and media discourses about fiscal policy, work to reinscribe particular understandings of social reproduction, up to and including the extent to which it is valued, both materially and discursively, in times of crisis. In so doing, it contributes to the growing body of FPE scholarship on COVID-19 by showing how the pandemic unfolded in the UK on gendered terrain. It offers important insights into how gender-based and other forms of inequality are sustained, and even deepened, in moments of crisis. At the same time, in engaging in an analysis of fiscal policy from the perspective of social reproduction, it pushes the research in new directions by showing how the boundary between production and social reproduction and the devaluation and invisibilisation of the latter is reproduced discursively, and on a daily basis.