Calls for a more caring society are getting louder, as places built around growth keep running into the limits of their own carelessness. Feminist thinking has been part of degrowth debates for a while now — critiquing how growth-oriented economies lean on unpaid, gendered care work, and pointing to the deeper coloniality behind it. What is less settled is how care itself should be reorganised: how to confront the gendered structures, the domestic arrangements and the patterns of violence built into it, rather than assuming they will simply dissolve once growth stops.
One promising answer, from economist Corinna Dengler, links two things together: a care income — paying people for the work of sustaining life — and the commoning of care, collectivising it outside the market and outside the isolated household. But that only works, this essay argues, if we are honest about what makes growth-driven economies possible in the first place: gender systems that have long placed humans above the rest of nature, men above women, coloniser above colonised, production above reproduction, and “universal” knowledge above local knowledge and lived experience.
An economy that cannibalises care
Sociologist Nancy Fraser describes capitalism as structurally dependent on care work it does not pay for — work that gets commodified for people who can afford it, and privatised for those who cannot, with women in the second group often providing paid care to the first. She calls this dynamic cannibalising: an economy that consumes the very relationships it depends on to keep functioning. The same logic, philosopher Johanna Oksala argues, extends to nature — ecological destruction and gender oppression are not two separate problems, but two expressions of the same underlying order. Capitalism does not simply happen to oppress women while damaging the planet; it needs both to keep working.
This is why economic reform on its own will not be enough. If the private, gendered organisation of care stays in place, the vulnerabilities and violence that come with it will stay in place too, no matter how the wider economy is restructured. Philosopher Judith Butler’s idea of radical dependency is useful here: real social equality requires recognising how much we depend on each other, and actively — nonviolently — transforming the power relations built on top of that dependency, rather than pretending they will fade away on their own.
Degrowth setups risk reproducing the very conditions that sustain care crises and gendered vulnerabilities — unless the transformation of gendered power relations is as deliberate as the transformation of the economy.
None of this dissolves automatically just because an economy stops growing. Established habits and power don’t vanish with a policy change; they need real, practical alternatives to replace them — collectivised childcare that people can actually imagine using, structures of care built on mutual responsibility rather than one person’s unpaid labour, ideas like buen vivir that treat caring for life as a shared, collective duty rather than a private, individual one. A feminist degrowth, in other words, is not degrowth plus a chapter on gender. It is degrowth that takes seriously the fact that the crisis of care and the crisis of growth were never really two different crises to begin with.
Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, Corinna Dengler, Judith Butler and Johanna Oksala.