Whose crisis counts? Intersectionality, austerity and the politics of survival

Foregrounding the voices of minority women in England, Scotland and France, Minority Women and Austerity provides a rich and compelling account of austerity’s lived effects. Through its intersectional analyses and historically attendant frame, the book locates minority women’s experiences of austerity not as fundamentally “new” but rather as an extension and sharpening of conditions of “routinized crisis” and inequality. In doing so it compels its readers to ask: whose crisis counts? In this review paper, I summarize the book’s key contributions. In particular, I discuss the book’s theorizations of “political racelessness” to critique the erasure of minority women’s experiences and activism. I reflect on what this means for those researching austerity and its deleterious effects, and for those participating in anti-austerity activism. I end by discussing the analytical tools that the book offers for interrogating the Left’s response to on-going austerity within a post-Brexit Britain.