Feminist Businesses as “Safer Economic Spaces”

Feminist businesses are often framed as either complicit in neoliberalism or as resistant alternatives to capitalism. This article moves beyond such binaries by investigating the motivations behind the creation of feminist businesses. Drawing on fifty-two in-depth interviews conducted across Western Europe and the United States in 2023–24, this article examines the experiences of feminist business founders—often self-employed women, trans men, and nonbinary individuals—who respond to personal and collective experiences of marginalization. Using a grounded theory approach, we analyze how participants frame their businesses not primarily as profit-driven ventures but as efforts to create safer economic spaces shaped by care, autonomy, and inclusion. The findings reveal that many feminist businesses are created in response to experiences of systemic discrimination, offering safer economic spaces for those who have felt marginalized. This result provides a nuanced understanding of founding feminist businesses as an act of agency that addresses personal needs for safety and community, highlighting their potential to resist oppressive economic structures. Drawing on the diverse economies framework developed by J. K. Gibson-Graham, we theorize feminist businesses as contingent and relational sites of economic becoming—neither outside capitalism nor fully absorbed by it but situated practices of negotiation, refusal, and ethical experimentation.