Gendering Global Finance: Crisis, Masculinity, and Responsibility

This article examines the relationship between discussions of responsibility in and for financial crisis and the locations and effects of gendered power and privilege in the global political economy. Most of these discussions have absented the ways in which power in the global political economy was, is and might continue to be gendered, which has served to reinforce the 'natural fact' of economic liberalization, integration and human progress through the expansion of Western-style financial capitalism and has obscured the highly masculinized and ethnocentric model of human activity on which this has been built. This article suggests that accounts of crisis that do not interrogate the ways in which organizations, actors, ideas and norms interact to actively construct the social setting(s) of financial discourse will fail to see contributory factors to crisis as a whole. This article takes seriously the effects of the culture of privilege, competitive success and masculine prowess that contemporary financial discourse has created and sustained and interrogates, against the abstractionism of contemporary neoliberalism and its advocates, where gendered configurations of power, knowledge, representation and identity have enabled contemporary global financial discourse to configure and reproduce ideas and practices of individual, collective and moral responsibility.