Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T09:29:06.441Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

16 - Gender, Capitalism, and the Erotics of Finance

from Part Three - Resistances and Intersections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2023

Cecilia McCallum
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Silvia Posocco
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Martin Fotta
Affiliation:
Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Get access

Summary

Feminist anthropology has radically reworked the central terms and frameworks for how anthropology approaches the study of capitalism. Building outward from an ethnographic study of feminized microcredit loans, the argument of this chapter is that standard economic anthropology approaches to capitalism require radical reframing. This reframing calls attention to the persistent exclusions and erasures of gendered activities, spaces, roles, wealth, and work. Retheorizing capitalism from a gendered vantage point is part of a wider feminist project aimed at revealing the workings of power and domination. To do this, the chapter explores two thematic areas in the anthropology of capitalism: first, economic units such as the household, the firm, or the national economy, and, second, economic subjects such as the entrepreneur, the worker, or the consumer. Throughout, the chapter calls attention to fieldwork epistemologies in economic anthropology. The author suggests that we should recenter attention on complex and contingent ways sex powerfully shapes financial markets, and take seriously the erotic dimensions of credit on their own terms.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adkins, L. (2015). What are post-Fordist wages? Simmel, labor money, and the problem of value. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(2), 331–53.Google Scholar
Allison, A. (1994). Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allon, F. (2011). “Home economics”: the management of the household as an enterprise. The Journal of Australian Political Economy, 68, 128.Google Scholar
Allon, F. (2014). The feminisation of finance: gender, labour and the limits of inclusion. Australian Feminist Studies, 29(79), 1230.Google Scholar
Allon, F. (2015). Everyday leverage, or leveraging the everyday. Cultural Studies, 29(5–6), 687706.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Appadurai, A. (1996). Global ethnoscapes: notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 49–65.Google Scholar
Appel, H. (2014). Finance, figuration, and the alternative banking group of Occupy Wall Street. Signs, 40(1), 5358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ardener, S. (1964). The comparative study of rotating credit associations. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 94(2), 201–29.Google Scholar
Arnould, E. J., and Netting, R. M. (1982). Households: changing form and function. Current Anthropology, 23(5), 571–75.Google Scholar
Bear, L. (2015). Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bear, L., Ho, K., Tsing, A., and Yanagisako, S. (2015). GENS: a feminist manifesto for the study of capitalism. Generating Capitalism, Cultural Anthropology website, March 30. Retrieved from www.culanth.org/fieldsights/652-gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism.Google Scholar
Bedford, K. (2005). Loving to straighten out development: sexuality and ethnodevelopment in the World Bank’s Ecuadorian lending. Feminist Legal Studies, 13(3), 295322.Google Scholar
Bedford, K., and Rai, S. M. (2010). Feminists theorize international political economy. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36(1), 118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beneria, L. (1999). Globalization, gender and the Davos Man. Feminist Economics, 5(3), 6183.Google Scholar
Bennett, T., McFall, L., and Pryke, M. (2008). Editorial. Journal of Cultural Economy, 1(1), 17.Google Scholar
Benston, M. (1989). The political economy of women’s liberation. Monthly Review, 41(7), 3143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berge, L. C. L. (2010). The men who make the killings: American Psycho, financial masculinity, and 1980s financial print culture. Studies in American Fiction, 37(2), 273–96.Google Scholar
Black, S. (2009). Microloans and micronarratives: sentiment for a small world. Public Culture, 21(2), 269.Google Scholar
Brenner, S. A. (1998). The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth, and Modernity in Java. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bryan, D., Martin, R., and Rafferty, M. (2009). Financialization and Marx: giving labor and capital a financial makeover. Review of Radical Political Economics, 41(4), 458–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callon, M. (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers/Sociological Review.Google Scholar
Cassells, R. (2016). Will the real gender pay gap please stand up? The Conversation, September 8. http://theconversation.com/will-the-real-gender-pay-gap-please-stand-up-64588 (accessed May 22, 2019).Google Scholar
Cattelino, J. (2008). High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, D., Murdoch, J., Rutherford, S., and Ruthven, O. (2009). Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, J. L. (1986). The household and relations of production in southern Peru. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28(4), 651–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, J., and Comaroff, J. L. (1999). Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist, 26(2), 279303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, J., and Comaroff, J. L. (2000). Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture, 12(2), 291343.Google Scholar
Constable, N. (1997). Sexuality and discipline among Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong. American Ethnologist, 24(3), 539–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, F., and Stoler, A. L. (1989). Introduction tensions of empire: colonial control and visions of rule. American Ethnologist, 16(4), 609–21.Google Scholar
Cooper, M. (2015). Shadow money and the shadow workforce: rethinking labor and liquidity. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(2), 395423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, M. (2017). Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. New York: Zone Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, M., and Mitropoulos, A. (2009). The household frontier. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 9(4), 363–68.Google Scholar
Costa Perdomo, R. (2010). 108 (Cuchillo de palo). Documentary, Estudi Playtime.Google Scholar
Cox, J., and Macintyre, M. (2014). Christian marriage, money scams, and Melanesian social imaginaries. Oceania, 84(2), 138–57.Google Scholar
Dalla Costa, M., and James, S. (1972). The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.Google Scholar
Dalton, G. (1969). Theoretical issues in economic anthropology. Current Anthropology, 10(1), 63102.Google Scholar
Dent, A. S. (2017). Paraguayan horses: the entailments of internet policy and law in Brazil. Current Anthropology, 58(S15), S113S122.Google Scholar
Elyachar, J. (2005). Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Elyachar, J. (2010). Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo. American Ethnologist, 37(3), 452–64.Google Scholar
Engels, F. (1972). The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Ed. Leacock, E.. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Fisher, M. S. (2012). Wall Street Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Folch, C. (2019). Hydropolitics: The Itaipu Dam, Sovereignty, and the Engineering of Modern South America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Frank, A. G., and Dalton, G. (1970). On Dalton’s “Theoretical Issues in Economic Anthropology.” Current Anthropology, 11(1), 6771.Google Scholar
Freeman, C. (2000). High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Freeman, C. (2001). Is local : global as feminine:masculine? Rethinking the gender of globalization. Signs, 26(4), 1007–37.Google Scholar
Freeman, C. (2014). Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.Google Scholar
Gal, S. (2002). A semiotics of the public/private distinction. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13(1), 7795.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geertz, C. (1962). The rotating credit association: a “middle rung” in development. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 10(3), 241–63.Google Scholar
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2014). Rethinking the economy with thick description and weak theory. Current Anthropology, 55(S9), S147S153.Google Scholar
Goede, M. de. (2000). Mastering “lady credit.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2(1), 5881.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, J. (2019). Eve’s future figures. In Berlant, L., ed., Reading Sedgwick. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 121–31.Google Scholar
Gregory, S. (2006). The Devil behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Oakland: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Guyer, J. I. (1981). Household and community in African studies. African Studies Review, 24(2–3), 87137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Han, C. (2011). Symptoms of another life: time, possibility, and domestic relations in Chile’s credit economy. Cultural Anthropology, 26(1), 732.Google Scholar
Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational Connections. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harris, O. (1981). Households as natural units. In Young, K., Wolkowitz, C., and McCullagh, R., eds., Of Marriage and the Market. London: CSe Books, pp. 4867.Google Scholar
Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Helliwell, C. (2000). “It’s only a penis”: rape, feminism, and difference. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 25(3), 789816.Google Scholar
Helliwell, C. (2018). Domestic/public distinction. In H. Callan and S. Coleman, eds., The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London: Wiley, pp. 1–6.Google Scholar
High, H. (2011). Melancholia and anthropology. American Ethnologist, 38(2), 217–33.Google Scholar
Hoang, K. K. (2015). Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Oakland: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hodgson, D. L. (1999). “Once intrepid warriors”: modernity and the production of Maasai masculinities. Ethnology, 38(2), 121–50.Google Scholar
Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2007). Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Huang, J. Q. (2017). The ambiguous figures of social enterprise: gendered flexibility and relational work among the iAgents of Bangladesh. American Ethnologist, 44(4), 603–16.Google Scholar
Jolly, M., and Macintyre, M. (1989). Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kar, S. (2013). Recovering debts: microfinance loan officers and the work of “proxy-creditors” in India. American Ethnologist, 40(3), 480–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kar, S. (2018). Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kar, S., and Schuster, C. (2016). Comparative projects and the limits of choice: ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay. Journal of Cultural Economy, 9(4), 347–63.Google Scholar
Karim, L. (2011). Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Leacock, E. (1979). Class, commodity, and status of women. In Diamond, S., ed., Toward a Marxist Anthropology: Problems and Perspectives. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, pp. 185–99.Google Scholar
Lee, B., and Martin, R. (2016). Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LiPuma, E. (2017). The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Lutz, C. (1990). The erasure of women’s writing in sociocultural anthropology. American Ethnologist, 17(4), 611–27.Google Scholar
Lutz, C. (1995). The gender of theory. In Women Writing Culture/Culture Writing Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 249–66.Google Scholar
Mauss, M. (1990). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
McKinnon, S. (2001). The economies in kinship and the paternity of culture: origin stories in kinship theory. In Franklin, S. and McKinnon, S., eds., Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 277301.Google Scholar
McKinnon, S. (2005). Neo-Liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.Google Scholar
McNamara, O. (2019). “Making coin” and the networker: masculine self-making in the Australian professional managerial class. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 30(3), 294308.Google Scholar
Meiu, G. P. (2015). “Beach-boy elders” and “young big-men”: subverting the temporalities of ageing in Kenya’s ethno-erotic economies. Ethnos, 80(4), 472–96.Google Scholar
Moodie, M. (2008). Enter microcredit: a new culture of women’s empowerment in Rajasthan? American Ethnologist, 35(3), 454–65.Google Scholar
Murphy, M. (2017). The Economization of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Murphy, M. (2018). Against population, towards afterlife. In Making Kin Not Population. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, pp. 101–24.Google Scholar
Nicholson, L. J. (1986). Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oboler, R. S. (1980). Is the female husband a man? Woman/woman marriage among the Nandi of Kenya. Ethnology, 19(1), 6988.Google Scholar
Ong, A. (1988). The production of possession: spirits and the multinational corporation in Malaysia. American Ethnologist, 15(1), 2842.Google Scholar
Ong, A. (1991). The gender and labor politics of postmodernity. Annual Review of Anthropology, 20(1), 279309.Google Scholar
Osburg, J. (2013). Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality among China’s New Rich. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Pigg, S. L. (2001). Languages of sex and AIDS in Nepal: notes on the social production of commensurability. Cultural Anthropology, 16(4), 481541.Google Scholar
Pigg, S. L., and Adams, V., eds. (2005). Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Pollard, J. (2013). Gendering capital: financial crisis, financialization and (an agenda for) economic geography. Progress in Human Geography; London, 37(3), 403–23.Google Scholar
Poovey, M. (1988). Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rabossi, F. (2012). Ciudad del Este and Brazilian circuits of commercial distribution. In Globalization from Below: The World’s Other Economy. London: Routledge, pp. 5468.Google Scholar
Rapp, R., Ross, E., and Bridenthal, R. (1979). Examining family history. Feminist Studies, 5(1), 174200.Google Scholar
Roitman, J. L. (2005). Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980). The use and abuse of anthropology: reflections on feminism and cross-cultural understanding. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(3), 389417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, A. (2010). Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex. In Reiter, R. R., ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157210.Google Scholar
Rubin, G. (2011a). Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 137–81.Google Scholar
Rubin, G., and Butler, J. (2011). Sexual traffic: interview with Gayle Rubin by Judith Butler. In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 276306.Google Scholar
Rubin, G. S. (2011b). Afterword to “Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality.” In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 182–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudnyckyj, D. (2016). Islamizing finance: from magical capitalism to a spiritual economy. Anthropology Today, 32(6), 812.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salzinger, L. (2003). Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sanjek, R. (1993). Anthropology’s hidden colonialism: assistants and their ethnographers. Anthropology Today, 9(2), 1318.Google Scholar
Sargent, A., and Morton, G. D. (2019). What happened to the wage? Anthropological Quarterly, 92(3), 635–62.Google Scholar
Schuster, C. E. (2014). The social unit of debt: gender and creditworthiness in Paraguayan microfinance. American Ethnologist, 41(3), 563–78.Google Scholar
Schuster, C. E. (2015). Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy. Oakland: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Schuster, C. E. (2019a). The bottlenecks of free trade: Paraguay’s mau cars and contraband markets in the triple frontier. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 24(2), 498517.Google Scholar
Schuster, C. E. (2019b). The indebted wage: putting financial products to work in Paraguay’s tri-border area. Anthropological Quarterly, 92(3), 729–56.Google Scholar
Schuster, C., and Kar, S. (2021). Sub-prime empire: on the in-betweenness of finance. Current Anthropology, 62(4), 389–411.Google Scholar
Scott, J. W. (1999). Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Shever, E. (2008). Neoliberal associations: property, company, and family in the Argentine oil fields. American Ethnologist, 35(4), 701–16.Google Scholar
Shever, E. (2010). Engendering the company: corporate personhood and the “face” of an oil company in metropolitan Buenos Aires. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33(1), 2646.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simmel, G. (1990). The Philosophy of Money, 2nd enlarged ed. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Spyer, P. (1997). The eroticism of debt: pearl divers, traders, and sea wives in the Aru Islands, eastern Indonesia. American Ethnologist, 24(3), 515–38.Google Scholar
Stout, N. (2016). #Indebted: disciplining the moral valence of mortgage debt online. Cultural Anthropology, 31(1), 82106.Google Scholar
Stout, N. M. (2014). After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, J. (1988). Women and capitalism: oppression or emancipation? A review article. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30(3), 534–49.Google Scholar
Tsing, A. (2009). Supply chains and the human condition. Rethinking Marxism, 21(2), 148–76.Google Scholar
Tucker, J. L. (2017). City-stories: narrative as diagnostic and strategic resource in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. Planning Theory, 16(1), 7498.Google Scholar
Wagner, C. (2012). From boom to bust: How different has microfinance been from traditional banking? Development Policy Review, 30(2), 187210.Google Scholar
Watanabe, C. (2015). Commitments of debt: temporality and the meanings of aid work in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar. American Anthropologist, 117(3), 468–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiss, H. (2019). We Have Never Been Middle Class. London: Verso Books.Google Scholar
Weiss, H. (2020). The anthropological study of financialization. In Mader, P., Mertens, D., and van der Zwan, N., eds., The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Weston, K. (2013). Lifeblood, liquidity, and cash transfusions: beyond metaphor in the cultural study of finance. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, S24S41.Google Scholar
Wilson, A. (2004). The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Yanagisako, S. (2002). Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Yanagisako, S., and Collier, J., eds. (1987). Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Yanagisako, S. J. (2015). Households in anthropology. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 228–32.Google Scholar
Young, K., Wolkowitz, C., and McCullagh, R. (1981). Of Marriage and the Market: Women’s Subordination in International Perspective. London: CSE Books London.Google Scholar
Yunus, M. (2007). Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle against World Poverty. New York: PublicAffairs.Google Scholar
Zaloom, C. (2018). A right to the future: student debt and the politics of crisis. Cultural Anthropology, 33(4), 558–69.Google Scholar
Zaloom, C. (2019). Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zelizer, V. A. R. (2005). The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zelizer, V. A. R. (2010). Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×