Gendered discourse is central to enabling, legitimizing, and sustaining capitalism – masculinity permeates all gendered discourse, even when not explicitly mentioned. Their feminist studies are an instance of masculinity’s unspoken assumption within gendered discourse.

Across the globe, the economy is characterized by growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and finance increasingly sets the terms on which production unfolds.1 However, the economy does not unfold in a vacuum; rather, economic processes themselves are imbued with meanings and emerge through the actions and interactions of subjects whose selves are constituted not only within capitalist injunctions but through gender, race, nation, and other categories of difference. Feminists have been making this argument about capitalism for some time,2 but work on neoliberalism suggests that forms of power that work increasingly on and through the self make such questions ever more relevant in the current period.3 Gender has enabled, fueled, legitimated, and stabilized shifts in the nature of capitalism, and within this, discourses around masculinity have been crucial to both the emergence and ongoing functioning of neoliberalism as a transnational system. The narrative below will take us into spaces in which we can see these processes at work and so further specify their implications. The 1970s saw the dispersal of production, made possible by technology and propelled by the first deregulatory phase of neoliberalism,4 but also incited by the glimmering promise of virgin labor—uniquely, innocently malleable and dexterous young third-world women, new to the workplace and disposed to obey.5 The disassembly of industrial production, along with the growing political commitment to shape as well as “free” markets,6 in turn intensified a booming transnational financial sector, itself articulated through a celebration of the peculiarly masculine art of “risk management.”7 Thus, these overlapping but successive historical developments were propelled and made palatable through gendered rhetorics, and as such their consequences have been especially marked for poor men around the globe, who have been economically blindsided by growing national class inequalities even as they find themselves passed over for their female peers in the fastest growing sectors of the transnational economy. Gender has always been understood to be a central element in reproductive labor of course. However, it is in the traditional heart of capitalism, in production and finance, that the ideological work of revealing gender’s operations is most counterintuitive, and catching these developments in process is a tricky business. General theoretical claims that the economy is gendered cannot demonstrate the contextually specific consequences of this fact and thus do little to illuminate how and why this social fact matters. On the other hand, large-scale empirical reviews of capitalist development, whether macrohistorical or statistical, can miss the social—often discursive—processes on the ground that shape the structures they describe, too often imbuing those descriptions with an aura of inevitability that undermines our ability to see how the economy actually functions and blunting our collective critical capacity. In this article I delve into the particular, using two case studies: one in production, positioned early in the neoliberal period as capital fled its traditional heartlands; the other in finance, situated in the early 2000s as neoliberal policy makers intervened to establish a capital-friendly architecture for global markets.8 In each case, I illuminate the way these gendered rhetorics operate on the ground and to what effect. As such, my claim is neither strictly “theoretical” nor strictly “empirical” but rather straddles the two realms, using a grounded description of how social processes unfold in place to theorize the intimate relationship between gender and political economy. In this context, ethnographic data make men visible—as men— within the sphere of the economy and thus reveal the role of masculinity in the ongoing evolution of neoliberal globalization. ENGENDERING NEOLIBERALISM Since the 1960s, capital’s flight from the purportedly agentic, breadwinning, first world man and its search for the grail of the cheap, docile and dexterous, thirdworld woman has both propelled and stabilized the global dispersal of production. Entering the scene shortly thereafter, financial capital began its dizzying global ascent,9 fueled in its turn by the double-barreled invocation of “masculine recklessness” and “masculine rationality,” so memorably captured in Michael Lewis’s bestselling 1989 Liar’s Poker. 10 These gendered meanings do not of course “account” for the trajectories of global capitalism, as if any single element could. In theory, gender is not necessary to capitalism’s functioning at all. However, economies don’t work “in theory.” And in capitalism as it has actually developed historically, and especially in its contemporary neoliberal instantiation, gendered discourses and subjects play a fundamental role in its operations.11 Gender’s structuring of capitalism can be usefully separated into two modalities. First, as a purportedly biological duality, gendered references root the social in an inexorable “nature.”12 Thus, gender functions as a discursive ground against which other claims can be made and stabilized.13 And second, gendered discourses inter-pellate and produce masculine and feminine subjects—selves capable of intelligible social action.14 Both of these processes are based more on form than content. Despite its expressive reputation, gender describes not a pair of identities but a set of contrasts. Whenever we invoke a feminine subject, it operates in contradistinction to some idea of the masculine, however inflected that may be by race or class, and whether the “masculine” in question is read onto a male body or not. Like many social categories, gender is also a fractal, a set of relations that remains identical across scales.15 The distinction between masculine and feminine can be endlessly subdivided, as each side of the line can always be repartitioned into its own relatively masculine and feminine components. A single set of practices can be coded as masculine from one vantage point and feminine from another, even within the same social space. This multidirectional flexibility makes gender fertile terrain upon which to make truth claims about the rest of the social world and provides a plethora of interpellatory moments within which selves can be produced. Within this ongoing process of reference and subdivision, masculinity and femininity play different roles. In the modern West, the masculine term is confounded with the human.16 Thus its dominant role is expressed by its invisibility; it goes without saying. As the norm, it is simultaneously the general case, the unspecified, and the standard.17 Femininity, on the other hand, is effectively subsumed within the masculine. Thus, when femininity is noted, it generally emerges as the articulated modification of that assumed norm, always marked, frequently on the body.18 The fact that the human is confounded with the masculine means that men are little studied as men. Although in the last two decades we see more feminist writing on men and masculinity,19 even in feminist work the need to make “woman” visible within the human continues to produce an overidentification of “gender” with the study of women, and as elsewhere we find this tendency in the study of transnational processes.20 This is particularly problematic because masculinity’s tendency to function without being specifically articulated makes its role in the overall illegibility of processes of domination pivotal, and this function is undoubtedly at work in the current neoliberal period. Focusing on masculinity also has the corollary benefit of helping us get some purchase on the rising chorus of anxiety about men and boys that has emerged over the course of the last quarter century in domestic popular discourse in the United States.21 Given all that, in the following pages I will make a compensatory move, discussing gender but bringing the masculine term to the forefront of my analysis, delineating masculinity’s role as an unarticulated backdrop in the dispersal of transnational assembly, and as a central actor in the growth and enactment of contemporary finance.