Gendered tropes and discourse in finance cause violent material consequences for women – we must start with a critique of hegemonic masculinity

As it stands, global finance is the only marker of globalization that exhibits the imperial spectacle of epistemic, self-privileging ‘self’ versus ‘other’ geographies and marauding financial practitioners. Intense competition across shores and centres for a sustained share of the worldwide market for financial services and products has caused a need for global management and regulation. This has taken on the colour of imperial, unquestioned, exclusive authority represented by institutions such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen), which function as icons of Western ‘reason’, to rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investor Service, with no less a grandiose, global role (Marshall 2007). The net result has been a valorization of financial practices and arrangements on the ‘inside’, a demonization of OFCs located on the ‘outside’ – socalled temptations to be resisted – and appeals for regulatory strengthening at local and global levels. This is a rehearsal of one of the most tenacious tropes of colonialism – the idea that history is shaped around two opposing directions: the progress forward of humanity from slouching unawareness to erect, enlightened reason; conflicting with a regression backward to anachronistic space ‘from white, male adulthood to a primordial, black degeneracy usually incarnated in women’ (McClintock 1995, pp. 9 – 10). There is a need, therefore, to expose those tropes and discourses that render unproblematic the persistence of undemocratic, unaccountable global ordering structures in finance, and the idea that increased regulatory scrutiny of financial practices can make the difference in securing international financial stability. The emphasis on discourse is intended to highlight struggles for meaning-capture. Following Barnett and Duvall (2005, p. 55), discourse refers to the ‘social processes and systems of knowledge through which meaning is produced, fixed, lived, experienced, and transformed’. Examples of discourse include both written and verbal discussion, technical manuals and reports, press releases, the symbolic use of institutions and policies, and so on. Discourse is not a material action but it constitutes power in a much more indirect sense, endowing some actors (insiders with specialist knowledge and information) with privileges and prerogatives not enjoyed by others. This is clear in the divide between financial specialists and consumers, investors and shareholders, and between transnational networks of regulators and country officials. Here meanings and definitions of legitimate transaction, financial value, instruments and products are secured and contested. Hegemony in the Gramscian sense is achieved when there is intra-elite consensus on the universe of norms, definitions and deviations. This is the power to establish the ‘common sense’, that is, to express the advantaged position of dominant social groups with respect to discourse. To be sure, I make references to discourses of entitlement, science and objectivity, imperialism, nature and gender. These are all historically grounded discourses to which financial science appeals for its legitimacy, authority and respectability. These discourses do not exist transcendentally or without contests as there have been moments of destabilization and reaffirmation in the history of the finance industry, moments that allow for a profound questioning of financial rationalities. Reference is also made to tropes. Defined by various leading dictionaries as a figure of speech in which words are used in a way that changes their meaning, this article refers specifically to the meaning captured in poetics, that is, ‘[t]he intentional use of a word or expression figuratively, that is, used in a different sense from its original significance in order to give vividness or emphasis to an idea’. Put simply, a trope behaves like a metaphor, standing for meanings other than its literal sense. The metaphors deployed for describing OFCs, such as ‘havens’ and ‘secrecy shelters’, for example, tell us about other power relations – the power to classify, name, or construct discourses of risk and danger. To re-present OFCs as havens is to assist in the mobilization of stereotypes that elides the need for empirics or investigation of the individual OFCs in order to determine their susceptibility to financial abuses. Where attention is drawn to gender discourses at work in shaping understanding of the realm of finance and capital, I follow the feminist critique of the appeal of the natural (Weedon 1997). To be sure, the feminist literature stresses that there are stereotypes attributed to male gender and female gender that deny women co-equal status with men as fully human and fully equal beings. The stereotypes derive from patriarchal understandings of statehood and social systems where the preserve of men is as bearers of intellect and power, whereas for women, child rearing and caring is treated as their domestic preserve in keeping with an assumed weaker nature. This dichotomization of gender produces sexist biases that in utterance, imagery and deed render invisible the injustices women experience as a devalued feminine. The reproduction and deployment of such gender discourse unwittingly reinforce patriarchal values; and so is the case within the field of finance, where it experiences no self-doubt given its faith in a neutral reason going to work on the pursuit of the liberal freedom to exchange, invest and accumulate. In a chapter entitled ‘Gender and the globalisation of finance’, Tony Porter (2005) focused on gendered occupations in finance, gendered aspects of the relationship of the international financial system with the global South and the impact of gendered attitudes and images on global finance. He notes how traditional gendered inequality exists in the field of finance and discusses the ways global finance is fissured with images that affirm such inequalities, a matter that de Goede extends, of which there is more later in this paper. In the power relations between Western global governance authority structures, financial stability discourse is punctuated with traditional constructions of passive femininity, even as the situations under scrutiny are ones in which women seldom physically figure. Offshore financial centres in geographies of the South often give bulk expression to the term ‘tax haven’, and in the spiel are often coded feminine, meaning a devalued version of femininity. OFCs are also infantilized in the popular discourse, a matter addressed further below. The stock market as a perfect market exists as an ideal; but the materiality of the stock market rests with the command of information, the influence of arbitrage operations, and mastery of economic tools to determine the value of financial instruments, contracts and definitions. Until very recently this was the site of late-modern masculinized financial identities featuring toughness, hubris, and a capacity to steer questions on how money, profit and value are generated on to discussion about proper stock valuation, eliding, of course, the contestability of such modern financial practices. The above dichotomized domains along gender lines are rooted in socio-historical and cultural constructions of sex-gender based on biological difference. It affirms and extends the long-run effort to establish manliness as laudatory, and then a particular version of such manliness; one that valorizes enterprise, stamina, valour, heterosexuality and pride. Beynon’s (2002) allusion to diverse masculinities is of importance here. He refers to hegemonic masculinities as constructions forged in relation to weaker and subordinated forms, but notes that the contests are within and across the broad class and racial spectrum. Beynon also adds that consensus around a hegemonic masculinity type is often secured through the ridiculing or absorption of alternative constructions. He avers that financial men gained male ascendancy following the demise of many heavy industries (e.g. coal mining) and the advent of post-Fordist changes in the composition and technical skills requirement of the labour force. Power, as it were, shifted from the male camaraderie, physical strength and trade union solidarity of the Keynesian era to mastery in the world of free market economic policies, computer processes and financial engineering. Popular consciousness was shaped by the culturally praised achievement of financial investors as they contrasted with the more mundane everyday lives of most men. This mirrored developments in the intellectual world where struggles for meaning-capture by knowledge producers and ‘hidden persuaders’ (as per Hodgson 2003) of the neo-liberal orthodoxy against those of the Keynesian variety were marked by a triumphalism of both historical moment and episteme (at once the ending of the Cold War, and trust in financial specialists’ – largely male – judgement).