The Demystification of Global Finance: A Feminist Interpretation

There is a need for feminist work to explore the gendered processes and the gendered effects of global finance and global restructuring that is situated at the intersection of IPE, economics, and politics. In order to examine the theory, meta-theory, and practise of global finance through a gender-sensitive lens, I situate my research within a broader feminist project. With a theoretical framework informed particularly by current feminist sociological, post-colonial, critical economic, structural adjustment, and development literature, as well as mainstream political economy literature, I will begin to address the multi-levelled social, political, and economic inter-connections of restructuring processes. These processes and effects come to light, in part, through an examination of the discourse created by economics, IPE, and global finance. As well, utilising a small set of practises associated with global finance, I examine the links between feminist macro-economic policy literature and the operations of finance on a global scale, and conclude by suggesting some potential directions for future research that might promote fresh thinking about IPE and global finance, its discourse, the centrality of ‘the market,’ and the increasingly complex social and political relationship between production and reproduction.