Gender, Capitalism, and the Erotics of Finance

Feminist anthropology has radically re-worked 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: Firstly, economic units such as the household, the firm, or the national economy, and secondly economic subjects such as the entrepreneur, the worker, or the consumer. Throughout, the chapter calls attention to fieldwork epistemologies in economic anthropology. I suggest that we should re-centre attention on complex and contingent ways sex powerfully shapes financial markets, and take seriously the erotic dimensions of credit on their own terms.