Description
‘Gender’ has increasingly become a policy interest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an international financial institution (IFI) established as part of the Bretton Woods system post-WWII. The IMF’s publications on gender were haphazard and inconsistent until 2013, which marked the beginning of an exponential increase in publications with a focus on ‘gender’. This interest emerged relatively late, when compared to IFIs such as the World Bank or other post-WWII global governance infrastructure such as the United Nations. While comparable institutions have also begun to substantively engage with non-normative sexualities, this is an area with which the IMF lacks any meaningful engagement. In this paper, I adopt a queer, post-structuralist approach to analysing the IMF’s discourse on women and gender, specifically interrogating how these discourses (re)produce the stability of a binary gender order and with what effects. In this paper, I analyse 16 online videos produced by the IMF on gender for public consumption located on YouTube. My queer post-structuralist approach to discourse analysis is used to probe the ways that gender, sex and sexuality are generated and sustained by economic discourses, considering the ways that discursive power demarcates the limits for social, political and economic life. This paper is a call for political economists to take queer theory seriously, and for queer theory to seriously consider questions of political economy.
