Description
Financial actors often characterise finance as abstract. This narrative of finance as abstract is commonly incorporated in critical finance scholarship which highlights the effects of depersonalised, abstracted debt when repackaged as financial instruments. However, such a narrative ends up obscuring the everyday practices and labour that produce finance. My ethnographic research with microfinance branch staff in West Bengal shows that finance is produced by intermediaries’ labour. Moreover, this labour is gendered as intermediaries extend affective labour and women workers in particular perform social reproductive labour to ensure that financial services can be rendered standardized. This builds on feminist political economy scholarship and demonstrates how gendered forms of labour are directly capitalised to generate financial returns. Finance workers negotiate financial requirements for profit maximization with affective, personalised ties with clients to generate trust. Women workers doubly negotiate their professional roles and unpaid social reproductive work which is essential for standardising financial services. As finance workers navigate gendered, moral and financial economies, their everyday labour challenges theoretical distinctions in political economy between finance and labour and, productive and non-productive forms of labour. This highlights how contemporary finance capitalises upon wide-ranging gendered labour to expand services to underbanked populations.
