Description
In this paper, I adopt a queer, post-structuralist approach to political economy by interrogating how economic meaning-making is inherently bound up with and (re)produces the stability of the gender binary order. I argue that the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) imperative for economic stability depends on the coherence and stability of the binary gender order and the heterosexual matrix; that a stable economy needs a stable gender order. To do so, I develop a queer discourse (and visual) analysis that interrogates 93 of the Fund’s publications on gender, including 77 online publications and 16 online videos. I find three dominant subject positions, ‘the working woman, ‘the heterosexual nuclear family’ and the ‘risky sexual subject’. In this paper, I work to denaturalise these subject-positions, revealing how the ideological work of sex, gender and sexuality structure the very production of economic knowledge. This has limiting political effects, because it circumscribes possibilities for economic behaviours and structures around particular expressions (or performances) of neoliberal masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality and homonormativity. I find that the Fund’s policy positions are expressly heterosexist, and that more broadly, the ordering of economic knowledge is deeply imbricated with the binary gender order. This paper is therefore a call for political economists to take queer theory seriously, and for queer theory to interrogate questions of political economy.
