Description
The regulation and discipling of (ab)normal expressions of sexuality and gender, as well as sexual acts underpins discourses on gender and women at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To make this case, I conduct a queer post-structuralist approach to discourse (and visual) analysis to interrogate the ways that the IMF discusses issues of (ab)normal sex. I analyse 93 of the IMF’s publications on gender and women, including 77 online publications and 16 online videos. I argue that capitalist political economy structures the ways that we understand life, sex, illness and death by rendering ‘risky sex,’ illness and dying invisible because of its negligible or detrimental impact on economic growth. The containment and absence of abnormal expressions of gender, sex and sexuality extends the carceral assumption that queer lives are disposable or aberrant. On the other hand, forms of acceptable sex such as heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family, and over-extended productivity are rendered visible and promoted as neutral subject-positions. This paper therefore highlights the importance of queer interrogations of how political economy is implicated in meaning-making about, and the regulation of, gendered, sexualised and racialised bodies from life to death.
