Description
There has been an increasing interest in gender at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has manifested in a proliferation of written and visual discourse on women and gender. However, the IMF’s novel ‘feminist’ output continues to depend on and (re)produce a limited vision of political, economic, social and familial life. In this paper, I use a queer theoretical approach to (visual) discourse analysis to interrogate the treatment of heterosexuality, care, intimacy and households within the IMF’s gender discourses. I analyse 77 of the IMF’s publications on gender and women from 2001-2023. I examine the explicit and implicit ways that the IMF defines the ‘household,’ as well as its representations of work within a binary of ‘burdensome’ care work and ‘empowering’ paid work. I find that the IMF’s discourse gives the gender binary, heterosexuality, reproduction and monogamy a pre-discursive quality, rendering them the ‘natural’ foundation for economic production. By presenting intimacy, care and households within the heterosexual (or heteronormative) monogamous structure, the IMF’s discourses create invisible, illegible and queer subjects, who do not conform to the (re)productive ideals of neoliberal capitalism. This has important political effects, as it curtails the possibility to imagine life outside of capitalism, neoliberalism, the gender binary and heterosexuality.