Gendering the Financialisation of Everyday Life: Geographies of Australian Women's Financial Self-help Cultures

• Main Author: Cruickshank, Marnie
• Other Authors: Pini, Barbara M, Pavlidis, Adele
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Griffith University 2023
• Subjects: financialisation; feminism; self-help; First Nations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10072/427100; https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/5093

While geographies of financialisation are increasingly central to our social lives insufficient attention has been paid to the bodies of everyday people who constitute the economy. This thesis addresses this gap by taking a feminist lens to explore how women's everyday experiences of credit and debt are embodied. Through analysing a sample of Australian women's financial self-help texts, including five books and two seasons of a popular podcast, I show how the demands of financialisation are enfolded into contemporary expectations of white middle-class hegemonic femininity. In detailing how expectations of contemporary femininity now include economic competencies, findings of this research include how the ideal feminised financial subject is defined in the cultural imaginary; as a speculative investor, risk-calculator, debt manager and asset-accumulator. She is corporeally self-disciplined, particularly as it relates to maintaining a 'healthy' (slim) body, and carefully manages the heterosexual life course markers of marriage and maternity. The requirements of successful financial femininity are communicated pedagogically via a gendered, racialised and classed girlfriendly affective-discursive mode of governance. Following the analysis of women's financial self-help media, I share seven oral and written vignettes which contain economic knowledges from a First Nations woman, a trans woman, a gender queer person, a migrant woman, two women with disabilities, and a woman who has experienced domestic violence and financial abuse. In narrating their financial biographies and communicating their expertise, these vignettes trouble the moralised celebration and economic disciplining of the supposedly relatable everyday Australian woman venerated in the analysed financial advice media. By illuminating the unevenness of the emotional geographies of money and finance, the knowledges in this chapter reveal how different bodies make affective negotiations in understanding their economic (un)belonging. [.] Thesis (PhD ...