Introduction: Bubbles and Machines

This chapter outlines the book’s arguments—that finance capital is gendered, and financial markets are materially and technologically embedded. The author shows that that a critical political economic approach to communication works well for financial crises because it considers their capitalist context and historicises technology and economy. Political economic writings on financial crises have neglected two areas: the gendered nature and ideology of finance capital and the materiality of financial information. Key arguments are presented via four themes:

1) Women serve as resources in financial markets.

2) Gender ideology is used to legitimise an unequal distribution of resources between women and men, and between developed and developing economies.

3) The production, distribution, and consumption of financial information—analogue or digital—rely on machines.

4) Financial markets are heterogeneous; a market assumes a specific spatiality and temporality which constitute an economy.

The Bernie Madoff case and the film Blue Jasmine – illustrate these arguments ahead of an examination of the relevance of feminist political economy, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The chapter assesses theories about financial crises from the Monopoly Capital and Digital Capitalism School with the author concluding that feminist political economy bridges the gaps between various theories on financial crises attending to materiality, temporality and spatiality and disrupting binary perspectives such as human v. non-human.