ABSTRACT
Ideas about men and masculinities have long shaped perceptions of economic life, but the ways in which masculinities and economic practices interact across areas and experiences often remain unclear, if not purposefully obscured. This chapter outlines the masculinised shape of contemporary capitalism, focusing specifically on what might be termed global financial capitalism. It explores how the expansion of Western-style financial capitalism has depended on, but also camouflaged, the masculinised and ethnocentric model of human activity on which it has been built. The chapter interrogates how and to what effects capitalist practices, embodied in global finance, have reproduced particular configurations of power, privilege, and economic knowledge in the global political economy. It argues that gendered knowledge in and of the global political economy is crucial in accounting for the relations of power that drive capitalist systems, while the absence of gendered analysis only further sediments the patterns of privilege and exclusion from which economic disenfranchisement, exclusion, and crisis ensue.
