ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the assumptions, norms, and discursive limits embodied in the ethics of finance, mainstream or 'alternative'. It shows how the authority located in financial discourse is constructed through knowledge and representations that are both racialised and gendered. The chapter argues that a turn to 'alternative' arrangements and 'everyday' local and global social practices is not a resolution or panacea to global economic ills; rather, it is a call to engage the contested, messy, and often contradictory 'ethics' of market life. Consideration of ethics, gender, and nature in relation to global financial activity requires a particularly 'pragmatic', rather than uniform and universal, approach to these layers of real life. The chapter details the everyday gendered and racialised practices that naturalise, and thereby render unremarkable, the 'ethics' of finance, considering the possibilities offered by thinking about financial activity in terms of the ordinary, cultural locations of economic systems, social behaviour, and 'ethical' financial practice.
