Stable economies/stable gender order: A queer analysis of the International Monetary Fund's discourses on women and gender

Abstract

This research examines how gender, sex, sexuality, and race cohere in, and are stabilised through, the discourses of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). I argue that the IMF’s imperative for economic stability depends on the coherence and stability of the binary gender order and the heterosexual matrix: a stable economy needs a stable gender order. This research is situated in the intersection between queer theory and political economy, two areas which have long remained analytically distinct and antagonistic. In bridging these fields of research, this thesis develops a vision for political economy that faces the ontological challenges of queer post-structuralism. It does this through the development of a novel analytical toolkit for queer discourse analysis in International Political Economy (IPE) and Global Economic Governance (GEG), and the curation of a unique dataset of IMF discourses about gender and women.

This thesis interrogates 93 of the IMF’s publications on gender and women, including 77 online publications and 16 online videos over the period from 2001-2023. Through my analysis, I identify three dominant subject-positions: the ‘Working Woman;’ ‘Heterosexual Nuclear Family;’ and ‘Risky Sexual Subject.’ These subject-positions are located on different points of a ‘visibility spectrum.’ The hyper-visible ‘Working Woman’ is an aspirational feminised economic agent, who reflects neoliberal values of productivity, efficiency and rationality and is also soft, maternal and measured. The visible ‘Heterosexual Nuclear Family’ represents the ‘common-sense’ configuration of family and home life, (re)producing heterosexist presumptions about intimacy and care in economic knowledge. The invisible ‘Risky Sexual Subject’ appears at the limits of what is knowable in the IMF’s discourse on gender. Together, these subject-positions reveal the disciplinary, regulatory and productive character of the IMF’s discourses on women and gender.