Popular Financial Feminisms: Mapping New Mergers of Feminism and Capitalism
Simidele Dosekun & Rachel O’Neill
What the paper says
This article introduces and conceptualizes a new transnational phenomenon that we call “popular financial feminisms.” Popular financial feminisms are highly mediated projects in which women claiming to have insight and expertise in financial matters—whether pertaining to everyday money management, the workings of complex financial instruments and investments, or anything in between—are moving to “empower” other women with it, to disseminate or share what they know as a kind of feminist act. We contend that such texts and actors represent a culture of contemporary popular feminist “solutionism” applied to a general situation and sense of economic precarity, engendering a novel form and site of financial self-help. While these projects represent a pragmatic response to the binds many women find themselves in, we argue that aspects of them are pernicious in terms of what they bind women as well as feminism to. We develop our arguments with reference to two illustrative cases from disparate national and cultural contexts, chosen to demonstrate that these new money-focused feminisms span various forms of difference. The first is The Smart Money Woman, a fictionalized financial education book and television series from Nigeria; the second, Her First $100K, a multimedia brand created by American financial influencer Tori Dunlap, who declares herself a “financial feminist.” We conclude by setting out a future research agenda, proposing themes and questions in need of urgent exploration by feminist scholars.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.