Mark Carney and the Gendered Political Economy of British Central Banking

Abstract

In this article

We account for Mark Carney’s role in the naturalisation of gender in finance and explain how this depoliticises important questions of gendered finance.

We demonstrate Mark Carney’s ability to embody a successful combination of ‘transnational business masculinity’ and ‘traditional bourgeois masculinity’.

We sketch how the current monetary and financial stability concerns of the Bank of England appear to reproduce the uneven and exploitative effects of gendered finance.

In this article we explore Mark Carney’s place in the gendered political economy of British central banking. We document the gendered narratives surrounding Carney around the time of his appointment as Governor of the Bank of England, suggesting that they worked to naturalise certain gender constructions in finance. We show how Carney seemingly had the ability to successfully embody a combination of two ideal-types of masculinity: both ‘transnational business masculinity’ and ‘traditional bourgeois masculinity’. We argue this contributed to three depoliticising moves, each of which gain their strength in part from the naturalisation of masculinities in finance, while obfuscating important questions of gendered finance. To elucidate the latter, we highlight some of the gendered outcomes that are obscured by the furore surrounding Carney’s character, suggesting that the monetary and financial stability concerns of the Bank under his stewardship are likely to reproduce the uneven and exploitative relations of gendered finance.

Keywords

Mark Carney masculinity central banking depoliticisation

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