Risky Business: Heterosexual Credit and Lending Practice

Abstract

In this article I reconsider the biased impact of discourses of `gender neutrality', `capacity to repay' and `acceptable risk' in the sexual economic sites of bank lending policy and the practices of loans officers. My analysis of bank tests for propensity to repay demonstrates how easily the complex production, operation and interweaving of (hetero) normative gender-sex-sexuality can be refigured as neutral through the application of equal opportunity rhetorics of equal access and sameness of treatment. Together queer/feminist research can demonstrate that it is often apparently neutral economic practices which place sexual subjects within culture and give meaning and substance to heteronormative sexual identity politics.

Keywords

credit economics feminist heterosexual queer

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