Popular financial feminisms: mapping new mergers of feminism and capitalism

This article introduces and begins to conceptualise 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 generalised 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 thereof 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 purposively to demonstrate that these new money-focused feminisms span various forms of ‘difference’. The first is The Smart Money Woman, a fictionalised financial education book and television series from Nigeria, the second, Her First 100k, a multi-media 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.