The gender politics of monetary governance in Germany and the Eurozone: Masculinity, metaphor and money

The gender politics of monetary governance in Germany and the Eurozone: Masculinity, metaphor and money provides a nuanced reading of how gender politics matter in monetary governance, contributing to a gendered and intersectional critique of the political economy of Germany and the Eurozone and to efforts of ‘de-patriarchalising’ monetary and economic governance. While gender aspects of economic governance have increasingly been made visible by critical literature such as feminist political economy, less focus has been placed on the role of masculinities and of monetary governance. This book shows that the intersection of gender politics and monetary governance plays a constitutive role in the making of the political economy. It puts forward a concept of gendered performative agency to make a twofold argument: It shows, firstly, that masculinist performative agency has been constitutive for monetary governance, by legitimising deflationary politics through a valorisation of disciplinary masculinity. Secondly, it argues that cultural gender politics have shaped and contested monetary governance contingently, through specific trajectories and variations of masculinist and feminist performative agency. Accordingly, the dominant approach of disciplinary austerity has been reinforced by ‘Calvinist’ performances of Central bankers, contested by ambiguous performances of protest masculinity, and resisted through both masculinist and feminist tendencies in anti-austerity organising. The book supports this claim through an empirical-historical analysis focussing on metaphors and narratives, beginning with a history of monetary discourses in Germany, and stretching to the crisis period of the Eurozone, discussing its monetary governance, its intergovernmental conflicts, and its grass-roots contestation.