Marry the market: romancing finance and redeeming capitalism in popular financial feminisms

This article examines the romancing of finance in and through popular financial feminisms, a transnational cultural terrain in which women claiming financial insight and expertise seek to ‘empower’ other women by sharing accessible and actionable advice. Such actors frequently promote stock market investing, claiming that engagement with financial markets represents the surest and most reliable means for women to achieve long-term financial security, alongside the various comforts and pleasures this entails. They do so, we argue, against a backdrop wherein young people generally and young women in particular are increasingly expressing disaffection with work, newly regarded in a variety of cultural registers as an unreliable love object and dubious source of feminist empowerment. Our analysis is based on 30 months of non-participatory digital immersion, tracking the social media content of an internationally dispersed cohort of prominent feminist finfluencers. We read this content through the analytical prism provided by feminist cultural studies scholarship on romance, and in so doing chart three interrelated components of the ‘romance’ that popular financial feminisms engender: a baseline narrative in which investing enables women to realise an otherwise-elusive ‘happily ever after’; a reparative fantasy about how women can live well under capitalism, without subservience to work or to a male partner; and ultimately a fiction about the intransigence of capitalism itself. On this basis, we put forward the concept of ‘capitalist romance’, a term we use to designate a seductive, gendered reworking of ‘capitalist realism’. Where capitalist realism dictates that capitalism simply is, now and ever after, capitalist romance tells us that this ‘now’ and ‘ever after’ can be happy.