This is a paper that pushes for a feminist analysis of financial technologies, building on feminist economic geography and feminist political economy. It uses "buy now, pay later" platforms as an example of how fintech is increasingly part of consumer spaces.
This has been relatively unexamined in fintech research thus far (though see Gordan Tan's research), but it's central to broader processes that include the financialization of social reproduction and transformations of our societal relationships to consumer debt.
Our framework highlights that social difference should be central to understandings of fintech, both as a way to understand how predatory activity works on these platforms, but also to highlight how difference functions as a mechanism for accumulation.
It centres the household and social reproduction as domains of central interest to fintech researchers, and emphasizes how digital applications are transforming financial technologies through data extraction and by creating digital "ecosystems" for financial activity.
This is all while *depending upon* incumbent financial actors (banks, existing payment networks, venture capital funds) rather than (as in popular accounts) rejecting them. Fintech *builds on* and *collaborates with* the existing financial elites: it is not a democratization or rejection of them.
Happy to answer questions about these pieces! They are all open access, but please let me know if you are having difficulty accessing - email at [email protected], or DM on this platform. Thanks for reading!
Comments