“Smart women love money – Reconfigurations of femininity and motherhood in financialized welfare state (FemEconomicus)”.

During the past few years, we in the Global North have witnessed a proliferation of financial self-help that invite women to save and invest to the financial markets to fight economic gender inequality, a phenomenon conceptualized here as “financial feminism”. This research project focuses on this recent cultural turn that this financial feminism creates and how it is changing gendered subjectivities and how these ideas are dis/connected from feminism and the politics of welfare states in new ways. The analyses draw on ethnographic data on financial feminism in social media and interviews of (non)investing women. In addition to possible emancipatory aspects of lived financial feminism, by being open to ambivalence, frustrations and disappointments, the study may open new perspectives not only on attachments to the current cultural conjuncture, but also on ruptures and disinvestments in financial feminism as well as to the welfare state.