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This thesis explores the discursive barriers to the feminist development of alternative monies, particularly in the post-2008 era. In a rapidly shifting environment of currency and financial innovations, the role of gender in re-thinking how money might operate – materially and relationally – has yet to be fully unpacked. After a literature review of critical feminist writing on money since the 1970s Wages for Housework movement, the four research articles feature: (1) an institutional analysis of money in the sustainability paradigm, (2) a critique the role of fiat currency in the state/citizen relationship, (3) a single-case study analysis of community economic practices in Scotland, UK, and (4) a postcolonial analysis of money as a tool of feminist translation.The set of interdisciplinary research papers concerning feminism, money and social innovation are then brought to bear on some crosscutting objectives for the development of critical theory and socio-economic change. The first objective provides a framework for the role of money in theories of feminist political economy – both as an object of critique and as a space for the proposition of alternatives – concerning language, power, and sexuality. The second objective explores how contemporary developments in intellectual culture (briefly summed up as “postmodern” conditions) affect the epistemological underpinnings of economics in a manner that makes it difficult for money to be re-imagined, at this current time in the West. The third objective is to experiment with different ways of imagining what the ‘innovative development’ of feminist monies might look like – in other words, to let feminist theories permeate the very systems of excavation and measurement that we use to assess alternative monies.Ultimately, I situate the problem for feminist monetary development in the crux of challenges set by the “abstraction” and “monoculture” of contemporary currency relations. The thesis argues for embracing a post-structural account of money as intertwined with language. I argue that the symbolic biases of these systems can be worked against through the use of different semiotic models, including feminist aesthetics and translation, and through making post-modern amendments to the theory of social innovation. The thesis closes with discussing contributions to the research fields of feminist political economy, monetary sociology and social innovation.

Since the 1970s, the type of money issued on behalf of Western Nation States has been a form unique in human history. ‘Fiat’ currencies lack the intrinsic value of precious metals found in previous currencies, but derive their value purely from the declarations of the state. Despite the deep-reaching implications of these declarations for the state/citizen relationship, monetary theory has been unusually united in its acceptance of the status quo when it comes to fiat currencies. Public confusion over how the monetary system actually creates and distributes money is endemic yet, particularly following the revelations of the 2008 financial crisis, opportunities for investigating and re-imagining the role of money in the state/citizen relationship have grown. Our engagement with money involves relationships between subjects and objects which are mirrored in money’s material expression itself: these quantitively discreet objects of currency, fungibly replaceable by others of its kind, concretize human practices into numerical measures. Whilst these features of money are recognizable in Victorian and Edwardian writings on political economy – from money as a ‘veil’ to J.S. Mill to money offering “an absolute freedom from anything personal” in George Simmel’s words (Simmel 2011) – the role of the state has changed markedly since this time. After several decades of Welfare state development, and the influence of emancipation movements which stirred anything personal to also be political, has the concept of state-money also developed?This paper explores how fiat money performs through various institutions of the state from the perspective of feminist critical accounts of the political economy as gendered. The paper poses the questions: ‘How does fiat money ‘perform’ in the political economy, from a feminist perspective?’ and ‘How do these performances intersect with feminist accounts of the legitimacy of the state?’. Feminist economists have implicitly critiqued the imprints of money’s movement and character: the reduction of natural value to commodity value; the objectification of human beings, as expressed in trafficking, prostitution and pornography; the epistemic violence of any supposedly ‘objective’ organizing technology. Even while some of these critiques derive from considerations of the state body and the affordances it makes to the market - to which money is a quantifying or legitimating discourse - focus on money’s material qualities and performative structures has been absent from the debate. Building on Christine Desan’s notion of money’s “constitutional” power (2015), this paper analyses how the material conditions of money (its communicative functions, physical form, symbolic associations and habits of governance) impact the institutions of political economy.ReferencesDesan, Christine A. 2015. The Constitutional Approach to Money: Monetary Design and the Production of the Modern World. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. SSRN Scholarly Paper. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2724108 (October 20, 2020).Simmel, Georg. 2011. The Philosophy of Money. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge.

From the perspective of feminist economists, the relationship between money and care in Western democracies is typically a negative one. Care has a ‘contradictory’ relationship to capital for Fraser (2016), it is categorically unable to keep pace with the efficiency drives of monetary growth for Himmelweit (2005), and its association with both paid and unpaid labours makes it ’anomalous’ for Prügl (2020). Money, as the outward face and emblem of capitalist economic value, has borne its fair share of this criticism: money is a fundamental feminist issue, for Adkins, because it demonstrates the ‘convertibility and commensurability’ of value under capitalism (Adkins 2015). However, the matter is far from settled around contexts of care. Proponents of new Social Reproduction Theories have been accused of the very same commodity and money fetishism that Marx critiqued, in their primary focus on wages as the conveyor of economic value (Folbre 2020).This prompts the research question: How have feminist economic theories influenced the discourse of care on monetary theory in contemporary liberal market economies?This paper: firstly, reviews the diverse positions of ‘money’ as a concept in feminist economics; secondly situates the topic of care centrally; and finally, identifies points of convergence toward care in wider monetary theory literature. Whilst there is an increasing interest in the so-called ‘caring currencies’ (Fureai-Kippu) popularised by Japanese society (Sahakian 2014), monetary theory continues to inherit a neo-classical view of money as an objective, neutral measure, and thus has not been concerned with Western discourses of caring (state-supported, familial or labour-gendered). Whilst a cursory glance at the history of monetary systems away from money as a 'public resource' (Desan 2014) would initially justify this separation of money and care, this paper begins from the position of an entanglement between the two concepts in contemporary life.Methodologically, this paper takes a new materialist approach to its central question. As mentioned, the dominant narrative within feminist economics is clearly for a negative impact of money on care in their increasing entanglement. This paper takes such conceptual influencing as mutual. In other words, if the monetary system against which feminist activists marched in the 1970s has fundamentally altered, how has the increasing attention of ‘care’ influenced the way monetary theory views the central medium of valuation under capitalism?

This essay explored the normative and epistemic effects of dis/ability arts organizations in the UK and Sweden. With the development of a discourse for the Arts and Health movement and Art Entrepreneurship, a gap emerges for socially-entrepreneurial ventures whose innovation value is outside the well-engrained parameters of ‘work integration’ for persons with dis/abilities. Using theories of kynicism and sensemaking – from aesthetic and organisational studies – an analysis is framed of how these Arts innovations – largely lead by non-dis/abled entrepreneurs – navigate and disrupt institutional understandings of dis/ability.