Ms Georgia Peters1
1University of Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Georgia Peters (she/her) is a PhD candidate and sessional academic at the University of Sydney, interested in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), feminist political economy and decolonial queer theory. Her doctoral thesis interrogates the IMF’s publications on women and gender using queer, poststructuralist discourse analysis. Her work has been published in the Australian Journal of International Affairs and International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Abstract:
The regulation and discipling of (ab)normal expressions of sexuality and gender, as well as sexual acts underpins discourses on gender and women at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To make this case, I conduct a queer poststructuralist approach to discourse (and visual) analysis to interrogate the ways that the IMF discusses issues of (ab)normal sex. I analyse 93 of the IMF’s publications on gender and women, including 77 online publications and 16 online videos. I specifically interrogate how the IMF is implicated in biopolitical issues of life, death and the regulation of bodies including fertility, HIV/AIDs, health and child marriage. In doing so, I analyse the tension between economic measures of output, productivity and production with intimate matters of life, sex, illness, and death and how this regulation takes on a carceral quality. I argue that capitalist political economy structures the ways that we understand life, sex, illness and death by rendering ‘risky sex,’ illness and dying invisible because of its negligible or detrimental impact on economic growth. The containment and absence of abnormal expressions of gender, sex and sexuality extends the carceral assumption that queer lives are disposable or aberrant. On the other hand, forms of acceptable sex such as heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family, and over-extended productivity are rendered visible and promoted as neutral subject-positions. This paper therefore highlights the importance of queer interrogations of how political economy is implicated in meaning-making about, and the regulation of, gendered, sexualised and racialised bodies from life to death.