Mastering ‘Lady Credit’

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Abstract
This article politicizes current understandings of financial crises. It is argued that financial discourse, and specifically the discourse that locates financial crises in the realm of madness and delusion, is founded upon a distinctively masculine conception of agency. This argument is made by looking at early eighteenth-century debates concerning the emergence of credit and paper money. The article examines Daniel Defoe's satirical personification, Lady Credit. Lady Credit embodies all the irrational, inconstant and effeminate aspects that had to be purged from financial discourse before it was able to gain respectability as a rational, disinterested and scientific sphere of action. Lady Credit is not unlike ancient goddess, Fortuna, who ruled capriciously over the affairs of men. The financial discourse under examination implies that it is in times of crisis that financial man loses self-control and is prevented from seeing economic reality by the delusions that Lady Credit generates in him. Through the virile mastering of Lady Credit, it is implied, the smooth and neutral workings of the financial sphere are guaranteed. The article contends that this inherently gendered manner of understanding financial crises informs debates on financial crisis today, as can be exemplified by the public discussion on the recent crisis in Asia.

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