Neoliberalism and the World Bank: Economic Discourse and the (re)Production of Gendered Identity(ies)

Abstract

This article examines the World Bank's discourse of neoliberalism with a view to understanding how this informs and sustains the Bank's policies and practices in particularly gendered ways. ‘Neoliberalism’ is, here, a discursive structure that constitutes a powerful and pervasive contemporary model of economic development, resting on assumptions of economic growth and stability, financial transactions and human behaviour that are deeply gendered whilst presented as universal and neutral. The article thus seeks to offer an analysis of the discursive practices by which the Bank (re)produces a fundamentally gendered discourse of neoliberalism. Neoliberal discourse is a power-laden and discursively regulatory framework of economic identity that (re)produces the social reality that it defines through particular discursive practices, predicating, pre/proscribing and (re)producing the meanings, behaviours and human identities that best correspond with the pre-given, economic ‘reality’ thereby constructed. It is in the places that the Bank does not explicitly discuss or mention gender that gender identity(ies) most clearly reside, constituting the foundations of the Bank's neoliberal economic logic and informing at every level the Bank's processes of decision and policy making.