Capital Culture Revisited: Sex, Testosterone and the City

Abstract

In this essay I want to revisit and add to the arguments in my book Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City, published a decade before the first signs of the current financial crisis. There I suggested that the City of London, the financial heart of the UK, is an arena riven by sexualized and gendered scripts: in other words capitalism is gendered. A decade or so later, these arguments seem just as relevant as the financial ‘masters of the universe’ are brought low, in part by their own behaviour. Here, I explore more explicitly the implications of testosterone‐fuelled risk taking by both the traders and the chief executive officers of investment banks in the current world of casino capitalism.

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