The Aesthetics of the Feminisation of Finance: Examining Australian Women’s Financial Self-Help

Abstract

This article applies a feminist multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to 19 Australian women's financial self-help books (WFSH) published between 2004 and 2024 to examine how paratextual aesthetics feminise finance. Data are presented in three sections. First, book covers display spatial motifs and neoliberal postfeminist signifiers to appeal to a heterosexual, white, middle-class reader, promising that WFSH is fun, girly, and playful. Second, on the back covers, devices such as rhetorical questions, dot points and author biographies depoliticise financialisation, framing financial success as simple and meritocratic ignoring broader context and emphasising individualism. Third, while some chapter headings and prefaces gesture towards structural barriers and differences among women, these acknowledgements are fleeting and ultimately subordinated to dominant discourses of self-responsibility and universalism. In sum, the genre's aesthetics construct feminine financial inclusion narrowly for subjects who are heterosexual, middle class, and white and, in doing so, marginalise women whose experiences fall outside these norms.