Everyday geographies of cryptocurrency: crypto-masculinities, crypto-futures and gendered financial subjectivities in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Drawing on feminist scholarship on money and finance and ­geographical scholarship on everyday life and masculinities, this article examines the promises and futures that investment in and use of cryptocurrency represents for men in the UK. We explore the financial practices, logics and decision-making of ordinary crypto-users and examine how engagement with cryptocurrency shapes how these men understand themselves, their futures, and their place in the broader world. Through focus group and interview data we explore how research participants explain their rationale and motivations for their financial practices, including examining men’s perceptions of and relations to cryptocurrency, and how these shape and are shaped by the intimacies and moralities of everyday life. Based on our findings, we conceptualise crypto-masculinities as a historically and socially specific financial practice and gendered expression of the relations of (digital) money and finance. This article remedies the limited geographical attention that has been paid thus far to cryptocurrency ‘users’, and offers novel insights into the embodied dimensions of cryptocurrency use, including how cryptocurrency is experienced and lived.