Trading from home: the affective relations of 'doing finance' in the domestic setting of the home

As McDowell argues, the physical construction of the workplace affects, as well as reflects, the social construction of work and places its inhabitants within a relation to power. This is to both place and understand bodies and their socially encoded meaning in relation to the specific spatial, temporal and cultural context in which they are placed. In global financial centres, the spatial frame has served only to promote and reify a dominant vision of masculinist aggression, greed and competitive one-upmanship. For example, McDowell and Zaloom both highlight the impact of the traditional open-outcry exchanges on performative financial relations. However, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of London has largely fallen dormant, as its trading work force has been shifted from the masculine placing of finance work to the feminized sphere of the home. In this context, this chapter capitalizes on COVID-enforced work relocation to offer a unique insight into the challenges. Specifically, it focuses on experiences of conducting a masculinist occupational endeavour in the largely feminized sphere of the home, examining key themes of detachment, loss, tension and negotiation as well as opportunism and possibility.