This presentation explores the symbolic terrain emerging around cryptocurrency regulation, focusing on how masculinities are mobilised in debates about legitimacy, value, and authority. Drawing on feminist critiques of finance and psychoanalytic theory, I show how crypto is framed in strikingly gendered terms — from paternal figures like “Crypto Dad” and “Crypto Mom,” to the online fan cultures surrounding figures like Andrew Tate and the rise of the “Sigma Male.” These gendered scripts help shape the imaginaries of regulation, disruption, and risk within financial and political discourse. Through analysis of high-profile regulatory figures, industry media, and pop-cultural representations — including memes, slogans, and symbolic acts like the burning of a Banksy — I argue that cryptocurrency debates reflect not a rupture with financial orthodoxy, but an intensification of its symbolic exclusions. Even accelerationist or anti-oedipal defences of crypto replicate a gendered symbolic order that remains hostile to the feminine, and nostalgic for a mythic, paternal past. By placing cultural narratives of crypto within a broader history of financial masculinity, the paper highlights how technologies claiming to decentralise trust and value often entrench the very hierarchies they claim to dismantle.

About the speaker

Kate Maclean is Associate Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity, The Bartlett, University College London. She is Chair of the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group (RGS-IBG), editor of the journals Gender, Place and Culture and Journal of Latin American Studies, and a member of the Community Economies Research Network. She is the author of Cash, Clothes and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia’s Pluri-economy (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Social Urbanism and the Politics of Violence: The Medellín Miracle (Palgrave, 2015). Her work on gender and finance includes the edited volume Seduced and Betrayed: Exposing the Contemporary Microfinance Phenomenon (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles, including Gender, Risk and the Wall Street Alpha Male (2016) and "Crypto Dad and the Primal Horde: The gendered psychodynamics of regulating cryptocurrencies" (2025), both in Journal of Gender Studies.

This event is organised jointly by the department of International Relations & Political Science, the Gender Centre and the Centre for Finance and Development.