This thesis critically engages with financial speculation through the lens of “performance,” as a queer methodological approach, in order to reveal the turbulence inherent to its normative imposition. Financial capital normalizes financial speculation as a means to manage our present, and conditions thereof how we formulate expectations in the service of its futurity. By way of attending to the performative and speculative as central to financial capital’s operation, I argue that financial speculation’s infiltration into our everyday lives scripts the ways we approach intimacy as a negotiation of our expectations from each other through narratives of retrospective causality that pattern how we imagine our coming together will unfold in time. The thesis approaches these consequent socialities as affective relationalities by attending to the everyday performances of their narrative presuppositions that appear in popular culture, namely popular love songs. Financial speculation I wish to show, has become an embodied disposition of contractual obligations that impose predictive patterns and normative narratives restricting us to a present with a seemingly inescapable horizon of its infinite reproduction. This embodiment of financial speculation affects not only how we navigate our economic obligations but also how we understand and consecutively manage our relationality. But, in its mobilization of bodies and affects, financial speculation is met with queer resistances. Queerness is proposed here as a negotiation of freedom within finance’s temporal restrictions, and hope for and enactment of present and future intimacies that disturb its normative arrangements of sociality. The performative and the speculative imply the potentials of the bodily and affective of intimacy that is inseparable from the imaginative and futural. 

Author: Orestis Giannoulis