Spencer Kaplan, a PhD student in the Yale Department of Anthropology, has published a paper in Anthropology of Work Review based on his ethnographic fieldwork among Wall Street’s LGBTQ bankers.
“ ‘Bringing Your Full Self to Work’: Fashioning LGBTQ Bankers on Wall Street” explores how Wall Street’s LGBTQ workers experience institutional diversity and inclusion as a project of self-cultivation, engaging with queerness as a form of human capital and object of speculation. It asks: what does it mean to be both a queer and financial subject? Focusing on the experience of the bankers themselves, this work moves beyond current approaches that evaluate D&I based on its business results. It also complicates the notion that D&I is simply a form of top-down managerial power.
The paper is available open-access here.