FX Beauties

The FX Beauties are an online trading collective of Japanese women-mostly housewives who trade digital currencies in lieu of leaving household savings in the low-interest bank accounts commonly available in Japan. At their peak, the trading carried out by the women represented thirty percent of all retail currency trading out of Japan. By reworking the relationship between domesticity, cultural gender politics, financial systems, and decentralized networks, the FX Beauties demonstrate both the fragility and fortitude of gender norms in a neoliberal economy, as well as the ways that digital spaces encroach on domestic ones. With a preface by James Taylor-Foster and contributions from Adjustments Agency, Tobias Brask, dpr-barcelona, Keller Easterling, Karen Sofie Egebo, Helene Julia Frichot, Ryan John King/FOAM, Grace Quah, Jack Self, and Barbara Stewart.