Why Financialization as a theoretical framework? 

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/652-gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism

6. Financialization is a Powerful yet Heterogeneous and Contingent Process of Capture and Conversion

“Finance’s undue influence in the twenty-first century is often taken to index the penultimate expression and triumph of neoliberal logics, but the specificities of finance’s rise are important here, and underexamined. On the one hand, finance—as a constellation of priorities, practices, and ideologies that engage with, are based on, and seek to convert already existing (and highly varied) assets into more liquid forms of capital—is age-old. Financialization, it is important to distinguish, refers to the scaling up and growing influence of finance, and specifically the increased linking, translation, and interactions between a financial mode of apprehending the world and other social domains (Ho forthcoming).

While our generating capitalism approach tackles head-on the massive socio-economic shifts that have made institutions, natural resources, governmental entities, education, retirements, etc., increasingly dependent on financial products, measurements, and values, we also insist that the processes of finanicalization are uneven, specific, and contingent. Moreover, this scaling up (i.e., the far-reaching influence of finance institutionally, regionally, and globally, as well as its remaking of individual subjectivities and selves) is dependent upon those multiple and non-linear cultural, material, political, and legal transformations that also need to occur in order to enable the messy conversions of non-financial assets.

How does investigating the devolution and outsourcing of risk to these heterogeneous lifeworlds help us to understand processes of financialization differently? Does a re-assessment of the assumption of risk in finance and its historical configuration enable us to rethink purported capitalist logics and the dominant narrative of financialization? Undoubtedly, yes and yes. For example, if the widespread imposition of subprime credit depended, in part, upon the historical encounter with racist redlining as well as subprime credit’s productive recalling and active differentiating from this trauma (while reproducing its effects) in order to lubricate the conversion of household incomes and relations (especially among African Americans) into finance, then we can begin to see how financialization is integrally a story of households, race, and the manufacture of risk. Indeed, various financial products and forms of advice can both rely on and enable conversions within households that mediate the market and the family (Han 2012; James 2014).

• Financialization is the explicit application of particular financial market values to new domains, fracturing illusions that capitalism is separate from multiple, intersecting sites of production, such as the household, corporations, or education.”