Hardback : £95.70
Women, and particularly poor women, have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Globally, women are responsible for managing household debt, and that debt has exploded over the last decade, reaching an all-time high after the COVID-19 pandemic. Across various categories of loans, including subprime lending, microcredit policies, and consumer loans, as well as rent and utilities, women are overrepresented as clients and managers, and are being enfolded into the system. The Indebted Woman discusses the crucial yet invisible roles poor women play in making and consolidating debt and credit markets. Isabelle Guerin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian spent over two decades observing a credit market that specifically targets women in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu. They found that paying off debts required labor, frequently involved sexual transactions, and shaped women's bodies and subjectivities. Bringing together ethnography, statistical surveys, and financial diaries, they offer for the first time a comprehensive theory for this sexual division of debt that goes far beyond the Indian case, exposing the ways capitalism transforms womanhood and how this transformation in turn fuels capitalism.
Women, and particularly poor women, have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Globally, women are responsible for managing household debt, and that debt has exploded over the last decade, reaching an all-time high after the COVID-19 pandemic. Across various categories of loans, including subprime lending, microcredit policies, and consumer loans, as well as rent and utilities, women are overrepresented as clients and managers, and are being enfolded into the system. The Indebted Woman discusses the crucial yet invisible roles poor women play in making and consolidating debt and credit markets. Isabelle Guerin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian spent over two decades observing a credit market that specifically targets women in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu. They found that paying off debts required labor, frequently involved sexual transactions, and shaped women's bodies and subjectivities. Bringing together ethnography, statistical surveys, and financial diaries, they offer for the first time a comprehensive theory for this sexual division of debt that goes far beyond the Indian case, exposing the ways capitalism transforms womanhood and how this transformation in turn fuels capitalism.
Introduction
1. Intimacies and Measurement
2. Kinship Debt
3. The Sexual Division of Debt
4. Debt Work
5. Bodily Collateral
6. Debt and Love
7. Human Debts
8. What Does the Future Hold?
Isabelle Guérin is Senior Research Fellow at the French Institute of Research for Sustainable Development, and Associate at the French Institute of Pondicherry.Santosh Kumar is a part-time researcher and founder and head of the Mithralaya School of music, dance, and arts.G. Venkatasubramanian has been a sociologist and Research Fellow at the French Institute of Pondicherry for the past thirty-five years.
"This book is pathbreaking in the most literal sense: it opens the
way for more studies of women and debt as central features of
capitalist economies. It gives insight into the ways in which the
reproduction of capital depends on women's reproductive labor as
household debt managers, but also into the ways in which they
strategically navigate the system."
—Joan W. Scott, Princeton University
"With gripping evidence and theoretical acumen, Guerin, Kumar, and
Venkatubramanian reframe our understandings of the debt economy. By
foregrounding the deeply gendered labor of debt, The Indebted Woman
launches a new research agenda. A book that transcends disciplinary
boundaries and moves forward the analysis of intimate
economies."
—Viviana A. Zelizer, author of The Purchase of Intimacy and
Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy
"The Indebted Woman is a compact account of the credit markets in
South Arcot, and in particular their disproportionate effect on
Dalit women.... Where the book shines is in its conscientious
economic research, awakening readers to the lived experiences of
Dalit women and their invisible and indispensable role in the South
Indian economy."
—Annelie Hyatt, Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism
"The Indebted Woman is a groundbreaking exploration of the
relationships between capitalism, patriarchy, and female debt."
—Maryann Bylander, The Developing Economies
"This is an ambitious book building a picture of the different ways
in which women are indebted and the ways in which they strive to
repay their debts. It gives an account of the dilemmas faced by
women juggling loans from multiple sources both to survive and to
advance the position of their families. It is unusually rich in its
coverage of psychological as well as social and economic aspects of
their debt relationships."—Judith Heyer, Journal of South Asian
Development
"[The Indebted Woman] offers a powerful and compelling analysis of
the mutual determinations of economic conditions and the dynamics
of capitalism, the kinship system, and women's subjectivity and
sexuality, at the base of financial capitalism."—John Harriss, The
Journal of Peasant Studies
"The arguments presented, linking debt with kinship, capitalism,
and sexuality, leave one with much food for thought."—R. V.
Bhavani, Review of Agrarian Studies
"This book... offers valuable insight into the gendered dimensions
of financialized debt and rural poverty. It will be critical
reading for economic anthropologists and anthropologists of South
Asia, and anyone interested in the intersection of gender, finance,
and poverty."—Sohini Kar, American Ethnologist
"The figure of the 'indebted woman' is the ontology of femininity
introduced in this book that expands our understanding of finance
and establishes it to be deeply gendered."—Rhacel Salazar Parreñas,
Contemporary Sociology
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