The Indebted Woman

Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism

Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, G. Venkatasubramanian (Autoren)

Buch | Softcover

248 Seiten

2023
Stanford University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5036-3690-3 (ISBN)

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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 Guérin, 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.

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.

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?

Erscheinungsdatum	23.08.2023
Reihe/Serie	Culture and Economic Life
Zusatzinfo	4 tables, 2 figures
Verlagsort	Palo Alto
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Wirtschaftspolitik
ISBN-10	1-5036-3690-9 / 1503636909
ISBN-13	978-1-5036-3690-3 / 9781503636903
Zustand	Neuware