The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality and 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 talk draws on this recent co-authored book with Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian and outlines the key findings: the sexual division of debt and the work of debt as pillars of contemporary financialized capitalism, and how these are both shaped by and constitutive of specific forms of womanhood and sexuality.

About the speaker:
Isabelle Guérin is a Senior Research Fellow at IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development). Her research focuses on how financialization perpetuates inequalities, as well as its impact on the development of alternative and solidarity-based initiatives. Her approach combines statistical surveys and ethnography and includes a critical analysis of the politics of numbers. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Observatory of Rural Dynamics and Social Inequalities in South India (ODRIIS).

Chair: Alessandra Mezzadri, Reader in Global Development & Political Economy

This event is part of the SOAS Global Development Seminar Series.