The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, And Capitalism (Culture And Economic Life)

Women, and particularly those who are subaltern, have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Women bear the largest share of household debt worldwide, and that debt has exploded over the last decade, reaching an all-time high after the COVID-19 pandemic. Things like subprime loans and microcredit policies both have an overrepresentation of women as clients and managers, enfolding them into the system. The Indebted Woman discusses the crucial yet invisible roles subaltern 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 frequently involved sex work or sexual transactions, making one's body available for surrogacy, and selling one's daughter or her virginity. Bringing together ethnography, statistical surveys, and financial diaries, they offer for the first time a comprehensive theory for this sexual division of debt, exposing the ways in which capitalism transforms womanhood, and how this transformation in turn fuels capitalism.

• | Author: Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, G. Venkatasubramanian
• | Publisher: Stanford University Press
• | Publication Date: Sep 19, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 248 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1503636313
• | ISBN-13: 9781503636316