The Indebted Woman
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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.
—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
