Table of Contents for The Indebted Woman
Introduction
In this introductory chapter, we argue that there is a specifically female subjectivity of social inferiority, moral obligation, dependency, and guilt that in turn forges a female ethic of debt. Debt not only constitutes a power relation based in class, race, or caste, but a patriarchal power relation that debt theorists have largely neglected, or even ignored. While feminist studies have tackled the gender of debt in terms of how women are exploited by debt, they have overlooked something deeper. Debt intimately connects to the very fact of being a woman, of experiencing womanhood and having a female body. That is the focus of this book, which draws on almost twenty years of fieldwork in the South Arcot region of Tamil Nadu in southern India alongside Dalit women (ex-untouchables in Hindu theology), systematically examining this social category, region, and period of history.
1.Intimacies and Measurement
Here we discuss the construction of our collaborative research and our unique combination of methods over time. How did the question of women's bodies, which we had completely ignored at the outset, gradually and belatedly become a central issue? Although ethnography remained our primary approach, multiple questionnaire surveys became key to capturing the materiality of debt, its evolution over time, and its deep gender asymmetries. Financial diaries, as a specific form of quantification, were instrumental to capturing the extent to which debt management constitutes real work. We discuss the backstage of this collaboration, enriched by our particular skills but also by our distinct sensibilities and our diverse gender, cultural, and social backgrounds.
2.Kinship Debt
This chapter traces the gradual transformation of kinship and matrimonial payment systems in South Arcot over the past fifty years, their growth under the neoliberal and ultranationalist policies of the past decade, and the attendant transformation of Dalit women into "housewives." These changes have been both a reflection of and a catalyst for the devaluation of women and the prohibition of so-called deviant sexuality. Although fathers, maternal uncles, and older brothers are supposed to shoulder the heavy costs and debts of marriage and brides' dowries, women are also responsible for a large portion. An ontological condition of indebtedness moreover transpires from Dalit women's narratives, stemming from their status as women and devalued subjects. Feelings of debt and obligation, entitlement and guilt come up repeatedly in testimonies. These permeate financial behaviors and conducts but also more deeply, womanhood.
3.The Sexual Division of Debt
This chapter traces back the construction of dedicated credit markets for women and the gradual sexual division of debt in South Arcot. Microcredit, initially conceived as a tool for the emancipation of women, has primarily fueled their transformation into "housewives." It feminized the local credit market, as providers became convinced of women's creditworthiness and their impeccable repayment ethics. High demand for credit is a matter of making ends meet but also of improving children's chances in life and of breaking away from, or at least weakening, historical dependencies on high castes. For women, it is also a matter of regaining economic worth, as they are unable to find paid employment. Offering a comparison across time and space, we highlight the extent to which poor women have become specialized in humiliating and degrading debts. The sexual division of debt acts both as a marker and a revealer of gender hierarchies.
4.Debt Work
Feminists have long fought for the value of domestic work to be counted, and for work to be counted differently, to better measure women's economic contribution to capitalism. In financialized economies entrenched in the sexual division of debt, counting debt and the work of debt is an extension of this struggle. This is what this chapter also looks to achieve. Debt management has become a real, invisible, devalued yet highly productive form of work in South Arcot. The high transaction volumes, the degree of time invested, the routine and repetition, and the skills and know-how required all add up to a true form of unpaid, invisible labor. Some women manage to negotiate very cheap loans, while others spend a large proportion of their family income on interest payments. Debt management transpires to be an ongoing state of mind, which involves cognitive, memory, and emotional demands.
5.Bodily Collateral
This chapter explores the central but underexplored role of women's sexual and emotional work in credit markets. How do they cope and try to make the most out of them? Sex and often "forced" work to repay debt have been widely documented, but the existence of sex work in the ordinary fabric of creditworthiness and repayment remains a blind spot. In South Arcot, debt work is not just about financial management and calculation. As the indebted woman lacks material resources, she frequently uses her own body as collateral, a security that the lender can use throughout the transaction. The indebted woman is also supposed to respect the moral codes of virtue and chastity. This all requires specific techniques and disciplines of body exposure and the management of feelings and emotions. Reiterating a historical constant of patriarchy, the indebted woman's body proves both an asset and a stigma.
6.Debt and Love
This chapter focuses on the indebted woman in love. It discusses how, over time, certain preferred lenders can become lovers, providing a source of credit, love, care, and sexual pleasure. In the collateralization of their bodies, transgressive sexuality is experienced as immoral and therefore a source of guilt. But with lender-lovers, it is sexual pleasure that is a source of guilt. The indebted woman in love is constantly torn by feelings of guilt and shame that eat away at her. Her ethical dilemmas are simply the reflection of a colonial-era obsession with scrutinizing women's sexual behavior and classifying all those who stray from chastity and monogamy as aberrant and dangerous. Due to this guilt, which she seeks to compensate for by taking on more obligations, the indebted woman is caught in an unpayable debt from which she cannot escape.
7.Human Debts
This chapter focuses on debts that women take on with other women, and where the circulation of money intertwines with friendship and care. The indebted woman uses these circuits of female reciprocity to reconfigure the webs of interdependence within which she is embedded. She also uses them to support her own emancipatory aspirations and to elicit care, which is usually something she constantly gives to others while remaining deprived. Last but not least, she uses these female spaces to free her speech and her body and to escape omnipresent control over her every waking moment. These are only interstices, and the unpayable debt does not go away. But they offer various lessons for thinking about human debts—namely, those debts that can be a source of solidarity and interdependence based on equality, as opposed to unilateral power, exploitation, and guilt.
8.What Does the Future Hold?
Our concluding chapter situates the case of South Arcot within a wider context, with lessons for a theory of the gender of debt. Taking a detour across time and space, we revisit the multiple ways in which ideas and norms about happy and desirable marriages, and respectable sexuality, are both shaped by and constitutive of debt and credit markets. We also consider how this intermingling produces a specifically female demand for credit, a female form of creditworthiness, and a female repayment ethic. We equally discuss the future of debt. Many antidebt feminist campaigns have been playing out in various parts of the world since the 2008 financial crisis. They need to be coupled with measures and policies to break the rules of kinship and sexuality, to lift the indebted woman out of her ontological status as debtor and guilty party.