THE INDEBTED WOMAN

Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism ISABELLE GUÉRIN, SANTOSH KUMAR, and G. VENKATASUBRAMANIAN

As developing states adopt neoliberal policies, more and more working-class women find themselves pulled into the public sphere. They are pressed into wage work by a privatizing and unstable job market. Likewise, they are pulled into public roles by gender mainstreaming policies that developing states must sign on to in order to receive transnational aid. Their inclusion into the political economy is very beneficial for society, but is it also beneficial for women? In The Stigma Matrix Fauzia Husain draws on the experiences of policewomen, lady health workers, and airline attendants, all frontline workers who help the Pakistani state, and its global allies, address, surveil, and discipline veiled women citizens. These women, she finds, confront a stigma matrix: a complex of local and global, historic, and contemporary factors that work together to complicate women’s integration into public life. The experiences of the three groups Husain examines reveal that inclusion requires more than quotas or special seats. This book advances critical feminist and sociological frameworks on stigma and agency showing that both concepts are made up of multiple layers of meaning, and are entangled with elite projects of hegemony.

Fauzia Husain is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens University. Her work has been published in Signs and Poetics.

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.

G. Venkatasubramanian is a sociologist and Research Fellow at the French Institute of Pondicherry.

Santosh Kumar is a researcher at the French Institute of Pondicherry.

Globalization In Everyday Life

JANUARY 2024 296 pages | 6 x 9

4 tables, 2 figures

Paper $30.00 (£25.99) SDT 9781503636057

Cloth $90.00 (£78.00) SDT 9781503632370 eBook 9781503636064

Sociology

Culture And Economic Life

SEPTEMBER 2023 248 pages | 6 x 9

4 tables, 2 figures

Paper $28.00 (£23.99) SDT 9781503636903

Cloth $90.00 (£78.00) SDT 9781503636316 eBook 9781503636910

Sociology