Does access to credit bring women emancipation? The public hype around microfinance for the past three decades insists that credit indeed liberates global South women, both from poverty and from irresponsible men. However, a growing multidisciplinary critical literature on microfinance begs to differ, finding that microfinance brings little or no change to women’s circumstances, and might even drag them into debt spirals. A new book by economist Isabelle Guérin, accompanied by researcher Santosh Kumar and anthropologist G. Venkatasubramanian, reframes this debate by showing how Dalit women in rural south India navigate the expansion of patriarchal debts, including microfinance, as their sexual and economic autonomy declines. Based on twenty years of quantitative data from original surveys, financial diaries, and extensive ethnography and interviews, The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality and Capitalism provides new and startling context to how microfinance has unfolded in rural Tamil Nadu, India. This is a pathbreaking work for understanding financial capitalism from the bottom up.
The Indebted Woman tackles head-on the complexities of studying borrowing, debt, and indebtedness. The collaboration between Isabelle, Santosh, and Venkata (they refer to themselves on a first-name basis in the text, remaining true to the identities they carried in the field) promoted a convergence of perspectives that takes readers more deeply into the hidden lives of women experiencing indebtedness than in the plentiful existing accounts of microfinance, which tend to come from a single disciplinary bent. This team brought together insiders and outsiders, men and a woman—an economist committed to quantification (Isabelle), an anthropologist with academic expertise and lived experience with Tamil culture and history (Venkata), and a dancer, fitness coach, and part time researcher (Santosh). Santosh in particular brought attention to the embodied aspects of borrowing and indebtedness, which later became the central focus of the study.
What results are forceful twin arguments that most scholars would shy away from, sitting at a productive intersection of anthropology and feminist political economy: first that “there is a specific female subjectivity of social inferiority … and guilt that forges a specific female ethic of debt,” an understudied, gendered argument that draws attention to debt as a patriarchal power relation. While this opening argument has transhistorical characteristics, the second argument is more grounded in the present and in the geography of Tamil Nadu: that “the co-construction of finance capitalism and transformed kinship and sexuality” has resulted in a devaluation of women (pp. 13–14). The bravery with which this book takes on the taboo topics of caste and sexuality further underscore the importance of this work in making explicit what is at stake when we view credit for women as a recipe for emancipation.
The introductory chapter is followed by a methodological chapter, followed by two fascinating historical chapters, one that chronicles broadly how kinship and marriage have transformed in recent decades in that area, and another that examines how and why a credit market targeting women borrowers emerged in South Arcot. Each of the following empirical chapters takes readers more deeply into different arenas of women’s indebtedness and the relationships in which they are entangled: kinship-based obligations, how women must use their bodies as collateral, what happens when indebted women fall in love with their lenders, and debt in relation to friendship with other women. The concluding chapter pans out from the context of South Arcot in Tamil Nadu, building a framework for a general gender theory of debt. The chapters tell a cumulative story with crisp and direct writing and a deft weaving of descriptive stories and large bodies of scholarly literature. Still, readers will find it easy to dip into whichever chapter(s) are most pertinent to their interests, making it an ideal text to assign advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
Guérin, Kumar, and Venkatasubramanian expand upon the central theoretical concept of “debt work” throughout the work. Managing household and kin debt, the authors demonstrate, has become women’s work in neoliberal India. Managing debt requires knowledge of multiple sources of loans and their meanings (i.e., microfinance loans are more “dignified” than other loans, although not always as accessible as from moneylenders), knowledge of what is “socially expected” in terms of consumption and social mobility, knowledge of caste hierarchies, and the grueling, risky, intimate, and stressful work of shuttling between multiple sources of debt. Each source carries different expectations for repayment that can range from monetary repayment to sexual favors, and some debts, such as those to kin, can never be repaid. Women have been targeted to carry out this work because of their socially inferior position in their societies—they are already always indebted to their kin, their husbands, and their children. The authors suggest that this is likely true for women globally who are surviving financial capitalism, and for foremothers who survived earlier economic systems. We, as woman, always feel we owe something. Within this broader story, for Dalit women, although their economic and sexual autonomy has declined as they have exited the workforce, they have also experienced a rise in their social class and respectability. Previously excluded from the category of “women” because of the stigma associated with their labor in the fields and their unfeminine bodies, Dalit women have now become more and more like non-Dalit housewives, expected to remain within patriarchal nuclear families. Access to credit, and the negotiation of their bodies as both asset and stigma, have facilitated this transformation. This story of housewifization troubles standard taken-for-granted accounts about globalization and modernity bringing women empowerment. Although Dalit and non-Dalit women featured in the book all navigate respectability threats as they negotiate their position on new credit markets, Dalit women must also navigate caste stigma, which structures who they can borrow from and under what circumstances.
The accounts provided in the two chapters dedicated to the entanglement of sex, romantic love, and indebtedness (chapters 5 and 6) provide a unique and perhaps unprecedented insight into what Viviana Zelizer has previously called, perhaps all too neutrally, “relational work,” the “matching” of intimate ties with economic ones. Based on Dalit women’s intimate conversations, experiences, and decisions, these chapters lay bare the bodily collateral that women provide as borrowers, not necessarily by choice, that makes women creditworthy under neoliberalism. As one Dalit woman and key interlocutor, Pushparani, puts it, “When I go to see a man to ask for money, it’s like walking across thistles (p. 111).” Despite the tricky and uneven minefield that Pushparani and her many neighbors must navigate in order to make ends meet and aspire to a better future outside of caste domination, the women residents of South Arcot show up as agents of their own destiny, aiming to fulfill their kinship obligations and imagine a better future for their children. This is a complex sexual political economy in which women borrowers craft themselves according to the dominant scripts of modern femininity, from clothes to makeup to comportment. For lender Veerappan, just the feeling he gets when he looks at a woman he is lending to, who smiles at him, is enough for him to feel powerful and keep lending to her (p. 117). Other lenders demand more intimate favors. Women leverage sex with their husbands, termed by some as “pillow magic,” for economic favors, whether aiming to motivate him to start working again or trying to secure permission to give more gold for a daughter’s dowry.
Sometimes, women fall in love with their lenders and establish long-term relationships with them. The authors feature Pushparani and one non-Dalit woman, Raika, who found themselves in this situation. They feel constantly guilty about their sexual deviance while also justifying the need for money to keep their families afloat. Despite their guilt eating them from the inside, they are open with the researchers about their need for emotional comfort and sexual pleasure. The authors situate Pushparani and Raika’s narratives within a broader sociological and anthropological literature on desire and love as social constructs embedded in material flows and the self-making. With every secret romantic meeting, women risk their reputations, their creditworthiness, and their livelihoods, navigating with even greater intensity the dual character of their bodies and emotions as both asset and stigma. Always, they are navigating the moral quandary that Raika makes explicit, even after relationships that last fifteen years: “Am I a whore?”
The nuance and detail contained in every page of this book rings as true as possible to the real lives and contexts the authors seek to illuminate. Although the title suggests a transhistorical, essentialized Indebted Woman, the analysis is at once richly contextual and suggestive for global social theory. The core insight, that indebted women comprise the bottom of the pyramid of financialized capitalism, has broad implications for theory, praxis, and social policy across the global South/North divide, bringing the body back into the seemingly abstract financial system that drives contemporary neoliberalism.
