In The Indebted Woman, Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian propose an analysis connecting sexuality to a wide array of debt relations, from global financial relations to those with the most emotionally intimate people, including lovers, kin and friends. The authors thereby show that the definitions of femininity and masculinity established in patriarchal kinship relations sustain global capitalist relations, in a way that attributes responsibility for social reproduction overwhelmingly to female bodies and subjectivities.

The introductory chapter presents the general theoretical framework of the book. The authors position the indebted woman as a “figure” produced historically by the conjunction of patriarchal kinship relations and capitalism. This relational figure is also a form of subjectivity in which aspirations, obligations, desire, violence and coercion coexist, with boundaries that sometimes become blurred. The authors call this an ontological state that, they explain, is not universal, but historical variations of which can be found in a great number of social settings worldwide. The book situates the study within the long history of research in social sciences that shows that unrecognized female labor sustains domestic spaces and capitalist relations well beyond what may be identified by statistics, state policies and a large part of social theory. The authors’ contribution to these debates is at least twofold. First, they show that managing debt is a particular form of gendered labor, as women manage more debts for households than men, in a way that is fundamental for the social reproduction of kinship, patriarchy and capitalist relations. Second, they show how this organization of debt is intrinsically connected to sexuality and the bodily experience of womanhood: “the indebted woman is a recurring, if changing, figure of capitalism, intertwined with kinship and sexuality norms that engrave debt in women’s bodies and flesh” [7]. The book is based on a mixed methods longitudinal study of people living in South Arcot, Tamil Nadu, India, with a focus on Dalit women. The theoretical framing and the comparative cases allow the authors to draw on a uniquely fine-grained study of intimacy to address in detail an issue of global dimensions.

Up to a point, the theoretical argument of the book depends on the unique methodological conditions of data collection. The material comes from 15 villages that the authors have studied continuously for 20 years, since 2003. It was only in 2011, after eight years of interaction with the same people, that some women started to talk to the researchers about the role of sexuality in debt arrangements. These confidences occurred only when respondents were not in their home village and could talk more freely. This longitudinal survey based on interviews and interactions was complemented with three other methods. One is a series of three quantitative surveys, in 2010, 2016–2017 and 2020–2021, with 1,600 respondents from 500 households, in which debt played an important role, often treating men and women separately. Another is the use of financial diaries, which again focused on separate accounts for men and women. Finally, a research assistant conducted participant observation with four households over a period of nine months. The book’s qualitative data is focused mainly on the confidences of ten women. The methodological chapter provides a fundamental critique of the notions of household and of quantifying debt. So-called “households” may be composed of a varying number of members over different periods of time, which means that their contours are not clear. Roles within a household can be very specialized in terms of gender, so that the concept of the household considered as a unit may hide more than it reveals. Finally, debts concern institutions (such as self-help groups, microfinance and banks) and people (such as neighbors, friends, lovers, kin members, employers, door-to-door lenders and pawnbrokers) that may be very diverse. This makes the meanings and conditions of different debt relations incommensurable, while the relevant social relations go well beyond a clearly defined interpersonal unit. The authors remark that the data they obtained was fraught with secrets and silences that make it necessarily incomplete and that findings often gave rise to conversations with respondents, which led to new data and understandings. At the same time, quantification aimed at obtaining a “total” amount of debt for a single household at a particular point in time yields results that reveal widespread gendered dynamics. In the 2020–2021 survey, debt repayment concerns on average 68% of household income. Women are in charge of repaying the debts of other family members and manage a much higher number of debts than men. Most of these debts are used for social reproduction, including expenses for education, health and marriages. The role of microfinance has grown over the period, with women its major recipient. The rest of the book shows how kinship norms and the figure of the indebted woman play a central role in the rise of microfinance and the reproduction of social hierarchies in terms of gender, caste and class.

The second chapter, titled “Kinship debt”, provides a short historical account of the centrality of the indebted woman in kinship relations in the region. A few decades ago, marriage arrangements among Dalit included a small dowry paid by the family of the groom to the family of the bride. This has changed dramatically. Today dowries tend to be large and are paid by the parents of the woman. As a result, the bride remains perpetually indebted to her parents and family if the dowry is high, but to her in-laws if the dowry is considered insufficient. In the context of rising living standards and consumerism among Dalits, agricultural labor has diminished and with it female labor. The figure of the housewife who does not work outside the home and protects her chastity as a high moral value has replaced that of the working woman with broader geographical mobility and sexual freedom. The rise of Hindu nationalism has only intensified women’s susceptibility to attributions of guilt, shame and liability in this process. Inside families, a lot is invested in the education of the sons in an effort to find them a good job or a wealthy bride, and in payment of dowries. Womanhood has thus come to be understood ontologically as indebted, in a state of affairs in which dowries play a crucial role in a process of social mobility centered on males’ rising social status. “If, adopting an econometric analysis, we take women with identical wealth levels, occupations, and education, the number of daughters they have is the greatest factor for them getting into debt” [62]. The authors assert that the indebted woman is thus first of all a figure of patriarchal kinship relations, who bears most of the responsibility in people’s attempts to escape the oppressive norms of caste in a capitalist economy.

The third chapter shows how this organization of kinship fosters and is reinforced by the rise of microcredit, which is backed by the financial industry and 90% of whose clients are women. Microcredit loans have increased rapidly among Dalit women, in many cases replacing group loans that depended on interpersonal relations. Generally speaking, these loans are not used to start new businesses, but for survival debt and social mobility, to break the “caste debt” that historically has made Dalit people the debtors of higher castes. For women, such loans also help to assert their creditworthiness and sexual probity, as this form of credit is less marked by the suspicion of an exchange of sex for debt. It thus reinforces the “housewifization” of Dalit women and their responsibility for obtaining loans and managing debt to sustain the reproduction of kinship relations and upward social mobility.

Chapter four focuses on female “debt work”. Financial diary analysis is crucial for this study. While on average women receive only a little over 20% of household income, they repay around 80% of the debts, managing and repaying other kin members’ debts, much more than men. In line with research on invisible female labor, the chapter shows the importance of female debt management productivity, that is, its capacity to lower the costs of debt, in a context in which the ratio of debt repayments to disposable income has increased in the past 10 years. Debt work cannot be measured in hours because debt management obligations and opportunities may arise at any time. It is better described as a “state of mind” that women must inhabit to meet unpayable kinship debts in accordance with their inferior status in the family. This status constitutes an endless source of guilt and responsibility against the background of aspirations of social reproduction and breaking caste debt through social mobility.

Chapter 5, titled “Bodily collateral”, explores the intimate relations between this organization of debt and women’s bodies and sexuality. Potentially or in act, sex is always part of debt relations: “financial discipline meets bodily discipline in a continuum of sexual acts, from charm to sexual penetration” [125]. The definition of sexuality is here marked by obligations and prohibitions concerning marriage and chastity. The interviews and ethnographic data show that women negotiate sexual acts with their husbands in relation to the amounts of money they can obtain to manage debts. In their relations with lenders, they also perform a variety of acts that are considered sexual, including smiling charmingly, wearing clothes in a way that shows more skin than usual, or closer bodily contact. Research on door-to-door lenders shows that both they and women borrowers consider these sexual acts as potentially part of the debt repayment, sometimes extracted by lenders, sometimes used as a resource by borrowers. Most of the time, women experience this as a threat that humiliates them and that they must work carefully to fend off while negotiating the possibility of borrowing and or deferring or lowering repayments. The examples and analyses provided in the chapter situate these exchanges in a broader analytical framework, in which “far from being opposites, paid sex work and married sex, coercion and freedom, are more of a continuum of fluid and interconnected positions” [112]. For the indebted woman, this is marked by constant suspicions cast on her chastity. In women’s debt work, it constitutes a constant component of fear, repugnance, suffering, guilt and emotional work, required to maintain respectability.

Chapter 6, “Debt and love”, explores cases in which women develop emotional relations of care and affection with lenders with whom they have sexual relations. Maintained in secrecy, these relations can provide emotional support and sexual pleasure, which are often absent in marriage. They are marked by guilt, to which the women interviewed in the study respond by making extra efforts to support the social mobility and reproduction of their household. Prioritizing the household over personal spending thus provides some moral rebalancing as against sexual deviancy and personal pleasure. Care, affection and sexual pleasure experienced with lenders thus avoids two morally unacceptable extremes: outright prostitution (exchanging sex solely to obtain money) and love without economic benefits, which is supposedly the exclusive prerogative of the household. Debt with love thus stands in a middle ground between payment and gift and helps to reinforce both women’s capacity to bring monetary resources into the household and their position of being eternally guilty and indebted to their kin.

Chapter 7, titled “Human debt”, shows that the women surveyed in the study also develop relations of reciprocity that elude capitalism and allow for solidarity, equality and interdependence based on sharing and caring. According to the authors, these occur in interstices, usually among women and in spaces that evade kinship and market obligations. They do not constitute an alternative to patriarchy and capitalism but show the possibility of emancipation when interdependence is reworked. The authors recall that relations among women in the sample surveyed should nevertheless not be idealized. They are marked by mutual surveillance, shaming and hierarchies among women partly based on who owes what to whom. The progressive replacement of self-help groups by microcredit, more prevalent among Dalit women than in higher castes, indicates that they may tend to consider interpersonal debt among women to be more oppressive than market debt. Inspired by Frazer’s work and the notion of a human economy, the authors propose that for reciprocity to become solidarity based on equality “a new great transformation would require breaking the hold of the creditors. For this to be feminist, it would also require a complete inversion of the ontology of debt, turning women, particularly the most disadvantaged ones, into true creditors, not only to the state but also to their kinship group and to society as a whole” [167].

Chapter 8 synthesizes and extends the findings of the book. A literature review that explores a wide variety of cases worldwide foregrounds an invariant element, namely that when social reproduction depends on market and capitalist debt, debt is a female prerogative that reinforces responsibility and moral denigration. Variations can be found based on patterns of kinship and sexuality and on state policies concerning social reproduction, including education, health and housing. The book shows that on many occasions men’s bodies are also bound by debt, for instance when they are forced into migration, face incarceration or even death. In South Arcot, this is also the case when they take up lovers or exert themselves to find further sources of debt and income to fulfil their role as breadwinners, including providing dowries for their sisters. The particularity of the indebted woman is nevertheless that debt “is engraved in women’s bodies and sexuality, and it is inseparable from their obligations as wives and mothers called on to sustain life” [176]. The research findings show the necessity of putting sexuality, bodies and kinship at the center of the study of debt on a global scale. Doing so makes it possible to see how patriarchal definitions of womanhood sustain the development of the global financial industry. The authors argue, however, that debt cancellations would not change these structural conditions. Instead, it is necessary to address the kinship systems and patriarchal ideologies that lock women in “an ontological status of debtor and guilty party” [179].

The authors address important limitations of the study, which also constitute an invitation to pursue this kind of research further. The generalizability of the findings is put into perspective with a comparative literature review that highlights the importance of avoiding universalizing approaches while staying attentive to the pervasiveness of structural elements on a global scale. Among other things, this calls for new methods and categories for quantitative studies and renewed focus for qualitative ones. The authors remark that, retrospectively, they realized they probably did not pay enough attention to issues of mental health among respondents. Also, their sample did not include cases of violence, such as suicide and murder, which are recorded in the press and other studies. These limitations concerning mental health and violence matter because, even when people do not experience them directly, the fact that they are always present as a potential threat reinforces gendered hierarchies on a large scale. The book also highlights the importance of looking in more detail into the experience of gender, sexuality and debt among people identified as male. Many examples in the book are attentive to the contradictions and tensions among men, which are constitutive of the way in which women occupy a position marked by inferiority, guilt and shame. Finally, the book does not address the longer-term horizon of the growth of indebtedness and debt repayment in household expenses, and how much sexual acts and male migration may indeed serve as recurrent compensations to offset otherwise unpayable monetary debt. These limitations notwithstanding, the research proposed by the authors is thus a very productive inspiration to pursue further the study of the mutual constitution of gender, bodies, sexuality and debt, including—in a more comprehensive way—issues of mental health, extreme forms of violence and the relational production of gendered hierarchies.

The book raises important conceptual issues that deserve further elaboration. One important issue is the heuristic potential and limitations of concepts such as debt, capitalism, kinship, gender, caste, body and sexuality. The study is carefully crafted to show that these categories cannot be defined a priori, but must be analyzed as they are defined, transformed and contested by the people observed. It shows how practice and understandings of sex, gender, emotions and bodies are related to debt hierarchies and people’s attempts to break caste relations, including by leveraging loans offered by the financial industry. The book addresses the analytic relation between these concepts with a variety of categories, among which “mutual co-constitution” and “intertwinement” are probably the most systematic. The study thus connects with current debates about intersectionality in the study of gender, class, race and other logics of social hierarchization, putting patriarchal kinship relations at the center of the analysis. Analytically, the authors justify this by arguing that “the indebted woman is not only indebted to capitalism but first and foremost to her kinship group” [7], so that her “ontology” is first structured in kinship relations. They also mobilize a genealogical argument: “it seems that patriarchy has a longer history than the state or modern money” [162]. Given the explicit limitations of the sample, the book proposes a debate that is conceptual rather than empirical and that connects directly with an explicit political horizon. As already mentioned (see Chapter 7), this horizon foregrounds the fundamental role played by the indebted woman in social reproduction and proposes an inversion of its ontology, to consider this figure as a fundamental creditor.

The book also offers potential conceptual paths to question the analytic distinction between capitalism and gender, given the compelling evidence of the mutual constitution of sexuality, bodies, gender and debt, which includes the global financial industry. It shows how, in the setting under study, mouths that smile, skin that shows through clothes or genitals that touch, among other acts, are defined as sexual in a way that distinguishes female (considered guilty, obliged and shameful) and male (considered dominant, obliged and sexually shameless, although this is less studied in the book), in social relations in which pleasure, fear, violence, rape, humiliation, care and love are part and parcel of monetary debts with kin, friends, lovers, door-to-door lenders, pawnbrokers, employers, neighbors and the global financial industry. Showing that the intimate experiences of gendered bodies, sexuality and emotion sustain household organizations, exploitative labor relations and global finance, the book questions the analytical and political proposition that distinguishes capitalism from gender and, even more, the one that considers capitalism as the main category to focus on. This is not because of a phenomenological narrowing of focus on the self, but, on the contrary, because of analyses of how global social structures are sustained by and located in gendered practices of bodies and sexuality. In this line of analysis, the authors refer to Rubin’s workFootnote ¹, which highlighted the analytical and political limitations of the gender-neutral category of capitalism proposed by Marx and the simplifying potential of an all-encompassing notion of patriarchy that conflates gender differentiations and the practices of sexuality. The authors propose use of the concepts of “sexual political economies” and of “political economies of desire and love”.

At the same time, the book still uses the concept of “capitalism” in a way that connects with the more pervasive gender-neutral way of using the concept in political economic studies. This is visible, for instance, in the recurrent claim that capitalism and patriarchy are intertwined or mutually constituted, which asserts that, at some conceptual level, the two processes can be understood as separate. This also connects with another line of analysis in the book, which refers to Fraser’s study of cannibal capitalism.Footnote ² She asserts notably that “all roads lead to one idea – namely, capitalism” [78], both as an analytical concept and as a shared enemy that might allow the creation of a unified revolutionary political horizon. Without resolving the tension around the use of the concepts of gender and capitalism, the book offers fruitful empirical and conceptual insights with which to address their limitations and possibilities.

The political horizon of the book is multiple. On one hand, it calls for a reconsideration of the gendered division of debt work and the “inversion” of the “ontology” of the indebted woman, not just with a view to cancelling debts, but also to replacing a hierarchical gendered organization with one based on equality and reciprocity. The authors also consider that debt itself, considered as interdependence in line with Butler’s understanding of the termFootnote ³, could serve as a concept for political emancipation, breaking with the gendered norms of kinship and capitalism. This leaves a few questions open. Rubin and other feminist and queer theorists consider the political horizon of emancipation and equality as a classless and genderless society. The book does not clarify whether the “inversion” of the ontology of the indebted woman would do away with its gendered identification altogether. The concept of “ontology” proposed by the authors, little problematized in the book, remains unclear in this respect. The book also shows that social reproduction constitutes a powerful driver of gendered oppression that organizes debt relations, including female unpayable debt, shame and guilt. Nevertheless, it does not address what social reproduction could mean with the dissolution of hierarchies, including gendered ones, in an organization of debt based on equal reciprocity and interdependence. Finally, the book does not address how “debt” and “interdependence” are two concepts that propose potentially very different analytic and political horizons. These issues are politically important. They are also important heuristically, as they signal potential research questions about the meanings and practices of bodies, gender, power and making humans. The Indebted Woman thus offers a uniquely rich empirical analysis that makes it possible to ask extremely compelling conceptual, methodological and political questions to address the relations between power, capitalism, patriarchy, kinship, debt, gender, bodies and sexuality.