Event Date: November 20, 2023 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: FSS 4006, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS and the International Political Economy Network (IPEN)

Poor women have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Globally, it is most often women who manage household debt to make ends meet, 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.

The event will be in French. A light lunch will be served.

Speaker:

Isabelle Guérin is a socio-economist, Senior Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), member of the Cessma (Université de Paris Cité), and associated with the French Institute of Pondicherry. She specializes in the political and moral economy of money, debt and finance. Her current work focuses on the financialisation of economies, exploring how financialisation produces new forms of inequality and domination, but also alternative and solidarity-based initiatives. She founded and coordinates the Observatory of Rural Dynamics and Social Inequalities in South India (ODRIIS).

Moderator:

Pascale Massot is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies. She was a member of the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs’ Indo-Pacific Advisory Committee. She has served as the Senior Advisor for China and Asia to various Canadian Cabinet ministers, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs, at different points between 2015 and 2021.