Isabelle Guérin et. al., "The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Isabelle Guérin et al., "The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Date: November 29, 2025
Host: Sarah Fogelsanger
Guest: Isabelle Guérin (with reference to co-authors Santosh Kumar & Venkata Subramanian)

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Overview

This episode delves into "The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism," a path-setting ethnographic and conceptual study of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu, India. Co-authored by Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and Venkata Subramanian, the book examines the intricate interplay between gender, debt, kinship structures, and shifting sexual norms within the context of global capitalism. Host Sarah Fogelsanger interviews lead author Guérin, who shares insights from two decades of collaborative field research, challenging dominant narratives around women’s empowerment, financialization, and social obligations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Author Background and Research Collaboration

(03:33–07:54)

• Interdisciplinary Training: Isabelle Guérin identifies as a “social scientist” blending economics, ethnography, statistics, and personal observation.
• Collaborative Ethnography: The research was a collective effort; varying perspectives on gender, caste, and locality informed the analysis.
• Long-Term Fieldwork: Started in India (2003), integrating local co-researchers’ insights for a “triangulated” understanding.

Quote:

“Our work has consisted in carrying out a statistical survey aiming at measuring women's debt…combined with a long-term ethnography…allowing us to triangulate, cross-check, and in the end strengthen our analysis.”
—Isabelle Guérin (07:28)

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2. The ‘Elephant in the Room’: Gender, Debt, and the Missing Data

(07:54–16:16)

• Neglect of Gender in Debt Studies: Mainstream statistics and policy rarely differentiate women’s debt; it's often merged into household figures.
• ‘Sexual Division of Debt’: Just as labor is gendered, so is debt—women have particular access to credit, face predatory terms, and a disproportionately heavy repayment burden.
• Forms of Indebtedness: Pawn loans, payday loans, and especially microcredit (where 80% of clients are women) expose structural inequalities; women often repay not only their own debts but those of family.

Quote:

“A key argument of the book is to say that there exists a sexual division of debt, as many feminist studies have shown that there is a sexual division of labor…”
—Isabelle Guérin (12:35)

• Corporality of Debt: Women’s bodies and sexuality are often caught up in mechanisms of debt (from transactional sex to social stigma).

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3. The South Indian Context: Dalit Women and ‘Patriarchal Debt’

(18:28–33:10)

• Rapid Credit Market Expansion: Microcredit and informal lending exploded since the 2000s, with Dalit women targeted despite lacking traditional collateral.
• Paradox of Women’s ‘Creditworthiness’: Contrary to financial logic, poor rural women become ideal borrowers due to social domination—not economic power.
• Debt Beyond Economics: Drawing on David Graeber and Gayle Rubin, Guérin argues debt is moral, political, social—a tool reinforcing gender, caste, and kinship hierarchies.

Quote:

“Debt is never just economics. It's moral, it's political, it's deeply social.”
—Isabelle Guérin (28:27)

• Kinship and Changing Norms: A shift toward ‘housewifeization’—increased domesticity and sexual control over women—is linked to capitalist and conservative kinship ideologies.
• ‘Respectable’ Woman as Repayer: Repayment is crucial to the construction of social worth in the community; shame and guilt add to the burden.

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4. Sexuality, Transactional Sex, and Navigating Respectability

(34:38–43:36)

• Unexpected Centrality of Sexuality: The discovery that transactional sex—trades of sex or affection for credit or leniency—is more prevalent than anticipated.
• Broad Definition: Includes gestures from smiles to touch to sex; not only with lenders but also within kin relationships to negotiate resources.
• Changing Body Norms: Societal expectations around beauty and respectability intensify the psychological burden; managing debt becomes a cognitive, emotional, and physical ‘job’.
• Contradictions and Skills: Women must use their bodies as assets while maintaining respectability, juggling conflicting demands.

Quote:

“One of the most crucial and exhausting skills of the indebted woman is to learn how to navigate permanent contradiction: using her body to remain without losing respectability.”
—Isabelle Guérin (41:53)

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5. Avoiding the ‘Victim’ or ‘Heroine’ Trap

(44:25–51:46)

• Rejecting Simplistic Narratives: Guérin is careful not to frame Dalit women only as ‘victims’ or ‘empowered heroines.’
• Ordinary Citizens: Research shows these women are “very active figures of this financial landscape” supporting families, communities, and the financial system itself.
• Emotional Complexity: Attachments with lenders can blur lines between coercion, strategy, and affection—social history shapes even love.
• Anecdote: NGO sessions where women are coached on hygiene and ‘presentability’ for bank credit highlight the intersection of gender, appearance, and financial access.

Quote:

“She [the indebted woman] actively makes it function. She keeps money circulating. She negotiates time, trust, credibility, honor.”
—Isabelle Guérin (46:20)

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6. Broader Significance & Ongoing Research

(52:57–55:33)

• Debt as Structural Compensator: Without the exploitation of women’s debt, the current structure of global capitalism could not function—women’s indebtedness fills gaps left by insufficient wages and social protections.
• Statistics: At least one-third of the world’s population relies on debt for survival—a figure likely understated.
• Next Steps: Guérin’s current research includes:
  • Continuing to disseminate the book’s findings outside academic circles.
  • Campaigns to raise awareness on women’s debt.
  • Quantifying chronic indebtedness globally.
  • Investigating environmental debt's interplay with social debt.

Quote:

“Without women’s debt, capitalism couldn’t work… it allows the system to keep going.”
—Isabelle Guérin (53:06)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• Triangulated Research Method:
  “Our work…allowing us to triangulate, cross-check, and in the end strengthen our analysis.” (07:28)
• Sexual Division of Debt:
  “There exists a sexual division of debt…” (12:35)
• Debt as Social Structure:
  “Debt is never just economics. It's moral, it's political, it's deeply social.” (28:27)
• Navigating Contradictions:
  “One of the most crucial and exhausting skills of the indebted woman is to learn how to navigate permanent contradiction: using her body to remain without losing respectability.” (41:53)
• Dynamic Roles:
  “She actively makes it function…She negotiates time, trust, credibility, honor.” (46:20)
• Critical Structural Insight:
  “Without women’s debt, capitalism couldn’t work…it allows the system to keep going.” (53:06)

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Timestamps by Theme

• 03:33 – 07:54: Guérin’s background & collaborative methodology
• 07:54 – 16:16: Gendering debt and introducing the ‘sexual division of debt’
• 18:28 – 33:10: The South Indian case, class & kinship, normative shifts
• 34:38 – 43:36: Centrality of sexuality, transactional sex, women’s agency
• 44:25 – 51:46: Navigating dichotomies, nuanced portrayal, anecdotes
• 52:57 – 55:33: Broader capitalist context, ongoing projects, global perspective

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Takeaways

• The study reframes indebtedness as a gendered, social, and moral construct, not just an economic one.
• Dalit women in South India exemplify how financial systems and gendered kinship structures intersect under neoliberal capitalism.
• Women’s debt has become both tool and trap—a means for value, survival, and social participation, but also a profound site of exploitation and discipline.

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For further engagement, refer to the book:
The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2023)

Transcript

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[Marshall Po]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Welcome everyone. This is a new episode in the New Books Network. My name is Sarah Fogelsanger and I'm your host today. This episode will discuss the published book Indebted Kinship, Sexuality and Capitalism written by Isabel Green, Santosh Kumar and venkata Subramian. In 2023, Isabel is a senior researcher based in France and India. Santosh and Venkar based in India. They have worked together for over 10 years in Southeast India, written a book that portrays the everyday lives of Dalit women, dealing with their households, the local NGOs, and of course, money and debt. This is not only the first book looking at that of women, but also in the context of India where a large amount of micro investment programs were introduced to lift women out of poverty. This book is a very much needed conceptualization of an underrepresented string in the study of gender and economics that I'm sure will be of much influence in the future. Today I'm joined by Isabelle to talk about the book. Hi Isabel. Very excited to be here. Before diving into your book, it is a tradition at the New Books Network to present yourself and your work. So you do that already in your first chapter in the book, which I really enjoy to read. But please, I would love to hear more about yourself, how you got into academia and how you ended up writing this book.

[Isabel Green]

Thank you. And first of all, let me let you know how I'm very happy to have this opportunity. So thank you very much for your time and for giving us this opportunity to talk about our book. So regarding myself, I'm trained as an economist, but I'm practicing a very specific form of economics which is I would say, on the one hand, attentive to numbers. I do think that we need to measure and we need to quantify, but I'm also very much attentive to experiences, subjectivities, the life histories. And in the end I would rather qualify myself as a social scientist. Boring concepts from many different disciplines ranging from ethnography to statistics and even sometimes econometrics. So I started working in India in 2003 and quite quickly I started collaborating with my two colleagues, Venkata Sulamayan and Santosh Kumar, who at that time were presented as so called research assistant. And quite quickly I realized that in fact there were researchers on their own rights in the sense that my understanding and interpretation of what I was observing depended very closely on their own analytical capacities. So over time we ended up carrying out what could be called collective ethnography, combining our respective position in terms of gender, in terms of origin, in terms of skin color, in terms of caste, and also in terms of personal sensibilities. Maybe I can say a few words about that. Me as a woman, as a young mother at that time, I was constantly torn between my family and professional responsibilities, going back and forth between India and France and I was particularly sensitive very clearly to the issue of debt as an obligation, as some, as something which is constitutive of being a woman, which is a key argument of the book. Then Santos, who has been trained both as an economist, as a sociologist, but more than that, he has always been very active in NGOs. He's also a sport coach, a fitness specialist, a dancer and the founder of that school. And during the field work he has always been very attentive to the issues of the body. And it was he who drew attention to the corporality of debt, which is another key argument of the book. Then we have our third colleague, Ben Kattah, trained as a sociologist who is native from the region, the small region that talking about in the book, South Harkot, a small area in the central eastern part of Tanim Nad, South India. And he has been deeply invested in understanding local dynamics and trying to make a sense of what his own native region was going through. He's also someone who is very attentive to religious aspect. He's managing different temples in various parts of the region. He's also very much involved in trade unions, which I think makes him maybe help him develop a certain sensitivity to power relations. So in the end our work has consisted in carrying out a statistical survey aiming at measuring women's death, something that almost does not exist, and combining this with a long term ethnography. I believe that the diversity of our positions sets something. Yes, that we developed in the first chapter of the book was extremely valuable in allowing us to triangulate, cross check and in the end strengthen our analysis. It's not always easy. I think I should mention it. It's a long process of mutual learning and getting to know one another, building trust, making sure that we do not compete in our interpretations. But the way it works, it strikes me as a truly powerful and inspiring methods.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Yeah, it sounds wonderful and really interesting as well how you those like intersectionality that you kind of bring in into your analysis from your own kind of perspective, which is, yeah, super interesting. I would like to start now with the elephant in the room. So the topic of depth. You write about how little research has been done on debt and gender and I'm interested to know what have you found out about the differences of like debt routine, like is there a debt? Is there a difference between genders and how has it been treated previously in previous research?

[Isabel Green]

Yeah, so we do have some work on debt, especially over the last 10 years, I would say especially in regard with the rise of microcredit. So There are a number of fascinating, I'm not going to name colleagues because I'm sure I will forget some of them. But for sure, over the last two years there's been a growing body of knowledge looking at this part of the financial landscape. You also have some very famous colleagues like Silvia Federici, showing how the financialization of social reproduction is drawing on women's debt. And so our book draw on all those things and with the idea that we live in a world of debt, public debt, corporate debt, household debt. We talk a lot about household debt relating to supreme crisis. But apart from that moment, and apart from the few colleagues, feminist colleagues I was talking about, it remains something which is largely understudied. And when it is discussed, the issue of gender is usually left aside or considered as the other side of the coin. As women as credit rations, they need credit because they don't have enough access to credit. So while we look at the other side of the coin debt, and if you take for instance in 2019, there was a very nice interesting report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development who really raised the alarm about growing financial vulnerability of, of households. And the report, like many others, provided strong and valuable evidence, but no mention at all of gender. And we do believe that this is partly because there are no official statistics. And as we all know, when something is not counted, it tends to be ignored. It does not count. And the problem is that in most available statistics, women's debt is simply merged with their spouse estate as if those two things were a single undifferentiated unit. And this means that the only figure that we have in most cases, most countries concern single mothers or female students. And yet our main point is to say that many women do not have access to the same source of credit. They do not borrow from the same reasons, they do not rely on the same assets to build their credit worthiness. And they do not repay in the same way or for the same reasons. And even when it comes to joint debt, that is debt contracted with a husband or a partner. So one of the key argument of the book is to say that there exists a sexual division of debt. As many feminist studies have shown that there is a sexual division of labor that affect women in different places and at different times. And with this idea that women are often concentrated in low paid and undervalued care work. And what we argue here, that there is also a sexual division of debt that curses across time and space. Even though most of the book deals with is Tamil Nadu, and not only Tamil Nadu, but Dalit women in South Sarcode. We are constantly trying to locate this particular case study in time and space to be able to make some kind of generalization. So we do argue that this section of division of debt is not at all restricted to our case study. And it's everywhere. And more specifically, what do we mean by this idea of sexual divinity debt? Three things. The first one is access to specific brewing sources with this observation that time and again working class and so called Subaru women have to rely on loans that are expensive, degrading and sometimes outright predatory. Then you have a large range of examples or in pawning, in getting money in exchange of exchange for leaving something valuable as collateral. This can be anything from clothes and then jewels or electronic goods, everything. This has been a long, very old lifeline for working class families. If you look, if you read, I don't know whether you're aware of French literature like Emil Zola. If you read Emil Zola in the French 19th century, you come across many of those characters, women characters who constantly pawn their small belongings just to get a shoe, coin for a meal. And today bounding is still widely used everywhere. Everywhere. Then you have many other financial practices. An credit card, for instance, a payday, loans. But we have few figures showing that in the US or in the UK it's much, much more fear thing. Then you have microcredits, of course, which was initially designed for to help the poor, especially women, to start small businesses. Now we know that it's most often consumer credit and with average rate, average interest rate that are quite high. On average 30, 40% and sometimes even more. And we know that according to available data, 80% of the clients are women. Take subprime mold cases, for instance. We now know that women and colored women were overrepresented both in the US and Spain, the two countries where the supreme crises has been the most critical. This is the first thing specific borrowing sources. Then you have repayment. What is very striking in a number of cases, who is paying debt. And whether we talk about managing unpaid bills, whether we talk about dealing with bailiffs or debt collectors, answering repeated call from collection agencies, facing disapproval or even answers from creditors. Just let me get out from the Tamil case. I mean in France for instance, we have a recent study looking at the collection of rent debt in social housing, which shows very clearly that it is mostly women who are targeted by debt collectors. And the third aspect is what we call the corporality of debt. And it's crucial the fact that women's bodies and sexuality is often directly or indirectly involved. And you have some historians who argue that prostitution of sex work originally developed as a way to repay debt during times of extreme scarcity, for instance, famine, when families has no other way to survive and to force wives and daughters to send sarpotonies. And today we still see traces of those forms of dispossession. But what the book talk about is more ordinary situations where women have to engage into large continuum of transactional sex which is very different from paid sexual in order to build the creditworthiness or to maintain it.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Yeah, I would love to go more in depth of what you just mentioned, Lars, but before that I would like to know more a bit about the case, specifically what you studied in South India. So because I assume, like many listeners can probably imagine how debt and credit works in their own personal contexts. But how was the credit debt system in South India? And how did you basically get so much insight that you could write a book about it and the everyday that you just mentioned as well? Yeah.

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[Isabel Green]

That's how good leads the way. Yeah, yeah. There are of course, very specific features to the South Indian context and to Dalit women since our work, as I was saying earlier, has been mostly focusing on Dalit women. So in that particular context, the financial landscape is very diverse and has changed significantly over the last two decades. And that makes the case quite, very interesting. As in many other parts of the global south, microcredit has expanded very rapidly since it started in the early 2000s. I would say it's only one part of a much wider financial landscape. And then you find a very large range of lenders, pawn brokers, door to door moneylenders, and then a wide variety of informal lenders. I mean, landowners, government employees, neighbors, relatives. So this is very long. But maybe what I would like to talk about is, as I was saying earlier, what we've been trying to do again and again was to locate the Tamil case in a broader historical and social perspective in order to draw more general conclusion about gender update. And all the more that before starting doing fieldwork in India, before that I've been doing field work in West Africa, I've been doing work in France, I've been doing very short visits in different parts of the world. And what was striking to me was the figure of this indebted woman was there again and again in different forms. For me, the Tamik case was as I had the opportunity to really understand what was going on there, including historic, including how it has changed over time. It was really for me. And here I talk about my own personal obsession to really understand how this indebted woman emerged and where does she come from. And I could talk longer about the Tamil case, but what I would really like to emphasize is the fact that a central idea that reemerged from our efforts to understand the Tamil case and compare it with other places was this idea of something that we have called patriarchal debt. Because at the first glance it may seem a bit strange. Women are the favorite target for lenders, although they don't have any guarantees. No, if you look, if you open any standard economics or finance textbook, you will read that lenders should prioritize clients with assets or stable income or credit history. And according to that logic, poor rural women who, with little or most of the time no property and very little formal income, at increasingly less income. I would come back to this in a minute. Those poor women are completely uncreditworthy and yet they have become over the last two decades a primary target of credit. Okay, so to understand this we have to move beyond economics. We have to look at anthropology, philosophy, history. And here for instance, you have this famous book by David Graeber looking at the history of debt and showing very clearly that those who repay most, the good payers are not necessarily the richest, but on the contrary, often the most dominated, those who don't have a choice. And this is something that Graeber and others write about extensively, showing how throughout history, peasants, artisans, enslaved, colonized people have often been more faithful deputies and kings and lords, states or private companies now or. Yeah, and this was particular during Supran crisis. So what all of this tell us is that debt is never just economics. It's, it's moral, it's political, it's deeply social and. Okay, good. So we have many very interesting scholars writing about that graver and many others and we should be very grateful to them for that. The thing is that most of those scholars just ignore gender. And our argument is to say that that is not only a matter of class, it's not only a matter of religion. Because among those authors, many of them also, many, some of them argue that debt is also a way to construct hierarchies within religion. And this is quite clear within the, within the Hinduism priest. So yeah, in our field side this moralization of debt was so clear. No, this is the fact that many women were crushed not only by monetary debt, but by an intense feeling of shame and guilt. Shame of at not fulfilling their roles as good mothers, wives or daughters, shame at depending on others, shame connected to the sexual strategies they used to survive. And what was very clear and here we've been using the financial dairy method which is used to track as much as possible of the financial transaction within a particular residential unit. And from this method it was very clear that women were not only repaying their own debt, but also thought of their husbands, sons, sometimes in laws. And it was quite clear that a woman is the one who must pay. And well, at the first sight we could. The key question where does it come from? Is it just like that? And it is a bit tragic and a bit depressing because it would mean that there is no way to get out from that. Is it coming from capitalism? And yeah, we could think on those lines with capitalism made of very greedy lenders who have understood well that women are a very disciplined, docile and highly reliable clientele. And this is partly true. This micro. Of course the micro credit industry is very diverse and it's a bit simplistic to say to talk about the financial microcredit industry, but it's quite clear that by and Large today, the microfinance financial industry needs very good repayment rates and that's why the target put them. That's very clear. But this explanation is quite simplistic and as is often the case, and as feminists large part of feminist scholarship has shown very nicely that capitalism does not operate in isolation. It has a fascinating capacity to articulate to its existing social structure, in particular those of kinship and sexuality. And here the puny of paper by Gayle Rabin in the 70s has been very helpful for us to understand how this mode of production and the kinship norms. By kinship norms we mean not only who marries whom, but also who has access to property, what sort of sexual division of labor we have within the household, who marries whom, but with what kind of material transactions, the bride price, dowry and all those things. So yeah, this framework elaborated by Pagiel Rabin, I mean mode of production which are completely connected with kinship structure and sexuality, sexuality understood as who is defined in a particular social group as respectable sex. And who is what is defined as dan sex, which is strong consequences when you don't control your body and when you're not allowed to. To have sex with. With whom you want. You don't have access to resources first and, and also you also, it also develop a very particular subjectivity. I'm not, I'm not allowed to have pleasures. When I have pleasure, I'm guilty. And what was fascinating with the Tamil case is that when we started our fieldwork in the early 2000s, this indebted woman was not there, or at least not in its present forms. And in two decades we have seen at the same time the booming of the credit market targeting women and at the same time deep transformation in the kinship system and in sexual norms. So we've seen those three things working together. And short, what I'm going to say is a bit simplistic, but you have to read the book to have more details, to make it short. Dalit women, who were once seen as economically productive in agriculture and relatively sexually free, are now increasingly expected to become dutiful and respectable housewives, financially dependent on husband and sexually confined to marriage. So we have this process described by the sociologist Maria Mis as housewifeization, which becomes a new moral and social ideal. Yeah, so. Well, you might think this model is simply normal because it has been dominant in many countries of the global North. But if we look at kinship and sexual norms throughout history and across culture, we quickly realize how specific and historically situated this model actually is. And I mean, take South India again, early periods tell Us such a different story. If you look at a number of Tamil temples which were built in the 13th, 14th century, you have very explicitly erotic sculpture. And you can think about when British colonial administrators arrived, they were deeply shocked to encounter wide diversity of marital and sexual arrangements, polygamy, marriages with deities. And since then, India have been facing a number of repeated attempts, often in alliance, I mean, with the British and upper caste groups, to oppose a new normalized order of family, sexuality and respectability. And this started at the time of the British period, but it's still there. And in the Tamil Dalit communities in the places where I've been working, those transformations are in fact quite recent, I would say over the last half century and have accelerated in the last two decades under the combined effect of agricultural decline and the spread of deeply conservative ideologies. I don't think I have the time to elaborate, but what the connection with tech, you may ask two main consequences. The first one is that women's labor is now devalued because they are valued for being a housewife and their bodies is more tightly controlled. And so women seek to access, to regain value differently. And accessing credit is a way for them to regain some part of value. And this is a crucial point because we're in a context where women's debt is not only imposed by predatory lenders. Yes, it is there with lenders who come at your doorstep and oh man, are you sure you don't need the credit? It's a borrow money to do this. This is there with very aggressive commercial practices. But at the same time, women are very much in demand for it because it's a way for them to matter again. Now they're trustable, as we were often told. And I have in mind an NGO in the early 2000 who are very critical, which was very critical against this microplanic trend. He was very critical talking about it as poison, saying that it was going to replace a more strong structural efforts in terms of access to rights, access to health, education. But at the end she, she gave up because the women she was dealing with were in demand. And, and we want money, we want debt. And yeah, because for them assessing money, the only way to access money was through debt. And the other point is this, this strong ethic of repayment and the fact that when a context where, because of their devaluation and because of the fact that their body and their sexuality is severely tightly controlled. We do think that those norms define Dalit women now more than before as obligated things beings, sorry obligated with their children, the husband, family, community, the banks. We're not saying this is new, we're just saying that it has been strengthened further by all those very conservative norms. And to be a respectable woman nowadays in South Arcot along the Dalit is to be a woman who repays. And this sense of obligation is clearly reinforced by feelings of uselessness, shame, and by the repression of women's sexuality, which is seen as something dirty or dangerous. So you may ask, how do you observe that? It's very difficult. I think this here, what has been key is the comparison comparison of different generations of women. You know, over the last 20 years we've been following different generations and, and look and observing very clearly strong differences between mothers and their and then and their daughters. Even mothers mocking their daughters to be too being unable to laugh, unable to express themselves, just obsessed by dead by ripping debt. And yeah, this intergenerational comparison I think has been very helpful for us to understand all those processes.

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[Isabel Green]

Long day? Late night?

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[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Yeah, I think this is also this was a a big turning point in your book when you talk about the importance of sexuality and then also sexual transaction. Coming back to this topic and it's very interesting how you you write that you didn't expect to find this or you didn't kind of look for it. But then it became, throughout your research, central point of kind of the whole question of debt and repayment. And would you maybe elaborate a bit on that also like connecting what you just said with this intergenerational.

[Isabel Green]

Yeah. So yes, in the end, the sexuality is one of the key aspect of the book. It took us some time, I think first to be aware that a number of those women were engaged into some kind of transactional sex. By this we mean any kind of exchange where you have a combination of money and sex so related to debt, it can be providing sex to negotiate a credit that the lender wouldn't be ready to offer, increase the amount, to postpone the repayment payments, to decrease the price. It is very unusual that sex is used to write out the debts because lenders are not stupid or not, I don't know, not stupid might not be the right term, but need their money back. And by sex, what do we mean? We need a large range of situations. This is very important by sex, we need all sorts of gesture from smiling, touching to penetration. And so first of all, it took us, I think, eight years to, if I count the number of years before the very first day of our field work and to the date where some women talked about that I thought was really the result of close relationship trust with a lot of trust. And, and I think the, as you know, our work is not an ethnography of a particular village. So we never stayed there. And this makes a big difference in the way the people can tell us very sensitive part of their lives because we're not part of the village. I think in terms of method, that's a crucial thing. So slowly some women started to. They wanted to share. They wanted someone to share those stories which were very difficult for them because on the one hand they were engaged into those kind of things and at the same time they felt very ashamed. And yeah, it was constantly torn in very deep ethical dilemma. So initially I didn't know what to do with that. We had long conversation and, and, and I'm, as you remember, I intern as an economist. So I was so far from my area of, of expertise, I would say. Then I remember colleague, an anthropologist was telling me, but you have to, I mean, women want you to talk about this. If they, if they share those, this with you. Your responsibility as a researcher is to, is to, is to express them, to make their voice cancel. Oh, no. So we, anyway, the women were, I think, found with our team space to share their stories. So we've been gradually looking at this in more details and it became quite clear that it was completely part of the story. When you want to understand how the women maintain their creditworthiness, their body is clearly part of it. So we have a context where women are dealing with huge amount of debts while they have very little income and increasingly less income for the reasons I was mentioning before, the decline in agriculture and the rise of conservative norms according to which women should stay at home. And we have figures showing that very clearly over time, women's access to paid work is declining. So how do they pay back this money? So sometimes they receive support from husbands, but they receive support from husbands, nothing is free. So they also use a lot of tactics, sexual tactics with their husbands to access money. Sometimes they get support from our sons, brothers, other family members. You also have a lot of male migration, which migration is a migration domestic, mostly domestic migration, in some cases international migration. Here it's interesting to see how this debt issue is very much connected to. It's really a way, and maybe we'll get back to this later, but it's really a way to. It cannot be dissociated from the labor market because it forced people, and he, in our case men, to accept working in very bad working conditions because you have to pay back the debt. Okay, this is one thing, but the other way through which women cope with a debt is rotating. I borrow here to repay back there. And many of them are embedded into very complicated webs of debt. And in a number of cases they also draw on their bodies to negotiate time daily or access to new phone, source of debt. And maybe two things here, what is crucial here is. So we've been able to observe the evolution of the credit market for a period of two decades. And what is very clear is that women bodies have changed also over these two decades. And we all know that bodies are not given, they are always socially constructed, shaped by specific norms, expectations, techniques. And you have the pioneer work of the French anthropologist Marcel Moss on the techniques of the body with this idea that. This very simple idea that body is never natural, it's always trained, disciplined and valued in certain ways. And if we step back from systemic case for a moment, we very clear that in so called modern societies, bodies form mostly large platforms for women, but also for men. As beauty has become a form of capital. Looking a certain way, moving a certain way, presenting oneself in a certain manner, have very concrete economic effect. Finding a job, being better paid, getting promotions. And in a world which is increasingly Financialized bodies are very much. It's quite simple to understand that bodies are a way to build and maintain your creator. And back to Taminad, when I was saying that we've seen women's bodies changing, what do we mean by that? Beauty standards and expectations about femininity have changed dramatically over the last 20 years. The way women dress, care for the bodies, move in public, express themselves. And at the same time, women have to constantly worry about their reputation and respectability. And this is. We have a full chapter talking about managing debt as a true form of work. Calculating, remembering, negotiating. And women have to use a large range of cognitive skills to manage those debts, but also rational skills, emotional skills. And I think one of the most crucial and exhausting skill of the indebted woman is to learn how to navigate permanent contradiction using her body to remain without losing respectability. And yeah, I think for us this has been the most striking aspect and the large range of technique that they deploy to navigate on this very thin line, which is actually not specific to Daminal. If you look at women's body in many contexts, women's body is very often both an asset and the stigma and very many circumstances women have to play with these two things. Yeah.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I totally agree. And I think it's super interesting how you kind of see this over the past 10 years. And that's also a huge value of your research that is like so deep ethnographic, but then also as you said, like you're not living in the village, so you still kind of of have this outsider perspective, but still the trust in the community. Throughout the longitude of your research. And I think also related to this, what you just mentioned is that I think you do an incredible job in your book that you write about these women not as victims nor as power women, because usually in this, when we.

[Isabel Green]

Talk about.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

When women are kind of negotiating this credibility, but then also when they negotiate their bodies while also staying credible, the narratives follow either one of these two lines, like they're victims or power women. So I believe you managed to portray them as ordinary citizens kind of participating in the local economy. And maybe you want to elaborate a bit more on this and maybe have anecdotes that you can share with us.

[Isabel Green]

Yeah, thank you for that. I think this was actually one of the most difficult things to get right in the book. I mean, there is a very strong temptation, especially when sex is involved, to frame those women are either as victims of violence or on the contrary, as being empowered in and true stress figures. I Mean, for me, I mean, this is a common dilemma that many, most, if not all true scientists face. How to find the right line. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. What we've been trying to do is usually to. To depict them as very, very active figures of this financial landscape, while at the same time trying to understand the social fabric and violence of the global system. And in the end, yeah, we have this idea, this argument that this indebted woman is at the very center of contemporary financialism. She's not simply crushed by it. She actively make it function. She keeps money circulating. She can negotiate times, trust, credibility, honor. And through her debt, she's not only surviving, she's also trying to build a better future for her kids. She also tried to exist socially. She also tried to remain visible, respectable, desirable and connected. If we are back to this issue of sexuality. So on the one hand, it's very clear that those women are operating in a very constrained context. If they have to negotiate and reduce their body is simply because they don't have a choice and because the access to material sources is not only limited, but increasingly limited. So the only currency or capital that they have is their body. Right. And at the same time. So at first it's really a source of differentiation between women. I was talking earlier about the fact that managing debt is a true form of labor sense, that it requires repetitive task, it requires a number of skills and it creates value, value for the household because it's a way to compensate for very low income and irregular income. It also create value for the financial industry. And, and it's. Women are more as productive for different reasons. If you have a husband who has a permanent job, of course your creditworthiness is better, no doubt. But if you're able to, you know, to. To. If I use the term used by certain lenders, a woman who is. I don't find the term in English, but who is comfortable in her body, who is smiling, who is who. It makes something in my body, as Alandra was telling us all that, you know. So it is quite clear that the ability women have unequal ability to. To. To. To do that. Yeah. And another point which is crucial is the fact that lenders are not only greedy lenders who want to sexually exploit women. It's there. Of course it is there very clearly, especially dalit women who is topically are being depicted, are hypersexualized, always available and, and so forth. And at the same time, in, in some cases women after. Over time fall in love with their lenders. Well, they ask me. But are you sure it's love? Are you sure? Well, who knows? We never know. We never know what is authentic love or what is. You know, I think what is interesting here is again to. To could get back to feminist scholarship showing that love never comes from the air. You know, it's very unusual to fall in love as pure coincidence. And it's quite obvious that in a context where people depend so much on debt, it's not coincident that some women after some time fall along with their lenders. And yeah, I think it's crucial to really have in mind the fact that sentiments are always a result of social history and made influenced by a number of factors, historical factors, political factors, geopolitical factors. And here we have a number of cases where women have developed particular close relation with lenders who are able to provide them something that their husband is unable to provide. Care, recognition, sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure, something that many of them don't have. Are struggling to experience this at home, where they always have to. Again to. On the one hand, they have to satisfy the sexual desire of their husband, but without showing themselves as to. As to. How shall I say, as too skilled. Because this could mean that they have lovers or that they are looking at pornography, whether to films or books or whatever. Yeah, what else? I mean, when we talk about how women's body have changed over time, it's interesting to see that NGOs have been an important actor of this transformation. I just share with you an anecdote where you have a group of women discussing with the NGO head or with a woman and who again and again is trying to teach them how to dress properly, how to arrive at meeting with a banker being well dressed, how to avoid transpiration, Is it a dish.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Termination, sweat or sweat.

[Isabel Green]

And behave like respectable women. So you have one of the women in the group is saying, but is it beauty, context or it's a loan application.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

I remember this vividly reading this.

[Isabel Green]

We had a long session with this NGO head who was aware of her own contradictions because she's always very much against using women's body as puppets, stuff like that. And at the same time she's saying, but if you want to credit, everything is presentable. And she's right, because we have so many stories of bankers describing Dalit women as. You know, they talk about Dalit women as animals, you know, they smell, they are always in group like goats. So it's very clearly if women want to build their credit worthiness, they have to be presentable as. And this means dressing. Well, speaking in a certain way, using your body in certain way and so forth.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Yeah, yeah, this is super interesting and I think I could talk about this topic on and on, but unfortunately we're almost at the end of the podcast. But before we finish, I would love to know what you're doing now since you've published a book, are you still looking like are you continuing with this field work or what are your current research projects?

[Isabel Green]

Yeah, two or three things. No one is I think something we maybe I've been too long on certain questions, but another key argument of the book is to really emphasize the fact that without women's debt, capitalism couldn't work because instead is a way to compensate for the fact that wages are too low, social protection is non existent or antifa efficient or striking. And so that fills the gap. It allows the system to keep going. I think this let me emphasize this because I think it is so important. So it is not just a story of women in their villages, it's the story of everyone. Here we are able to buy, I don't know, cheap mobile phones that have been made in India. It's because of all the world. But by these women everything is connected. Now back to the what we are going to do next. So I one it's one thing to do a book. Then of course you know maybe better than me how difficult it is to circulate a book to talk about it and to talk about it beyond the very intimate academic circle. So also with a number of with my two colleagues and other colleagues who are trying to do our best to talk about it in other arena and to contribute to certain number of campaigns that denounce women's debt and that denounce this kind of paradox, according to which on the one hand women are indebted again and again, while at the same time they are providing all those services to their children, to the husband, to the society as a whole, so they could be considered as creditors. So our struggle is also to regarding numbers. So for instance now with other colleagues I'm trying to quantify at the global level how many households are chronically indebted and to really show the scope of the problem. It's very difficult to gender this, but at least to quantify the scope, cope with the problem. And we have a very conservative figure which is that at least one third of the population at the global level depends on debt to make a living. At least one third and probably much more. And then other research project looking at environmental debt, which is I think also another interesting and another interesting shock of debt. Yeah.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Wow.

[Isabel Green]

That's it.

[Sarah Fogelsanger]

Yeah. I'm very much looking forward to learn much more from you, I think. Yeah. You're looking at such an important topic that is definitely not talked about enough. And this was really interesting. Thank you so, so much for all your answers and your thoughts giving us an insight into your book. I wish you and your colleagues all the best. This was a podcast in the New Books Network about the book the Indebted Woman, Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism, published by Stanford University Press in 2023. I'm your host, Sarah Fogelsanger, and I hope you join us next time. Sam.