Understanding indebted subjectivities: A feminist postcolonial framework

Keywords: debt, neoliberalism, indebted subjectivities, feminist postcolonial approaches, debt geographies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 67

Abstract

Financialization is associated with the ascent of neoliberalism, with its promotion of privatization, individual responsibility over collective welfare, and its role in the formation of neoliberal subjectivities (Pollard, 2013; Rolnik, 2013; Christophers, 2015). Debt based financial expansion over the last decades has worked as a technology of neoliberal subjectification, letting previously excluded populations to get exposed to predatory financial practices and exploitation in the name of inclusion (Dymski, 2009; Langley, 2009). Putting the burden of sustaining a life on the shoulders of individuals through ‘work on oneself’ became the driving force of the indebted society (Lazzarato, 2012). Finally, the global financial crisis brought a new era of greater social control via intensification of coercive forms of state interventions in order to impose versions of the market rule on people through debts (Peck et al., 2009; Kear, 2013). My paper aims to contribute to the broader debt geographies scholarship by a synthetic review of the literature on indebted subjectivities. In order to enhance the framings of indebted subjectivities in the neoliberal era, I suggest (1) further research on intersectionality as lived in the context of indebtedness to advance homogenizing categories (such as ‘indebted man’) with feminist approaches (Benhabib, 1992, Mahmood, 2005, Han,2012, Joseph, 2014, Hall, 2016), and (2) nuanced approaches to subjectivities to contest universalisms and binary expectations, as in a global context where different regimes of living interact with neoliberal logic, the result is fragmented, contingent, and ambiguous (Ong, 2006).