Women's lives are burdened by the weight of debt. But collectively, it can be resisted.
***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***
In this sharp intervention, authors Luci Cavellero and Veronica Gago defiantly develop a feminist understanding of debt, showing its impact on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and examining the relationship between debt and social reproduction.
Exploring the link between financial activity and the rise of conservative forces in Latin America, the book demonstrates that debt is intimately linked to gendered violence and patriarchal notions of the family. Yet, rather than seeing these forces as insurmountable, the authors also show ways in which debt can be resisted, drawing on concrete experiences and practices from Latin America and around the world.
Featuring interviews with women in Argentina and Brazil, the book reveals the real-life impact of debt and how it falls mainly on the shoulders of women, from the household to the wider effects of national debt and austerity. However, through discussions around experiences of work, prisons, domestic labour, agriculture, family, abortion and housing, a narrative of resistance emerges.
What People Are Saying
"An exciting, novel feminist book on the financialisation of life. It rescues debates on debt from abstraction and provides a key cartography of oppression. A great read, opening yet new avenues for social reproduction analyses and feminist struggles." Alessandra Mezzadri, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, and author of The Sweatshop Regime (CUP, 2017) and editor of Marx in the Field" (Anthem, 2021)
About the Author
Luci Cavallero is a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. Her work focuses on the link between debt, illegal capital, and different forms of violence. She is a feminist activist and member of the Ni Una Menos Collective. Veronica Gago teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is a Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martin. She is the author of Feminist International (Verso, 2020) and Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Duke University Press, 2017). She is a feminist activist and member of the Ni Una Menos Collective.