Please join the Department of International Development for a book talk with Isabelle Guérin about her new book with Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramaniam, "The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism". Katherine Brickell, Nithya Natarajan, Ambarish Karamchedu, and Majed Akhter will be joining the event as speakers.

About the book

Women, and particularly poor women, have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Globally, women are responsible for managing household debt, 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.

About the author

Isabelle Guérin

Isabelle Guérin is a Senior Research Fellow at IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) and an Associate Researcher at the Institut Français de Pondichéry. Her research focuses on how financialization perpetuates inequalities and its impact on the development of alternative and solidarity-based initiatives. She employs a combination of statistical surveys and ethnography, along with a critical analysis of the politics of numbers. Additionally, she is the co-founder and co-director of the Observatory of Rural Dynamics and Social Inequalities in South India (ODRIIS).

About the speakers

Katherine Brickell

Professor Katherine Brickell joined the Department of Geography as Professor of Urban Studies in January 2023 and is the research lead of Urban Futures. Katherine’s feminist-oriented research on precarious home and working lives crosscuts urban, social, political, development, and legal geography.

Nithya Natarajan

Dr Nithya Natarajan is a Senior Lecturer in International Development. Her work focuses on South India and Cambodia, and explores agrarian change, rural-urban livelihoods, labour precarity, gender and debt.

Ambarish Karamchedu

Dr Ambarish Karamchedu is a Lecturer in International Development Education. His work focuses on India and explores the themes of agrarian and climatic change, neoliberalism, deagrarianisation, GM crops, the hydropolitics of groundwater and caste discrimination in labour markets.

Majed Akhter

Dr Majed Akhter is a Senior Lecturer in Environment and Society in International Development. His work develops a historical-geographical materialist approach to questions of technology, territory, and trans-regional relations, especially in an Asian and Pakistani context.

About the Interrogating Development Seminar Series

The 'Interrogating Development' seminar series is organised by the Department of International Development at King's College London. The series examines some of the most pressing issues of development facing global society today, with the authors of new books presenting cutting-edge research on a variety of topics related to development.

The talk will be followed by a wine reception. The event is open to everyone.