Politics of Debt in Everyday Experiences: Household Indebtedness and Women in Greece and Turkey

In the last decades, use of credit cards and consumer loans has become a prominent phenomenon. Debt-based consumption is now such an ordinary practice that many households depend on credit to sustain basic needs. Easier availability of financial means, weak schemes of social protection and growing socioeconomic inequalities have all played a role in making credit a substitute for services once included in welfare provisions. Lower-income groups in particular are encouraged or forced into borrowing for the necessities of social reproduction with credit operating as a neoliberal mode of inequality management. Credit expansion and the surge in indebtedness therefore have been a part of neoliberal transformation of the state and social policies. Given the pervasiveness of the phenomenon, it is essential that we know more about how debt and indebtedness is experienced: How do the recipients of credit perceive and practice indebtedness? What kind of intersectional subjectivities does debt create? What are the possibilities of politicization or depoliticization in these subjectivity formations? This paper aims to explore these questions comparatively in the everyday experiences of women who are residents of indebted households from low-and middle-income groups in Athens and Istanbul. On the one hand, the two cases represent weak economies, where debt is relatively new phenomenon, and they currently share the highest rates of growth in household indebtedness with highest levels of household consumption among the OECD countries. On the other hand, they differ from one another in terms of gender inequality and civic participation patterns. Based on in-depth interviews with women in the two contexts, this paper will point out the importance of the need for understanding indebtedness as a neoliberal governance strategy endowed with power relations and thus as an area of research for tracing its disciplinary effects and the possibilities for resistance at the level of experience.