The New Enclosure of Re/Productive Time. Theorizing the Temporality of Debt

The experience of time is highly dependent on socio-economic factors and social experiences. One factor that highly influences how time is experienced is debt and being indebted. The specific temporality of debt combines the debtors’ financial situation of the past which disciplines their present and future. Debt disrupts everyday life and makes it difficult to plan for the future. Living in debt means constant worrying, the need to perform precarious jobs and remaining in violent relationships and living arrangements. The impact of debt on women and queers has lately come to the fore by the feminist movement in Latin America that has coined the slogan “the debt is owed to us”. This slogan emphasizes the role of debt in the disciplining of the workforce and how it marginalises and expropriates feminised reproductive labour. In the feminist movement in Argentina, the temporality of debt is even reflected in the slogan “La deuda es una bomba de tiempo“ (debt is a time bomb). Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago develop a theoretical and activist-based framework to understand the political economy of debt from a decolonial and feminist perspective. Cavallero and Gago argue that debt is based on a “temporality of capture” that controls future obligations and dispossessions. They however don’t further explore the specificity of the temporality of debt, which this paper aims to theorise. We base our theorisation of the temporality of debt on feminist and decolonial theories of time, that have scrutinised the hegemonic patriarchal, capitalist and Eurocentric clock time. We argue with a queer-feminist and decolonial theoretical framework that the temporality of debt exceeds the respective specific temporalities of production and reproduction because it disciplines both and is characterised by a progressive and growth-based understanding of the future. It can therefore be theorised as an enclosure of reproductive and productive time. Deconstructing and theorising the temporality of debt is important to better understand the disciplining character of capitalism, as well as emphasising the importance and agency of queer-feminist movements that resist such a temporality.