Adrienne Roberts: 'Household debt and the Financialization of Social Reproduction'

November 17th at 4pm in G.15, 15-19 Tyndall's Park Road. The seminar will be followed by a drinks reception.

In many advanced capitalist countries, it is taken as axiomatic that a primary means of eliminating gender equality entails the elimination of barriers to women’s access to employment and to loans or other financial services that can be used to accumulate assets. Focusing on the case of the UK, I argue in the paper that this view, which is promoted by political elites and many women’s groups alike, fails to appreciate a key transformation that has taken place under financialized neoliberalism, whereby access to credit has become a necessity for many families, who are forced to rely on debt as a means of financing social reproduction. With this transformation, the nature of gender-based power relations and inequalities have undergone a complex transformation. Drawing from Marxist and feminist literatures, I argue that the key sites for the production of gender difference, which are often assumed to be access to jobs, equitable wages, and finance, must be expanded to include an understanding of the distinctly gendered risks that are presented by what might be termed ‘the financialization of social reproduction’. Following a point made by Lisa Adkins, I argue that to take this transformation in social reproduction seriously has implications not just for theory, but equally for forms of advocacy that prioritize the redistribution of income and/or greater access to credit without considering what wages and debt actually do in contemporary capitalist societies. 

About Adrienne Roberts

Adrienne's research interests are in the areas of international political economy, feminist political economy, finance, debt and debt-driven development.  Her work has been published in journals such as Third World Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, New Political Economy and Critical Sociology. She is co-editor (with Nicki Smith and Juanita Elias) of the Rowman & Littlefield International book series ‘Global Political Economies of Gender and Sexuality’.