Women’s Embodied Experiences of Debt in the Urban Global South

Feminist political economy has been enhanced by understanding the urban as a dynamic site of social reproduction. This article reveals how one aspect of social reproduction – women’s accounting for and managing the sociality around debt, that is, caring for debt – is expressed through embodied gendered norms that play out in the everyday lives of women in low-income urban neighborhoods in the Global South. Drawing on geo-ethnographic research, the article analyzes embodied experiences of indebtedness among grassroots women navigating economic precarity in Cochabamba (Bolivia), Delhi (India), Georgetown (Guyana), Ibadan (Nigeria), and Shanghai (China). The article illustrates how caring for debt is experienced through emotional, mental, and physical dimensions of women’s embodiment, expressed through their entanglement with socio-spatialities of the neoliberal urban. The analysis further underscores that women’s work caring for debts is an additional out-of-sight dimension of the unpaid and underpaid social reproductive labor driving urban economies in the Global South.