Indebted Adulthood in Queer Times

Abstract

This article examines the US student debt crisis through a queer, feminist lens attuned to matters of the material. Examining the discourse of ‘failed’ and/or forestalled millennial adulthood, I argue that the student debt crisis is a product of neoliberal, racial capitalism, and its profit resides in its financialisation. Drawing on queer and feminist theories regarding time and futurity and current research on student debt, I examine the configurations and effects of what I term the ‘student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse’, which renders the crisis of student debt legible through a heteronormative life narrative, and obscures the racialised, gendered realities of student debt. The student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse illustrates how under racial capitalism, heteronormative temporality is structurally conditioned via race. Examining US media coverage, I assert that the reprosexually oriented student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse legitimises new financial products that enable debtors to sustain and reproduce themselves via more debt.