Household Debt and Social Reproduction in Everyday Life: Women’s Experiences of Caring, Agency, and Risk

Abstract This article explores the ways in which everyday life produces gendered links between debt and social reproduction in contradictory ways. Based on interviews with women from indebted households in Athens and Istanbul, it argues that debt and socially reproductive work come to rely on one another, with gendered implications for caring, expanded agency, and embodied risks. Indebtedness demands forms of socially reproductive labor that women practice through caring for the debt and the indebted family. While this expands women’s agency, it also reinforces their experiences of distress and social isolation. This dual outcome reveals gendered contradictions emerging through the interdependency of debt and social reproduction. While the management of debt relies on socially reproductive labor through which women exercise greater agency, it creates embodied risks that threaten their own social reproduction, which also relies on debt.