Domesticated Debt: Women, Money, and Geopolitics in Tunisia
通过民族志研究突尼斯中低收入女性如何依赖小额信贷债务来维持家庭、教育子女和经营小生意，揭示债务如何融入家庭生活并连接国家地缘政治，对研究债务与性别关系的学者有参考价值。
This article examines microfinance debt among low- to middle-income-class women in contemporary Tunisia. Through an ethnography of microlending, the article shows the conditions under which Tunisian women come to rely on debt to put their children through school, build homes, and invest in small contraband businesses. Debt blurs the lines between life and work, a dynamic captured by the argument that debt constitutes part of the household; that is, debt is domesticated. The article weaves a multiscalar analysis into ethnography to draw links between these women’s households, Tunisia’s border bureaucracies with Algeria and Libya, illegal migration to Europe, and US imperial interventions in the region, revealing that domesticated debt at the household level aligns with national subjugation through debt. Contributing to scholarship about the relationship between debt and popular economies, the article develops a gendered analysis of debt, showing what geopolitics from below, with women at its center, looks like.HIGHLIGHTSThe urbanization of debt in Tunisia’s popular neighborhoods is a multiscalar dynamic.“Domesticated debt” shows the integration of debt in intimate household decisions.Debt capitalizes on state divestment and fuels sprawling popular economies.Women’s social reproductive labor oils the wheels of the debt economy.A geopolitics from below centers poor women’s debt relations.