Meeting with socio-economist Isabelle Guérin about her book The woman in debt
When: 09.12.2026 19:00
Where: 48.826787, 2.366440
Organizer: Admin
Far from
skyscrapers and market rooms in New York and Shanghai, where
rich men and graduates drive financial markets with help
Another figure in finance emerges from complex algorithms:
the woman in debt. She's not a banker or a speculator.
She watches over her own, counts every penny, gets into debt to feed,
Accommodation, treatment, marriage. She negotiates, quemands, sometimes sells. And
She always pays. From France to Tamil Nadu, from Senegal to Morocco,
book leaves to meet him. It reveals the central role – but ignored –
it plays in the daily functioning of capitalism. These women
which contract small debts are not at its margin, but in its
heart: without them, no consumption, no profits. Without them, the
machine does not turn.
By combining ethnography, statistical surveys
Isabelle Guérin reveals another face of capitalism,
based not on financial abstraction, but on shame, exhaustion
and discipline of women. It also illuminates the patriarchate as a
permanent debt regime: being a woman is a duty – to her children, to
his spouse, the state, the banks, the gods, the nation. But the
debt can also turn around. From the chain, it becomes a link.
The woman in debt is not
not just a debt investigation: it's a key to thinking differently
our interdependence. The book shows how the economy, far from being
a world apart, is intimately tied to kinship, body,
sexuality. Rethinking debt is rethinking what – and to whom – we
Hold on.
© editions La Découverte
Isabelle Guérin is a socio-economist, research director at IRD and Cessma, affiliated with the French Institute of Pondicherry. She co-founded and co-led the Observatory on Rural Dynamics and Social Inequalities in South India. She has published numerous books on the financialization of inequalities, the resistances it generates and the ways to investigate that make lives and numbers dialogue.
Tags: book discussion, economics, lecture
Source: https://www.paris.fr/evenements/rencontre-avec-la-socioeconomiste-isabelle-guerin-autour-de-son-livre-la-femme-endettee-114262
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