Life

Debt has become one of the most insidious and critical apparatuses of governance in our lives. Some authors even argue that debt has always been the principal device governing human relations, older than paper money, older than gold (Graeber, 2011; Harvey, 2020). As an apparatus, it organizes our lives, conditions our present, and dictates our futures. It operates at the most personal level, via student loans or consumer debt, but also at the most prominent and more collective levels, through national debt. This form of governance, when analyzed in tandem with other methods of population control, specifically those that restrain or mandate our reproductive capacities, exposes a disquieting set of historical unequal conditions enforced and maintained against women. Women have been crucial targets of population control and debt since the witch-hunt era until our present times. Given their lack of access to wealth, their procreative capacity, and the moral constructions of their “natural” roles as caregivers, women have been burdened with some of the harshest conditions necessary to build the desired population growth and an unlimited capital accumulation for our modern societies.