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Drawing on field work conducted over the last twelve years in rural south-India, this paper looks at the multiple interactions between sex, money, debt and power, their various meanings and their ambiguous effects on women's well-being.
We find that many women are engaged in multiple forms of transactional sex (defined as a relationship that involves the exchange of money, material goods or services for sex). These include a wide diversity of sexual services (from sexual intercourses to charming), a wide diversity of tangible and intangible compensations (credit, labour, social benefits, decision making, etc.), from men from diverse status (husbands, lenders, lovers, employers, local politicians, NGO field workers, microcredit field officers, neighbors, etc.). Social relationships also vary widely, from pure coercion, often based on patriarchy but also class and caste hierarchy, to more ambiguous relations involving affection and love.
From a theoretical perspective, we argue that a moral and political economy of money and debt can be a useful framework of analysis. The framework of political economy focuses on the structural dialectics producing political and economic differentiation within and between societies. We will refer here to “primordial debt theorists” (Aglietta and Orléan 1998; Theret 2009). In brief, this school of thought argues that money comes out of debt, and the liberating power of money depends upon the nature of the people's (moral) to sovereign power, whether ancestors, divinities or the State). The framework of moral economy refers to individual and collective moralities and cultural values that pervade economic social relations. We will refer here to Zelizer's work on the entanglement between intimacy and economics and her concept of “matching” work, ie. how people engage into intensive and creative work to make sure that their economic transactions “match” their social relations (Zelizer 1994; 2005).
Women's debt is monetary and moral and both should be looked at simultaneously. Because of increasing discriminations against women, their moral debt keeps on growing. Simultaneously, because of growing aspirations, but also because lenders increasingly favor women, women's monetary debt also increases. Within their households, women lack two crucial things: material resources, but also affection and recognition. Since they lack material resources, offering their body is often the only guarantee or compensation they can offer in exchange of access to cash. Some of these transactions are extremely coercive and look like sexual exploitation. But some lenders are able to provide moral support and affection, something women crucially miss in their daily life.
Combining these two facets of debt – monetary debt, moral debt – and two levels of analysis – on the one hand daily financial practices and their entanglement with social relations, including power relations, but also affects and emotions, and on the other hand structural forces which shape the intensity and the nature of moral debt – can shed a new light on the complexity and ambiguity of the articulation between sex, debt, money and power.
