Banks as the new family: the transition from informal to formal borrowing in Turkey

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impact of social reproduction patterns on borrowing experiences in everyday life, linking two lines of research within feminist and critical International Political Economy (IPE) literature of the everyday, one on social reproduction and debt, and the other on financial subjectivities. Drawing on interviews with women from indebted households in Istanbul, Turkey, it specifically explores how this impact is reflected in the meanings attached to borrowing and the perceptions of what it entails to be a debtor, thereby generating gendered implications. This article reveals that borrowing from family and friends, once seen as an expression of trust and solidarity, is now associated with financial dependence and humiliation, while borrowing from banks is perceived as a means to achieve self-reliance and self-responsibility. However, these meanings contradict women’s self-identifications as debtors, which are framed in moral terms surrounding the structural necessity of incurring credit-debt for social reproduction. This paper contributes to political economy scholarship by addressing how the everyday lives of the indebted are linked to the broader global financial system, mediated by the specific conditions of a Global South context (Turkey) characterized by subordinate financialization, the political use of credit expansion, and a neoliberal/conservative gender regime.

Keywords:

• Household debt
• borrowing
• social reproduction
• financialization
• everyday life
• Turkey

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Özlem Altan-Olcay for her invaluable guidance in supervising my doctoral research, forming the basis of this article, and providing insightful comments on earlier drafts, as well as to Adrienne Roberts, Ayşe Buğra, Ahmet İçduygu, İpek İlkkaracan, and Ian Bruff for their dissertation feedback, and to Merih Angın for her support. I would like to thank the three anonymous referees and editors of RIPE for their constructive comments, and to the audience of the 2023 EISA PEC’s Political Economy Beyond Boundaries section panel for their input on the draft. I am grateful to all the women participating in the study for sharing the details of their lives with me. Thanks to the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) for doctoral funding, and to the Center for Gender Studies at Koç University (KOÇKAM) for the Nermin Abadan-Unat Social Sciences Awards, supporting research.

Disclosure statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pelin Kılınçarslan

Pelin Kılınçarslan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoc), affiliated with an EC twinning project, BROAD-ER. Her research focuses on topics in feminist and critical political economy.