Financing Social Reproduction: The Gendered Relations of Debt and Mortgage Finance in Twenty-first-century America

Abstract

This article addresses a gap in the international political economy (IPE) literature on housing finance by highlighting the ways in which the deepening of mortgage debt is part of a broader attempt to individualise and (re)privatise relations of social reproduction under neoliberalism. While the extension and deepening of debt has been underpinned by policies and discourses that assume the formal equality of individuals, the attempt to erase the gendered subject in the context of ongoing inequalities in paid labour markets, in asset ownership and in the division of unpaid labour has served to reproduce various overlapping social divisions and inequalities. In linking social reproduction to financial markets, the promotion of homeownership in the US has also rendered the social reproduction of present and future generations increasingly insecure. This work contributes to feminist and other critical IPE debates by highlighting the ways in which accumulation in financial markets has been based on the perpetuation of divisions and inequalities between social classes, between men and women and along certain racial and ethnic lines. It also centralises the role of the state in conditioning these processes.

Keywords:

• subprime mortgages
• social reproduction
• feminist political economy
• housing finance
• debt

Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2011 International Studies Association Annual Convention, at the VU University Amsterdam and at the Irmgard Coninx Foundation 14^th Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality, Financialization and Everyday Life. I thank all of the participants in these events who offered helpful comments and criticisms of this article as well as three anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank Isabella Bakker and Susanne Soederberg for helping to shape the article and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Queen's University for providing funding for this project.

For example, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 as part of his campaign promise to ‘end welfare as we know it’, shifted some of the responsibilities of immigration and crime control agencies onto welfare agencies, requiring those that administer welfare block grants, SSI and housing assistance to determine the immigration status of clients before providing services. It has been estimated that this will cost welfare agencies an additional $700 million, draining already diminished resources. States have also increasingly been compelling welfare recipients to submit to drug testing. In 2009, over half of all states introduced drug testing legislation which, in addition to perpetuating the social construction of the poor as deviant and ‘undeserving’, uses resources that could otherwise be used to assist the poor in a time of economic struggle (Bohrman and Murakawa 2005; Budd 2011).

According to 2009 Census Bureau data, nearly one-quarter of all children under the age of 18 lives in a single-mother family. This is the case for around 16 per cent of white children, 27 per cent of Latino children and 52 per cent of African American children.

Though this literature cannot be fully surveyed here, some important contributions include Holloway (1998), Holloway and Wyly (2001), Howell (2006), Wyly et al. (2006) and Dymski (2008).