Kadınların gündelik deneyimlerinde hanehalkı borçluluğu: Yunanistan ve Türkiye karşılaştırması

This thesis explores gendered processes of household debt and indebtedness at the level of everyday experiences of women. In recent decades, use of consumer loans and credit cards has been key to the integration of households into processes of financialization. Easier availability of financial means, weak schemes of social protection, and commodification of social reproduction have all played a role in deepening the household's exposure to indebtedness. Documenting the lived experiences of debt and indebtedness can allow us to understand how these broader dynamics unfold in practices of everyday life and how central these practices are to the operation of credit along the lines of gender and class. Drawing on feminist political economy scholarship, this thesis addresses the following questions: How do practices of indebtedness interact with gendered power relations in the household and the labor market? What kind of political implications do these experiences have for emerging subjectivities? How do debt and indebtedness shape possibilities and perceptions of life choices in the present and the future? This thesis explores these questions comparatively in the everyday experiences of women, who are residents of indebted households in Athens, Greece and Istanbul, Turkey. On the one hand, Greece and Turkey share the highest rates of growth in household indebtedness with the highest levels of household consumption in the OECD. On the other hand, they differ from one another in terms of gender inequality patterns. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with women, this thesis makes three arguments. First, debt is not only a means for social reproduction but also becomes part of it, operating within the gendered relations of care. Indebtedness demands care for debt and care for the family in debt, which women make sense of and practice as an extension of their roles as mothers and wives. Second, the possibilities of politicization and depoliticization in emerging subjectivities are shaped by the class positions of households affecting the reliance on debt, and financial fluctuations determining the availability of credit. Third, and finally, embodied and temporal effects of debt create tensions and contradictions through everyday practices. Women experience financial distress and social isolation as they devote much of their time on the management of indebtedness, which may also take the form of self-sacrifice for protecting the family from deprivation. Yet, debt occupies a central place in women's articulations of the future, either as hopefulness about the possibility of receiving a future loan to make an investment for children, or as hopelessness for not seeing a way out of the financial strain. This thesis shows that everyday experiences of debt and indebtedness interact with gendered processes in relation to the family, the market, and the state, in ways that shape and are informed by perceptions and practices of family roles, paid and unpaid work, and future possibilities.