Caring for debt: Women’s work in Istanbul’s mass housing estates

Abstract

The housing programs of Turkey’s Mass Housing Administration (TOKI) for low-income groups put people into debt by selling them houses in remote housing estates and dragging them into a quasi-mortgage system operated by state banks. This paper argues that these (mortgage) debts are not just financial obligations, managed in terms of income and payments but are embodied processes that are cared for within and across households, increasing precarity and intensifying the burdens of social reproduction for women. I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul in 2019 to examine the lived experiences of indebtedness in a low-income TOKI estate. The paper analyzes the spatial and gendered aspects of the everyday negotiations of debts and labor, theorizing caring for debt as women’s work. I draw attention to how caring for debt becomes women’s life work in the gendered debt geographies that TOKI creates at the periphery of Istanbul.