Indebted Adulthood in Queer Times

Bibliographic Data

ID4997175
AuthorsElizabeth A Verklan, Elizabeth Verklan (corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume132
Issue1
Pages46-60
Publication date2022-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/01417789221135200
OpenAlexW4311508463
LanguageEN
References cited30

This article examines the US student debt crisis through a queer, feminist lens attuned to matters of the material. Examining the discourse of 'failed' and/or forestalled millennial adulthood, I argue that the student debt crisis is a product of neoliberal, racial capitalism, and its profit resides in its financialisation. Drawing on queer and feminist theories regarding time and futurity and current research on student debt, I examine the configurations and effects of what I term the 'student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse', which renders the crisis of student debt legible through a heteronormative life narrative, and obscures the racialised, gendered realities of student debt. The student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse illustrates how under racial capitalism, heteronormative temporality is structurally conditioned via race. Examining US media coverage, I assert that the reprosexually oriented student-debt-as-hetero-failure discourse legitimises new financial products that enable debtors to sustain and reproduce themselves via more debt

Capitalism · Debt · Economics · Epistemology · Narrative · Political science · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Student debt · Temporality · Finance · Gender Studies · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law

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