'Selling Our Own Skin:' Social dispossession through microcredit in rural Bangladesh

- “Social dispossession” involves the expropriation of means of social reproduction.
- In Bangladesh, microcredit results in the social dispossession of female borrowers.
- Microcredit produces new subjects and codifies capitalist social relations.
- Contemporary analyses of agrarian change must account for social reproduction.

In this paper, I articulate a notion of 'social dispossession,' an optic that extends current theorizing on agrarian dispossession into the realm of social reproduction, by examining the testimonies of microcredit borrowers in rural Bangladesh. In recent years, research on microcredit has highlighted new forms of subject-making employed by microcredit and other NGO entrepreneurship development programs. These developments have received insufficient attention in scholarship on agrarian change, both globally and in specific places. I correct this by arguing that microcredit drives social dispossession through three specific mechanisms: the confiscation of assets necessary to social reproduction (as well as to production); the construction of debt relations within a community which reshape what reproduction can look like; and the re-configuration of women's social status and subjectivities in relation to their communities.