ABSTRACT
In the wake of stagnant and falling wages, alongside the lack of adequate welfare provisioning, a growing number of poor households have turned to consumer credit to make ends meet. One such insidious product has been payday loans. Drawing on my book, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry, I argue that the regulative and rhetorical nature of debtfarism – that is, a mode of neoliberal governance in the age of financialized capitalism – has served to normalize and naturalize payday lending as convenience of modern life for low-income people. By exploring various regulatory provisions, I reveal how the debtfare state plays an integral role in establishing what Pearce refers to as an imaginary social order. In so doing, I demonstrate how the debtfare state serves to depoliticize the violence entailed in payday lending, whilst facilitating the industry’s expansion through the democratization of credit – a trope that dominates imaginary social order of payday lending.
