Visiting fellow lecture: The Authoritarianism of Financial Freedom

The UIC Institute for the Humanities Fall 2025 Visiting Fellow Verónica Gago will present The Authoritarianism of Financial Freedom.

How does debt shape society? This talk will look at the case of Argentina, where household debt has been deployed and moralized to create the conditions for far-right authoritarianism. By looking at how debt, and particularly the concept of indebtedness to live has consolidated the precarity of labor, Gago will also demonstrate how the stabilization of debt as a model of social reproduction has contributed to state antifeminism.

Gago is a prominent feminist and professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of San Martín. Her publications include “A Feminist Reading of Debt” (2021, with Luci Cavallero) and “Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies” (2017). Read her full bio.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the UIC departments of anthropology, Latin American and Latino studies and gender and women’s studies.

Pre-registration by Sept. 26 is highly encouraged.