Description
Finance, once trumpeted as enabling social life, over the last two decades, has served as a political haven. Families are confronted with finance through mortgages, loans and debt, making credit and inequality household norms. Instead of financing social needs, it forces families to the periphery of financial capitalism. Despite extensive literature on gendered welfare (Fraser, 1994; Orloff, 1992; Sainsbury, 2008), the financialised household remains understudied, yet it is growing ever more as an active site for economic governance. It is crucial to examine how households interact with the state; how male-designed welfare policies reinforce women’s role in financial reproduction, while sustaining capitalism via unpaid labour and reproducing the nation. To be ready for what comes next, we consider that a forward look requires building new bridges between disciplines and methods of inquiry into social life. Situated in 2010 under Orbán’s premiership, we combine family policy and the political economy of finance to explore family policy changes. By bringing novel insights from radio speeches over time, we examine how discourse mediates the government’s pro-natal economic agenda. We focus on the role and function of Hungary’s family housing subsidy scheme as a tool for social exclusion. Specifically, we explore how the scheme favours married, heteronormative, Christian couples with stable formal employment. The construction of the “ideal” household and native families, we argue, is boosting sectors like construction and facilitates a work-based welfare. Hungary’s state subsidy for a property loan transforms households into financial investment units. In return, an individual’s reproductive choice is politicised and becomes transactional, as wombs turn into assets that drive the market.
