The Biopolitics of Housing Financialization: An Approach to the Epistemic Violence of Financial Capitalism

This article provides a conceptual understanding of the processes of finan-cialization based on the concept of the biopolitics of housing financialization. Drawing on the Foucauldian categories of disciplining and regulation, we elaborate an empirical analysis of the mechanisms that, in Mexico, propagated the aspiration of various sectors of the population with limited resources to have access to a home of their own through mortgage loans. The construction of the notion of biopolitics of the financialization of housing is based on an empirical research conducted at two different times (2017 and 2020) and consisting of semi-structured interviews with owners of affordable housing in the periphery of the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico. It shows that, far from benefiting borrowers, their insertion in credit relations undermines income and negatively impacts their quality of life. The present discussion is articulated through five devices of the financial biocapitalism of housing -the discourse of personal wealth, socio-territorial stratification, the fallacy of social credit, the reality of peripheral life, and the reality of indebted lives-, which help to explain the epistemic violence inherent to a financialized model of economic and territorial development that produces economic and political gains for a few people, to the detriment of those who are supposed to benefit from housing policies. The analysis reveals that the devices implemented reflect the subtlety of the exercise of power in the financialized provision of housing.