‘I’m not going to feed the bailiffs’: personal bankruptcy and debtor agency in narrative accounts of struggling debtors

The article uses the formal instrument of personal bankruptcy proceedings as an illuminating context to contribute to the scholarship on the lived experience of overindebtedness. Through the analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with heavy debtors living in Czechia, we provide a focus on debtor agency, exploring how bankruptcy interrelates with how struggling debtors narratively approach debt and construct their capacity to act. We show that first-hand accounts of (planned) participation in a bankruptcy proceeding contain a surprising number and variety of narratives of agency. Emphasizing the processual character of bankruptcy proceedings, we demonstrate that bankruptcy supports enactments of debtor agency by interfering in the temporal ordering of debt as performed by the struggling debtors, shaping the experiences of overindebtedness also among those debtors who have not (yet) entered the formal process. We show that the narrative constructions of agency as regards bankruptcy are often embedded in a neoliberal discourse of merit and self-responsibilization. While the respondents reproduce a largely depoliticized and individualized account of debt resistance that at times operates with a hierarchization of struggling debtors, disclosing bankruptcy (intentions) to others also evokes spontaneous and unorganized acts of solidarity within personal networks that empower debtors.