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- Convenors:
-
Jasmine Gideon
(Birkbeck, University of London)
Marianna Leite (ACT Alliance University of Coimbra)
Gabriela Alvarez Minte (Birkbeck College)
- Discussant:
-
Ruth Pearson
(University of Leeds)
- Location:
- Malet G15
- Start time:
- 3 April, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
The gendered dimensions of social policy have been widely critiqued for their maternalist tendencies which reinforce gender roles. Yet at the same time women have made material gains. Does maternalism matter? How do we ensure women gain more strategically from social policies?
Long Abstract:
The gendered dimensions of the 'new' Latin American social policy have been widely acknowledged. Critics have argued that programmes such as conditional cash transfers (CCTs) and the expansion of early years child care services reinforce maternalism and fail to consider men's (potential) role in unpaid care. Yet at the same time many of these policies have brought material gains for poor women and children and have contributed to the overall reduction of poverty across the region. Does it therefore matter if policies continue to be framed around maternalist assumptions if women are benefiting? How can we realistically ensure women gain more strategically from social policies? What would gender equitable social policy look like today in Latin America? The panel organisers welcome papers that address these issues.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jasmine Gideon (Birkbeck, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
The paper considers why despite the adoption of 'gender' within international development policy gendered inequalities in health continue and women's health continues to be reduced to reproductive health issues.
Paper long abstract:
At first glance it would appear that important gains have been made for promoting gender equitable health policies over the past decade - gender mainstreaming discourse is widely found in health policy documents and millions of pounds of development assistance are being channelled in to promoting women's reproductive health. At the same time, the recent shift in health policies towards the promotion of universal health coverage also offers potential benefits from a gender perspective in terms of promoting better access to health care services for women. Yet significant inequalities in health persist across Latin America, many of which are gendered and racialised. This paper therefore takes a critical look at the ways in which women's health has been promoted across Latin America over the past few decades and considers why these inequalities still persist despite the significant attention that is given to women's reproductive health issues in a development context.
Maxine Molyneux (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper critically examines new approaches to the administration of poverty in Latin America which involve social accountability measures including rights and citizenship approaches in social protection programming.
Paper long abstract:
In a recent global consultation by the UN to determine post 2015 policies - social protection and social accountability were among the top 4 priorities. While cash transfers now cover several hundred million people, social or downward accountability has only recently been integrated into social protection programming. Donors and governments increasingly see social accountability as a way to meet the Paris commitment to aid effectiveness while there are growing demands from civil society for 'honest responsive governance'. Social accountability is intended to extend the principles of democratic accountability across the various sites of public policy. It is premised on liberal concerns to place checks on administrative power through active citizen participation. Applied to social protection it envisions 'the poor' less as 'beneficiaries' than as rights bearing citizens whose grievances and demands should be heard and acted upon. This paper considers new research from Latin America, a region that has been among the pioneers of these rights and citizen based approaches to the administration of poverty. The evidence provides some insights from a gender perspective into what can be achieved by these approaches in regard to both citizenship and tackling poverty without more profound social and institutional transformations.
Sarah Bradshaw (Middlesex University)
Paper short abstract:
As the Millennium Development Goals come to an end, social protection and cash transfer programmes are being promoted as an important element of the new post-2015 sustainable development agenda. This paper asks, why? And what will it mean, if anything, for the region’s women and gender equality?
Paper long abstract:
Since the late 1970s the development industry has sought to integrate women into development, and more recently (Conditional) Cash Transfer programmes have been promoted as a key vehicle for both poverty reduction and gender equality. Yet, while the design of these programmes has been borrowed from programmes in Mexico and Brazil, the applicability of development initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the countries of the region is open to question. While the MDGs may have found little resonance with the Middle Income Counties of Latin America, the proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are presented as 'universal', with targets applicable to all countries. The post-2015 agenda as envisaged by High Level Panel (HLP) and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network sees a continued role for social assistance, with the HLP report promoting it under their illustrative Goal One - To end poverty - and suggesting it to be a 'potential game changer'. The rhetoric of the reports is also gendered, including a proposed aim to end violence against women and girls, and rights based, including promoting reproductive and sexual rights. This suggests the new Goals and agenda may be of more relevance to the region and the region's women's movements. The paper seeks to explore why social assistance and specifically cash transfer programmes are being presented as key within the post-2015 agenda, and what this might mean, if anything, for the region's women, women's movements and for gender equality.
Marianna Leite (ACT Alliance University of Coimbra)
Paper short abstract:
This paper uses a Foucauldian discourse analysis to trace the use of instrumentalist discouses in maternal mortality policy making in Brazil.
Paper long abstract:
We live in capitalist times. All capitalist projects make use of a political rhetoric to support a particular discourse and practice that increases economic dependency and the poverty gap. Modern capitalist projects are mostly known and classified in the form of the cluster loosely named neoliberalism. This paper analyses the ascendance of maternal mortality as an issue and its neglect by Brazilian public policy in order to establish its links with the wider neoliberal project. More specifically, its main argument is that the control exerted by neoliberalism over policy and policy discourse is particularly acute in the case of maternal mortality. In its most progressive format, maternal mortality touches upon politically contentious issues that are often resisted by conservative networks supporting neoliberal control over public health sector reforms, principles and practices.
Gabriela Alvarez Minte (Birkbeck College)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes the resistance and backlashes to the protection of gender and sexual-based violence and women's sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico and Chile.
Paper long abstract:
This research aims at understanding the dichotomy between the con-
tinuous e orts to advance women's human rights and gender equality and the
pervasive resistance to this advancement in Latin America. It will do so by
analyzing the resistance and backlashes to the protection of womens bodily
integrity, speci cally gender and sexual based violence and womens sexual
and reproductive rights in Mexico and Chile. It will respond to two main
research questions; (1) how are resistances/backlashes to women's bodily in-
tegrity perceived and addressed by policy makers and advocates?, and (2)
why is women's bodily integrity a particularly contested sphere of women's
rights and gender equality? By conducting empirically based qualitative re-
search, this analysis will contribute to the gender equality scholarship looking
at the conditions and processes resulting in a backlash to women's bodily in-
1
Carmen Sepulveda (Institute for the Americas)
Paper short abstract:
The debates that surrounded the legalisation and distribution of Emergency Contraception(EC) in Chile (2000-2010) are a good example of the use of both maternal and progressive arguments to advance a social policy. Feminism and the medical lobby competed to influence key state and judicial institutions.
Paper long abstract:
The debates behind the legalisation and distribution of Emergency Contraception (EC) in Chile (2000-2010) are a good example of the use of both maternal and progressive arguments to advance social policy. Feminism and the medical lobby competed to influence key state and judicial institutions. Due to the political strategies surrounding EC, the judiciary and in particular the Constitutional Tribunal became central arenas where conservative and progressive actors fought to influence the outcome of the EC policy.
These political and legal battles raise many questions regarding the role of institutions for women's rights, in particular in the context of a country that lives under the Constitution shaped by Pinochet's regime, and is yet to fully democratise its political institutions.
This paper tries to show the type of arguments and strategies used by different actors and institutions. It highlights the way in which the Constitutional Tribunal was used by conservative forces to exclude progressive civil society, and maintain a status quo on gender roles and reinforce maternalist approaches to access to sexual and reproductive health. This was due to the undemocratic nature of the constitutional tribunal. Civil society was invited to participate only in a limited manner. The judicial arena proved a great challenge to the way in which feminists and other social actors carried out their advocacy. The executive - led by Chile's first female president - also faced new challenges to support its EC policy and engage with civil society, proving once again the power of institutions for gendered social policies.
Alejandra Ramm (Universidad Diego Portales)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses how post-dictatorial social policies in Chile unintendedly have increased, albeit in a limited way, the material and symbolic power of unmarried mothers. The analysis focuses on housing subsidies, as these are crucial to family life, and, in turn, to gender relations.
Paper long abstract:
Housing subsidies entail a significant part of social spending and are crucial for poor families. Who can apply to a housing subsidy? Who is entitled to be a home owner? What kinds of families are favoured by housing subsidies? These questions are analysed in the light of possible gains for women. Once democracy returned to Chile, social protection not only expanded its coverage, but also further enhanced targeting of vulnerable groups. Following a conventional understanding of gender roles, unmarried mothers were defined as vulnerable as they did not have a formal husband to look after them and their children. Yet expansion and targeting of social protection have brought the unexpected consequence of downgrading the historical significance of marriage as the exclusive or major means of access to welfare (for women/mothers not involved in formal employment). Therefore, today unmarried mothers can themselves apply to a housing subsidy, and, due to their vulnerability, they might have even more chances of receiving it than married couples. The paper combines a socio-historical analysis of social protection in Chile with qualitative life histories of urban young people from low income groups. The socio-historical background refers to changes in social welfare programs introduced by Pinochet's dictatorship and continued, in large part, by the post-authoritarian, centre-left Concertación governments. I also collected life histories of young people who were starting to form their own families and looking for greater housing opportunities. In this manner, housing subsidies also became a central theme of their narratives.
Tara Cookson (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
CCT programs often produce deeply ironic circumstances: women must choose between seeking low-quality services and being branded as irresponsible. Drawing on ethnography I argue that an analysis of the maternalist element must account for constructed notions of responsible family life.
Paper long abstract:
In rural Peru, a social protection program called Juntos works to promote human capital. Small sums of money are given to poor mothers to "incentivize" them to seek healthcare and education for their children. The ostensibly family-oriented program transfers cash almost exclusively to women who are seen as more "responsible" than their male counterparts, undertaking the majority of care work and more likely to invest in the household.
One camp of analysts celebrate quantitative indicators which paint a picture of Juntos as a driver of access to services such as primary and secondary education, immunization, and pre and post-natal health checks. I am certainly not the first to argue that such statistics gloss over the often exceedingly poor quality of these services. Another camp of scholars have protested the reification of gender roles that see women as the primary bearers of the care burden, suggesting that this inhibits their own strategic gains. Given this, do the material benefits we may observe justify the maternalist focus on women as the lynch pins of this program?
The conditional arrangement of CCT programs often produces deeply ironic circumstances: women must choose between seeking low-quality services and being branded as irresponsible. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the everyday experiences of Juntos recipients, in this paper I explore the CCT as a disciplining mechanism. I will argue that a just analysis of the maternalist element of CCT programs must account for the ways in which these programs construct notions of "responsible" and "irresponsible" family life.
Julia Zulver (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper challenges the idea that revolutionary feminism is the best framework with which to explain women's mobilization in El Salvador today.
Paper long abstract:
According to homicide statistics, El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world. For the most part, however, policy discussions about how women's experiences as citizens are impacted in contemporary violent contexts remain silent. This paper will examine the way that feminist mobilization has developed over time in El Salvador, as well as provide a framework for understanding contemporary mobilization. Most scholars working in the 1990s describe women's organizations in terms of their origins as revolutionary feminist movements. This paper argues, however, that in the contemporary context of high criminal (as opposed to authoritarian) violence, the revolutionary framework falls short in terms of explaining strategies and objectives of mobilization. Today's mobilization centres on the creation of collective identity (manifesting as a variant of insurgent citizenship) that moves beyond the traditional practical vs strategic gender interest binary. Paying particular attention to two recently passed gender laws, the paper will seek to examine the ways in which women's movements have adapted their collective action based on contemporary social and political contexts in order to gain more from social policy. Through engaging with social movement literature, the paper will develop a new framework to explain the adaptation of women's collective action in a context of high violence.