Social structure, gender and territory in Tandil, Argentina.

LAN, D; VELÁZQUEZ, G

Population, Environment and the Challenge of Development.

Akansha

Lugar: New Delhi; Año: 2003; p. 304 - 326

The eighties or “lost decade” and the nineties or “globalisation decade” have strongly impacted in Argentine social structure, which shows, every time, a bigger dichotomy. While a minority portion of population enjoys increasing privileges, the greatest number of the population can’t, at least, satisfy their basic necessities. Categories like: occupational structure, incomes category, instruction level, migratory condition, ethnic, and gender; can come to be relevant to evidence some of these changes in argentine social and territorial configuration. In this work, without laying aside the character of derived category of the social structure, we will emphasise on contradictions of a gender analysis in Tandil, a middle size city (nearly 105,000 inhabitants) placed in Argentine pampean region. The gender problem is related with differences originated between female and male and their mediation with the territory, not forgetting the social and cultural construction of the differences. By this way, we think that this analysis category mustn’t be board exclusively from the female perspective, because we would just study the half of the humanity; on the contrary, most currents studies focuses the comparative look of gender roll between men and women. Whether we consider the territory as the social built space, the space utilisation has an important connotation parting from the gender. Although the sense of property to any place is given among the different social groups. Also it exists in the territory a different signification given by the women and men uses of the public and/or private space. The starting place for our analysis is constituted by a series of central problems, having as a frame the answer we find in social structure for gender differences with the use of the territory, principally: social structure-familiar responsibilities, social structure-gender-urban movements, social structure-double journeywork and invisible work.