The Power of Care: Women s Agency in the Argentine Soy Belt

KUNIN, JOHANA

Essex (postpuesto por covid19, inicialmente 09/2020)

Congreso; Environment and Identity in the Americas; 2021

University of Essex

This paper presents an ethnographic description and analysis of women s agency in a soy-producing district of the rural interior of the province of Buenos Aires, as observed through diverse care practices and relationships. The study is based on the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2014 and 2017, which followed the coordinators and participants of a community theater group, a community medicine group, and a group of advocates and practitioners of agroecological family farming. The theoretical framework of the study takes its inspiration from feminist studies on care, adding nuance and expanding upon these, as well as discussing certain social theories regarding human agency.The expansion of soy cultivation has impacted economic, domestic and working life and, as a consequence, the new production model in the interior of Buenos Aires province has enabled a transformation in the agency of women. Likewise, the community development spaces discussed in this dissertation also influence women?s agency by promoting political dissent among women and contributing to their emergence as political subjects. Thus, it is mainly women who care for their children, for those from outlying neighborhoods, for the environment and even for themselves that break the barrier of discretion and, as they say, lose their sense of shame and propose alternative moral repertoires for a community in transformation.A product of the heuristic encounter with the native theories of this ethnography, this dissertation challenges metropolitan-centered viewpoints and the academic and political longings of Eurocentric feminism. In dialogue with postcolonial feminism, it encourages a consideration of the agency and political activism of women-mothers-caregivers in the rural world from a historically-situated socio-anthropological perspective. At a time when feminism and gender inequality are very much present in the public agenda, this dissertation challenges certain common sense and academic notions that maintain that care, in all its diverse forms, only limits a woman s possibilities. In contrast, this dissertation argues that certain characteristics of caregiving that are attributed to women through a binary vision of gender relations serve to mobilize the agency of women and function as a source of potential power thereby enabling women?who are often perceived as caregivers that do menial tasks and are not dangerous to become dissidents. In this way, participation, social and moral work are divided along gender lines, wherein women are able to make their criticisms public as they experience less risk to their reputations than men.