Spaces to talk about gender inequalities in social inclusion programs for young people: between emancipation proposals and mute voices

MEDAN MARINA

Congreso; IV ISA Forum of Sociology; 2021

ISA

This article addresses political and methodological dilemmas that ?invited spaces? presents (Cornwall, 2008) when tackling gender issues in inclusion programs aimed to increase youth participation. The empirical reference of these reflections is a research and extension project that we developed in a social inclusion program in Buenos Aires, between 2016 and 2018. In 2016, as part of the institutional interest in increasing young women participation, the caseworkers asked us to organize a weekly meeting aimed to invite them to work on different aspects of their ?life project?; we proposed to orientate it to gender inequalities. The work on these inequalities was carried out in a social and cultural context of effervescence -linked to gender violence in Argentina and discussions about the decriminalization of abortion-. During the development of the workshops, girls held different positions and perceptions regarding gender inequalities, as well as ideasassociated with models of appropriate femininity. This paper focuses on those expressions, but also observes how the girls participated in the workshop (their absences, silences, gestures), and other aspects of space dynamics. The objective of this focus is to carry out a work of reflexivity - more acute than that expected at the beginning of the meetings - on how our proposal and position in the field (as middle-class, university, and adult women) enabled or not plural forms of participation. Our ?emancipatory? message about gender could be decoded by them as a threat (Haney, 1996) to their gender ideologies and femininity experiences, which configured and effective in their particular context of life, could be being moralized, delegitimized, or silenced as an effect of the inequality of age and class that we maintained with them. The reflections include somecomments on the lessons learned from this experience to modify our subsequent interventions in 2017 and 2018.