A gender analysis of cash transfers: Making visible womens silenced narratives of poverty in Argentina

CONSTANZA TABBUSH

Congreso; 2012 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association; 2012

Latin American Studies Association

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) are the latest recipe for fighting poverty and exclusion in Latin America. Feminists have argued that CCTs reinforce maternal constructions of identities by positioning women as intermediaries of policy outcomes centred on children´s human capital formation. Gender perspectives have focused on problematising the terms of women´s incorporation into these state policies. They have, however, left unexplored the meanings that women attribute to their experience of the exclusionary processes tackled by CCT programmes. By adding a focus on women´s agency in contexts of poverty, this paper presents two contrasting perspectives on poverty: that of the women themselves, and that of the state.The analysis of CCT policies in Argentina and the qualitative study of a low income neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, reveal that while state programmes define women´s identities as maternal, they restrict women´s possibilities of agency to their mothering in a context of poverty. Interviews show that, for women, poverty is less about the material needs of their households than about violent power relations that sideline their voices from public deliberative processes. Yet, these problems that women identify with their sense of social exclusion, which involve dynamics of social violence, are not acknowledged in policy statements about poverty and social exclusion, and become what I called silenced narratives.