J. L. Carbone From the Nation-Building Debate to the Bolsa Família Program

Whiteness, Gender, and Poverty in Brazil
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-593-45521-1
Verlag: Campus Verlag GmbH
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Deutsch, 289 Seiten

Geschlechter- und Rassendiskriminierung sind in Brasilien umkämpfte Themen - verstärkt nachdem der ehemalige Präsident, Jair Bolsonaro, das Umverteilungsprogramm »Programa Bolsa Família« 2021 abgeschafft und durch eine Sozialpolitik ersetzt hatte, die Genderfragen missachtete. Diese Studie untersucht Diskurse gegen »Bolsa Família« und beleuchtet damit Konflikte um Brasiliens nationale Identität sowie strukturellen Rassismus und Sexismus. Aus der Kolonialzeit stammende und sich beständig reproduzierende hohe Einkommensunterschiede im Land verknüpft die Autorin innovativ mit den Race-Theorien der europäischen Aufklärung um Linnaeus, Leclerc de Buffon und Kant.

Beatriz Junqueira Lage Carbone ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Fachrichtung gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Europaforschung der Universität des Saarlands.

Autoren/Hrsg.

J. L. Carbone, Beatriz

Leseproben

Introduction

Early in 2003, the Brazilian government created a conditional cash transfer program (CCTP) called Bolsa Família. A conditional cash transfer program is a welfare policy characterized by: a target on the poorest share of the population and a set of conditionalities, which ultimately determine eligibility (Fultz and Francis 2013; Fiszbein and Schady 2009). It keeps stipends to the lowest level that suffices to boost recipients above the poverty line and follows good governance principles (Garmany 2016; Freeland 2007). The conditionalities refer to the mandatory maintenance of children and teenagers in school, the compliance with a health care agenda on the part of children, and the compliance with reproductive health care measures on the part of women (Lindert et al. 2007). Most conditional cash transfer programs implemented in the 2000s in Latin America had a focus on families and gave priority to women as recipients (Soares and Silva 2010). Though the Bolsa Família program is entirely carried out by the Brazilian government1, its format is the outcome of the convergence of three trends in the international agenda for development after the 1980s, namely: the basic needs theory, the human development approach, and gender mainstreaming (Robeyns 2010; Freeland 2007).

Each of these trends plays an ambivalent role in the determination of the goals of a conditional cash transfer program (Molyneux 2006). Firstly, the focus on the poorest share of the population is seen as a way to evade wider redistributive policies that provided unemployed citizens with a minimum income equivalent to the minimum wage (Fagnani 2011; Bastagli 2009). In the name of the ‘first needs first principle,’ international development organizations recommended that Global South countries should meet the basic needs of their citizens (Ranis et. al. 2000). At the same time, however, they were advised not to expand public expenditures to a level that might compromise fiscal balance, producing limited and contradictory outcomes (Robeyns 2010; Garmany 2016).

Secondly, the human development approach is based on the idea that everyone should be provided with opportunities to develop one’s skills and talents, realizing one’s potentials and leading a life one has reason to value (Nussbaum 2011). This theory tends, however, to ignore structural factors that reproduce poverty. It places a focus on education and training as if these two things alone were enough to boost people out of poverty (Kapoor 2008). In that logic, poverty could be simply solved by policies focused on the individual level (Mauriel 2006). In the case of conditional cash transfer programs, this principle ends up acquiring a sexist connotation, since women are seen as responsible for helping their children to break the ‘intergenerational transmission of poverty’ cycle (Sardenberg 2007; Molyneux 2006). They are charged with the responsibility to invest the stipends in improving the human capital of their children (Molyneux 2006).

Finally, the decision to give priority to women as recipients of the stipends transferred by the program was twofold. On the one hand, the Bolsa Família program follows the principles of the ‘new agenda on poverty and development,’ according to which women tended to benefit less from welfare and development aid (Razavi 2010; Molyneux 2006). Likewise, this agenda made it clear that women had less access to training and paid work in relation to men (Sabates-Wheeler and Kabeer 2003). From this perspective, instead of conceiving general profiles about people who live below the poverty line, welfare and development aid should take gender into account (Rai 2002). This goal would be achieved by policies aimed at empowering women, thus addressing their gendered disadvantages (Parpart 2002). Accordingly, conditional cash transfer programs would empower low-income women. On the other hand, the reason for giving priority to women to be recipients of the program relied on the perception among international organizations such as the World Bank that the majority of low-income households are headed by women (Chant 2006). And most importantly, women were perceived to be more likely to invest the money in the education and needs of their children (Sardenberg 2007). Hence, as the title of the program says, the stipends were supposed to support their families so that children would be provided with a better upbringing (Chant 2007). Women became in this perspective an instrument to the realization of the objectives of cash transfers (Molyneux 2006; Sardenberg 2007).

At the time the Bolsa Família program commenced, nearly one fourth of the Brazilian population lived under the poverty line established by the World Bank (Jaccoud 2013). As post-development feminism has shown, income inequality is a gendered phenomenon that has symbolic, social, historical, and material roots in the conflicts of a society and its relationship to the global economy (Sassen 2002). Although Brazil managed to implement a welfare system during the twentieth century, it was fragmented and focused on social security (Paiva et al. 2013; Lindert et al. 2007). And most importantly, it excluded all individuals who performed irregular work as well as autonomous workers with low and temporary incomes. This particularly affected low-income women of color with families2 (Carbone 2017). Until the Bolsa Família program, the Brazilian welfare system had ignored their economic vulnerability and excluded them from any income support. But most importantly, given that this welfare system protects groups of the population by giving them as many rights as we can find in the most advanced welfare systems in Europe, it is important to enquire not only about how this invisibility was created, but to question: why are low-income women seen as less entitled to belong to Brazilian society?

On the one hand, the Bolsa Família program was groundbreaking in the local context, for at least two reasons. Firstly, it was the first welfare policy to consistently address the poorest share of the Brazilian population, providing them with an income that was not dependent on previous salary contributions (Jaccoud et al. 2017). Secondly, by doing this, the program stated the right of this share of the population to be assisted by the state (Carbone 2017). Or to put it differently, the program created a discursive space to grant them rights they had so far been denied. By those means, the Bolsa Família program also partially confronted previous discourses that legitimized the inexistence of welfare policies for the poorest share of the Brazilian population on the grounds that welfare policies would compromise the economy and create a culture of economic dependence (Lindert et al. 2007; Campello 2013). On the other hand, although the program gives priority to women as recipients of the stipends, it has been criticized for seeing them as instrumental to the program’s developmental tasks as other conditional cash transfer programs have (Bradshaw et. al. 2019). Thus, although the program made low-income women visible to Brazilian society as right holders, it also turned them into categories of intervention. This happened because by stating that women are responsible for boosting their families out of poverty, the program turned them into the means to change the next generation (Chant 2007).

In this book I seek to investigate this last point in light of two concepts taken from Foucault’s discourse theory. Firstly, I draw on Foucault’s (1982) claim that discourses are contingent. Secondly, I build on his argument that categories of intervention play a social function in the organization of positions of subjectivity in a certain culture (Foucault 1994). These two ideas come together in an important way in Foucault’s genealogical work. Foucault saw the discourses available to individuals who belong to the same culture to comprehend social phenomena as being determined not by the sedimentation of values throughout history, but by the interplay between truth and power that found modes of knowing and participation in a certain culture. The objective of this book is to find out which discourses Brazilian people articulate in order to negotiate this category of intervention. I sought to analyze what the discursive formations are that confer a field of positions of subjectivities for...