Recipients or mediators? Women, motherhood and public policies in Aregentina

Abstract

In the last years, we have witnessed a growing maternalization of care policies in Argentina, emphasized among those that build families in poverty as a target population. Women who are mothers have become privileged interlocutors for state policies and benefits. Through these women, the state provides resources and services that aim at assisting children in particular or the nuclear family as a whole, while the state provision of care in Argentina is built on the basis of care work carried out within homes. In any of the cases, women who are mothers are interpellated by the state as mediators of policies in the territories, positioning them as those in charge of processing and managing those policies. This situation tends not only to reinforce the nature of caregivers of women but also to reproduce gender structures without altering sexual division of labour. To access these resources, a series of criteria are established that carry the premise of “good” mothering, (re)producing correct and incorrect ways of exercising motherhood in accordance with social values, meanings and expectations.