Law, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Violence Against Women: An Institutional Ethnography of Argentina's Universal Child Allowance Program

This dissertation is the first ever written Institutional Ethnography (IE) of the Asignación Universal por Hijo para Protección Social, or "AUH" [Universal Child Allowance], Argentina's CCT (conditional cash transfer) program. CCTs are one of international development's favourite and fastest-growing anti-poverty initiatives. Through the AUH, the State transfers cash to the poor attaching certain conditions that refer to the health and education of their children. Most CCT programs target women, and the AUH is no exception, as the overwhelming majority of legal recipients of the AUH are poor mothers. CCTs have been praised for contributing to human capital accumulation and empowering women. Using IE, a feminist socio-legal methodology drawn from Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith,† I conducted research with a total of fifty-eight informants: thirty-nine AUH recipient women - through in-depth semi-structured individual interviews, focus group discussions, and narrative photovoice - and nineteen professionals working at diverse corners of the AUH institution. I use the findings to answer two main questions: (1) What are AUH recipients' experiences with and attitudes toward the program? and (2) How do both State and non-State legal regimes work to influence the lives of the most vulnerable women in Argentina? In other words, how does the AUH play within a system of rules - formal and informal - that have traditionally exerted control over poor women? Following IE and Social Reproduction Feminism (SRF), I found that while the AUH program indicates women's decision-making roles within their families and communities, this policy initiative serves to entrench rather than rectify inequalities. The problematic that I have found through this study is administrative and obstetric violence against AUH recipient women. Discussion about the administrative and obstetric violence that AUH recipient women suffer while doing AUH work has remained at the margins of legal and social policy debates, generally underdeveloped in policy and scholarship conversations about the realities of Argentina's most vulnerable people. Recipient women depicted diverse acts of violence they suffered while doing AUH work: they were mistreated, dismissed, neglected, humiliated, and discriminated against by State agents; recipient women were treated as ignorant or infantilized; recipient women had their stipend partially stolen by bureaucrats; had to wait countless hours in unsafe conditions; were not heard by health actors when expressing concerns about their health; had no opportunity to give prior informed consent; and they faced barriers to accessing health services and contraception. I have found a disjuncture between women's lived experiences and the broader ruling relations that organize "AUH work." The findings show a disconnection between women's experiences of violence, bureaucratic actors' experiences and knowledge of the AUH, and a misalignment between bureaucrats' knowledge and the black-letter law. These disjunctures enable and facilitate violence against recipient women through fragmentation, invisibilization, rationalization, minimization, standardization, and objectification of women's experiences. In sum, the AUH facilitates violence against women and systematically obscures that violence. Following a legal pluralist approach, I show the complex role of the law: at times, it problematically excludes recipient women's actual experiences from the AUH legal framework; at others, it fails to protect recipient women against violence. I identify the formal legal regimes interacting and immersed in the AUH institution: human rights and constitutional law, administrative law, and the violence against women (VAW) legal framework. Despite an outstanding formal repertoire of rights, there is a gap between the formal laws and their effective translation into women's lives. The law is fragmented, complex, and sometimes contradictory. It cannot be limited to State-enacted formal laws; informal laws substantially impact people's lives, such as the rule to avoid retaliation from State actors by avoiding complaining. I argue that IE and legal pluralism can provide a more nuanced understanding of the law's complex institutional hierarchy and of the myriad ways by which recipient women's voices continue to be ignored and discredited within the law in the hope that the law can better respond (or at least stops interfering) with their needs. Ultimately, nothing less than the transformation of the socioeconomic order will achieve gender equality. Rather than "empowerment," we should strive toward emancipation, abolishing the structural colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist foundations of exploitation and oppression instead of integrating women into existing institutions and "empowering" them with shallow cash transfers.

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