Austerity Programmes in Argentina and the Structural Continuity of Extractivism: A Feminist Perspective

Abstract

A feminist reading of economics is necessary because no science is neutral, just as no knowledge is neutral. In this sense, the concept of gender is relevant because it is a category that reveals to us a notion about social relations of power; inequality is not only a problem of women, and gender is not the same as women. These power relations interact with other relations, such as racial, ethnic and age relations, which comprise different bodies with different psychic and motor capacities and imply dynamics of discrimination and subordination and the creation of states of ‘normality’, which become social stereotypes. Incorporating the notion of gender in economic analysis elucidates not only social but also economic structures and dynamics and helps us to think how gender relations, which structure social relations, have concrete effects. The past four decades in Argentina were characterized by a mode of development, based on the exploitation of ‘comparative advantages’ and export-oriented development, with a decreasing share of autonomy from the world market within the main axes of policies. The different governments that followed one another during these forty years maintained this characterization as a structural axis, but they maintained it with different tones that coloured each stage differently within this long period. Such is the case that, after sev-eral years of ultra-neoliberalism during the 1990s, the country shifted to a neo-developmental path from 2002 onwards, which was also oriented to the exploitation of comparative advantages but with strong differences regarding the nature of social policies and the importance of the internal market as a relevant space for the valorization of capital. The arrival in government of a right-wing force at the end of 2015 resumed the previous, more typically neoliberal, path, configuring a modeof development oriented toward finance and extractivism, trade and capital liberalization, and austerity policies. The domestic market was no longer rel evant for capital accumulation, so development was a matter of reducing the fiscal deficit as necessary and lowering national production costs in order to increase international competitiveness.As part of these objectives, a series of measures were carried out that differentially impacted women and LGBTIQ people more than men. This essay will begin by clarifying the neoliberal mode of development in Argentina, its extractivist emphasis, and the role of women therein, before focusing on the 2017 pension reform, budget cuts in gender- sensitive areas, and the changein the nature of social policies. The objective is to analyse the incidence that the austerity programme had with respect to women and, in the cases that can be analysed, to LGBTIQ people in Argentina.