ILPC 2026

This paper aims to address the role of public policies on the organization of female care workers in the Global South, and more generally, on the dynamics of politization/depoliticization. More precisely, based on empirical research about public health and social assistance policies in Brazil (São Paulo), realized by ethnographic incursions in the field and biographical interviews (about 100) with professionals along the care chains and “beneficiaries” of the public health system, but also of public assistance policies and Conditional Cash Transfer Programs, such as the Bolsa família, from 2008 to 2013, we focus on the way these policies re-articulate on the one hand the general social and sexual (and racial) division of work, and on the other, how these policies instrumentalize the work of poor (ethnical) women in between the sphere of production and of reproduction (Georges, Santos, 2016). In the last part of the paper, we will try to show how public policies during the so-called “lulist” (Singer, Loureiro, 2016) period (2003 to 2016) lead by the integration of the social demand – such as the inscription of basic social rights in the new Constitution of 1988 and the creation public services such as family health care – to forms of institutionalisation of this demand and forms of depoliticization (Lautier, 2009; Destremau, Georges, 2017). Latin America has been considered for long, at least since the eighties, and in particular since the 1990, as a laboratory of a new generation of social policies, combining social protection and reduction of poverty (Lautier, 2012). In Brazil, born initially in the context of the “democratic opening” or a “comeback” of democracy, after the military dictatorship (1964-1985), and in the context of the new Constitution (1988), as a result of the demand for basic public services (health, education, social assistance) as well as, during the nineties, of the intervention of international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, on the economic politics of this country, these policies have been ambiguous. Indeed, if these institutions promoted the generalization of social policies such as Conditional Cash Transfer Programs - too apparent poverty having become incompatible with the image of democracy – they also constrained countries like Brazil to implement a reduction of “social costs” and “neoliberal” economic politics to reduce the external debt. However, if these ambiguities have led to what has been called the “confluência perversa” (Dagnino, 2006), these intrinsic contradictions, which led to a minimalistic implementation of these policies, have also contributed to discredit the compromise of governability, which characterized several Latin-American countries during this period, and indirectly to the Brazilian parliamentary blow of 2016. In this perspective, the example of the elementary recognition of the community work of female health workers, the creation of the Family Health Program and other social policies, and the subsequent use of this female workforce to implement a moral government of the private sphere of the poor is paradigmatic for the (perverse) alliance of extractive, neoliberal economic politics and State care, depolitizing the poor.