Securing Citizens and Entrenching Inequalities: The Gendered, Neoliberalized Latin American State

Abstract

Managing social and political stability is a central preoccupation of neoliberalized Latin American states. Building critically on an emerging literature on the security state, I suggest that this preoccupation increasingly takes the form of a securitization of society through both punitive and preventive means, involving not only the police and penal institutions but also civil society in partnership with an enabling state. In this paper I suggest that we stand to gain analytically from rendering visible the gendered dimension of these management functions of the state. In a context of increasing precariousness of relations of production and reproduction, the contributions of feminists and activists to the shaping of securitization efforts is undeniable. Concretely, women’s invisible and naturalized care work makes a fundamental contribution to the configuration of the Latin American neoliberalized state as a security state.