A privação tem rosto de mulher: gestão da pobreza e segregação socioespacial na periferia de São Paulo

Abstract

Gendered deprivation: poverty management and socio-spatial segregation in São Paulo's peripheryThis research aims to understand how the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production reproduces deprivation and how it appears and takes place in everyday life to reveal the city's socio-spatial segregation and center-periphery contradiction. Therefore, this thesis analyses three public policies of poverty management, specifically those of income transfer: the Bolsa Família Program, the Auxílio Emergencial, and the Auxílio Brasil. Based on the analysis of these policies, we argue that the Brazilian state considers the absence of income to be the main characteristic of poverty. Consequently, it chooses income transfer to mitigate it, revealing the liberal conception that the market would be the main organizer of society and, therefore, responsible for its regulation. From another perspective, we understand that the essence of poverty is private property, whose existence guarantees the constant expansion of the conditions of expropriation and exploitation of the working class that experiences urban deprivation. Hence, we conclude that the income transfer policy operates as a financing strategy for social reproduction focusing on household consumption. The concept of social reproduction is analyzed in this thesis from a gender perspective in order to reveal the following contradiction: on the one hand, these policies imply women's financial autonomy, recognizing their importance as heads of families; on the other hand, they reify the gender roles that make women responsible for the care of the home and children. Therefore, we argue that there is a tenuous and conflicting balance between the role of the State and the role of capital in guaranteeing social reproduction: the more the former is absent from it, the more the latter imposes that it happens in a privatized and private way, that is, commodified and restricted to the domestic space. We arrived at such conclusions from research conducted in five East Zone of São Paulo neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods, we conducted ethnographic research, as we believe that ethnography reveals social practices and their meanings, revealing the contradictions that emerge in everyday life.