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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Body care and sexual and reproductive rights among young poor women in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

presenters

    Ana Cecilia Gaitán

    Nationality: Argentina

    Residence: Argentina

    LICH-UNSAM/CONICET

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

Keywords:

bodily autonomy; feminisms; ethnography; young people; affect

Abstract:

In the last three decades, social programs aimed at social inclusion of young people have emerged in Latin America. In Argentina, their emergence is related to the context of institutionalization of children's and adolescents' rights. As indicated in this paper, the implementation of those programs has been influenced by the advance of feminism and its demands regarding sex education, abortion and the eradication of gender violence. In fact, many of these programs organize specific workshops for young women to identify, collectivize and contextualize everyday gender violence in a social and political order that produces it. In this paper I reflect on the constructions of meanings young female clients make around body care, sexual and reproductive rights and abortion in the context of these workshops. From ethnographic data constructed throughout 2023 and 2024, I seek to indicate how care and autonomy over the bodies of young women constitutes a terrain of dispute in which ambiguous appropriations of those rights take place, and how this is linked to a context in which, while feminisms have become more popular, conservative sectors have become entrenched in territories where multiple forms of violence and vulnerabilities intersect in a complex manner. These reflections contribute to debates in the anthropological sciences on what it means to make gender in societies across different contexts and life cycles. Also about how bodies are made through processes of exchange, taking into account place, social context, institutions and power.