Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork with Haitian women in Chile, this presentation examines how bureaucracies conceptualize need and dependence based on feminist and humanitarian ideals and patriarchal and maternalist state narratives in a Latin American setting of intraregional mobility amid multiple crises.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I revisit Wendy Brown’s proposition of ‘gendering the state’ (States of Injury, 1995) to account for the ways bureaucracies conceptualize need and dependence based on feminist ideals. Based on ethnographic encounters between Haitian women and public bureaucracies in Santiago (Chile), I unravel the contradictions between understandings of migrant humanity on the one hand, and patriarchal and maternalist state narratives on the other. I explore the affordances of humanitarian benevolence and gender-based compassion at the core of care rationales toward racialized migrant women in a postcolonial and neoliberal Latin American society living through multiple crises. By comparing the disparate stories of two Haitian women in their strive for care and dignity, I analyze the dislocations within migrant protection and governance to make sense of how contemporary statecraft becomes sedimented by everyday experiences of racial aggression and gender violence. Through the exercise of ‘gendering the state’, I show how grounded practices of bureaucratic care and subjectivity transform Haitian women’s desires to realize their life projects in and through intimate relations of power and institutional encounters. In doing so, I reflect on the ambivalences raised by an ethnography of care and dignity within state bureaucracies among those who are racialized as disposable and dispossessed others.