Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how technologies of care oriented towards the containment of ‘dangerous classes’ involve a project of subjectivation centred on women to enforce a gendered family model by engaging state programmes and prevention practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how initiatives of care and control of populations treated by the Chilean state as crime-prone have become technologies of optimistic coercion. Focusing on the lives of women in prison-family-neighbourhood circuits and their participation in crime prevention programmes, this paper studies how they relate to state institutions and NGOs. Specifically, it examines how technologies of care aim to empower women heads of household under market logics that they ambivalently live as a kind of ‘optimistic coercion’. Building on ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2021 with practitioners of crime prevention programmes and the prisoners’ families targeted by such initiatives, the paper addresses carceral domesticities as containment of problematic populations. It draws attention to how the safeguarding of social order and security policy is intertwined with the reproduction of carceral domesticities among low-income households. It addresses the ways in which technologies of care oriented towards the containment of ‘dangerous classes’ involve a project of subjectivation centred on women to enforce a gendered family model by engaging state programmes and prevention practitioners. The paper concludes by analysing how these women contest the forms of carceral domesticity they encounter, opening up spaces of subaltern self-affirmation for themselves and their households, at a time when the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism in Chile is undergoing its greatest crisis since its brutal imposition during the Pinochet dictatorship.