Abstract
This chapter summarizes and discusses the central themes and objectives of this book, explaining how “ultra-intensity patriarchy” materializes in the everyday lives of Paraguayan women in the Paraná Tri-Border Area (between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay), shaping their experiences of mobility and care. It argues that the condensation of gender inequality and violence in these border territories configures them as spaces where patriarchy presents itself with heightened intensity. It also introduces the feminist approach that frames the volume, stating the authors’ commitment to bringing border women’s experiences to the center of the analysis. Therefore, their value for local families and communities is emphasized, highlighting how their lives produce (and are produced by) multiple-scale power dynamics. Furthermore, the chapter introduces the ethnographic case study carried out among transborder Paraguayan women, describing its methodology and the qualitative strategies applied to approach their life histories. Finally, it offers a synthesis of the content found in the following chapters, inviting readers to travel across the gender boundaries in the Tri-Border Area.
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Notes
- 1.
The Paraguayan Republic is divided into three different units internally known as (from largest to smallest): departments, districts, and municipalities. Each has a certain level of administrative and governmental autonomy.
- 2.
- 3.
According to Marcel Mauss, in his classic “The Gift” , the system of total prestations constitutes the elemental structure of exchanges in human societies. In it, “the persons represented in the contracts are moral persons […]. Further, what they exchange is not exclusively goods and wealth, real and personal property, and things of economic value. They exchange rather courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts; and fairs in which the market is but one element and the circulation of wealth but one part of a wide and enduring contract. Finally, although the prestations and counter-prestations take place under a voluntary guise they are in essence strictly obligatory, and their sanction is private or open warfare” (Mauss, 1966 [1950], p. 3). This type of exchange establishes a morality based on three fundamental obligations—giving, receiving, and returning—that appear as voluntary. Nevertheless, they are strongly stipulated by the moral danger that not attending them would represent to the group’s members. The latter conforms to a particular sense of collective ethics that permeates social life (Mauss, 1966 [1950], pp. 10-11).
- 4.
The life history interview (Alberti, 2005) consists of a flexible strategy for dialogic interaction with no preformulated questions. It is built from the suggestion made to the interviewee that she narrates her life chronologically, starting with her grandparents. This technique allows us to collect empirical material that contextualizes the social networks the women participate in and the knowledge they glean from them, giving material with which to relate these elements with their labor insertion, care overload, and their suffering of gender violence.
- 5.
This imaginary reproduces itself to date both in Brazil (Souchaud, 2011) and Argentina (Grimson, 2012). In addition to the racism they carry, these identity representations produce a distorted perception of Paraguayans’ ethnic affiliation. While it is true that 59% of Paraguayans speak Guarani (which, along with Spanish, is an official language), only 1.7% of the country’s population declared themselves indigenous in the last national census (Souchaud, 2011, p. 134).
- 6.
Working in these department stores implies having had access to formal schooling, at least having finished secondary school, and a command of English (as well as Portuguese, Guarani, and Spanish). The women also mentioned that the employers choose their salespeople for their appearance and so discriminate against older women and those they consider having indigenous features, giving priority to women who fit into the stereotype of beauty peddled by the cosmetic and international clothing industries. Together this makes working in these big shops an inaccessible niche for many women. On the other hand, we observed that working as a salesperson in a medium-sized shop is characterized and dominated by men: women are a minority there, and those who are present work in cleaning or serving coffee.
- 7.
This issue will be discussed in Chap. 4.
- 8.
We will pick up these debates with more detailed arguments in Chap. 3.
- 9.
When I refer to political hegemonies, I do so ascribing to the post-Gramscian debate as summarized by Said (1979, pp. 6–7): “Gramsci has made a useful distinction between civil and political society, in which the former is made up by voluntary (or at least rational and non-coercive) affiliations like schools, families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracies) whose role in polity is direct domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but rather through what Gramsci calls consent […]. The form that this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as ‘hegemony’”.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter was translated from Spanish to English by Christine Ann Hills. The author thanks the National Research and Development Agency of Chile (ANID) for funding the studies that gave rise to this chapter through the Projects Fondecyt 1,190,056, “The Boundaries of Gender Violence: Migrant Women’s Experiences in South American Border Territories” (2019–2023).
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Guizardi, M. (2021). The Tangled Borders: Female Experiences of Violence and Care. In: Guizardi, M. (eds) Ultra-Intensity Patriarchy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85750-9_1
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