Gendered Governmentalities and Neoliberal Logics: Latina, Immigrant Women in Healthcare and Social Services

Abstract

This ethnographic research with Latina, immigrant mothers and health care and social service workers in Williamsburg, Virginia analyzes the production of insecurities in immigrant women’s lives, as they fulfill their gendered role as caretakers of the family. I argue that the process through which immigrant women come to associate accessing public benefits and health care services with danger is reflective of neoliberal governmentality, which cultivates mothers as self-reliant subjects charged with ensuring their families’ survival. I forward the concept “insecuritization,” an interactive process through which institutional actors communicate a threat of harm to immigrant women by triggering anxieties linked to gendered norms and expectations regarding motherhood. Insecuritization steered immigrant mothers away from local institutions towards individualized strategies for solving their problems. Immigrant women responded to insecuritization by developing their own informal networks to assist them in accessing resources and care, a process that aligned with neoliberal projects of social disinvestment but also involved forging new social connections that could hold the potential for challenging neoliberal logics. This research elucidates gendered dimensions of governmentality and suggests new thinking about dialectics of women’s creative agency and disciplinary power in a neoliberal order.