Dismantling Gender Policies in Argentina: Austerity, Anti-Wokism and Poor Accountability
摘要
This chapter analyzes the dismantling of gender and care policies in Argentina after the far-right government that took office in December 2023. Using Cejudo and Olvera’s (2026) framework, it shows how austerity, anti-“woke” discourse, and weak accountability combined to justify and operationalize the rollback of a dense architecture of gender equality and care policies built in the previous decade: the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity and its care agenda (interministerial committee, federal care map, Cuidar en Igualdad bill proposal, campaigns); the Registradas program, meant for formalizing domestic workers; care infrastructure programs across several ministries; and disability pensions linked to health care provision. The chapter reconstructs the reasons (macroeconomic crisis, anti-caste and anti-feminist ideology), the strategies (governing without an approved budget, emergency powers, program non-renewal, drastic under-execution, restrictive eligibility changes, and aggressive audits), and the mix of density and intensity in dismantling across three emblematic cases. It then examines the effects: deterioration of care provision, setbacks in the construction of a national care system, deepening of unpaid care burdens, and the differential emergence of social resistance, particularly from people with disabilities and their families.