Interview
Luci Cavallero: Debt is a political construct that particularly affects women
"We put economic violence and its relationship to gender violence at the center of the analysis. Today, we are at a stage in which the strike is more important than ever. We are protesting against the hunger and cruelty of the Milei government."
“Today, Argentina is a laboratory of the extreme right. We are witnessing a clear plan to control the feminist movements and their ability to create alliances and new politics of resistance to neoliberalism,” says Lucí Cavallero, Ni Una Menos activist, sociologist, researcher, and author of A Feminist Reading of Debt (published in English in 2021 by Pluto Books, tr. from Spanish by Liz Mason-Deese) written together with Verónica Gago. In her writings, Cavallero has analyzed the concept of debt from a feminist perspective, interpreting it as a form of economic violence that particularly affects women.
In her view, debt is a political construction rooted in inequality and reproduces patriarchal power structures. It is fueled by neoliberal policies that force people into debt to meet their basic needs, thus becoming a constant in the lives of vulnerable people, whom it tends to control and place in a subordinate position. Ni Una Menos and the feminist and women's movements will take to the streets on March 8 against “austerity policies,” “hunger,” and the “cruelty” of President Javier Milei's government: “We’re striking against hate speech, against a state that entices fascist passions, against the far right,” Cavallero says. “We are striking against the dismantling of gender policies.” In his first year at Casa Rosada, Milei tore down decades of feminist policies. He closed down the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity along with the Undersecretariat against Gender Violence.
Programs to support women experiencing violence, such as the 144 hotline, were suspended and heavily downsized. Milei has also banned the use of inclusive language in the national administration and attacked the right to abortion and the teaching of comprehensive sex education in schools. In November, Argentina was the only country to vote against a United Nations General Assembly resolution to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls.
On Saturday, International Women's Rights Day, Ni Una Menos will be in the streets. The feminist strike is a political device created thanks to the Argentine feminist movements.
In Argentina, the feminist strike was a very important political development: it was born in 2016, inspired by the strike of women in Poland who were protesting for the right to abortion. We decided to call a strike after a number of brutal femicides. We gathered in assemblies convened for the first time in the spaces of the union of women workers in the local economy.
This led to an interesting discussion on how to render visible work that until then was not thought of as such. The strike started a reflection on who produces the wealth in our country and what are the forms of labor that are marginalized: the labor of migrant people, domestic and community work. We put economic violence and its relationship to gender violence at the center of the analysis. Today, we are at a stage in which the strike is more important than ever. We are protesting against the hunger and cruelty of the Milei government. There is a serious economic crisis in Argentina. Poverty has exceeded 50 percent of the population. Wages are getting lower and lower compared to the cost of bills and food. The layoffs in the public sector are not stopping.
In one year, Milei has dismantled decades of feminist policies. Just a few months ago, he said that he wanted to remove femicide from the criminal code. Is this a culture war?
In Argentina, the far right is clearly implementing its political project to control the population by targeting the feminist movement, which is a movement that challenges structures of inequality, obedience, body sacrifice and unpaid labor. The feminist movement spotlights the defense of territories and bodies and opposition to the concentration of wealth, through forms that go beyond authoritarian and possessive individualism: this is why the right deems attacking it to be of strategic importance.
Femicide is the legal recognition that there are crimes motivated by gender hatred; it is the acknowledgment that there are deep patriarchal structures and an unequal relationship between genders. On the one hand, the government is trying to attack the movement as such; on the other, it is trying to move women into a position of silence and a condition of subordination. Thus it “naturalizes” violence against women because it is promoted and sanctioned by the state itself.
This means that it will be more difficult to report abuse, at the workplace and at home. We have gone beyond a culture war. We are facing a war that has to do with the deepest material reality of our society. It is an attack against our living conditions.
You argue in your writings that economic and financial violence are linked. How so?
For a long time, we have been analyzing how the far right produces economic violence and repression in the name of freedom. It is crucial to understand the significance of the fact that it came to government in a democratic way and by appealing to the concept of freedom and financial freedom. According to this concept, inequalities and social problems are to be solved by financial means, thus according to an individualist logic. What is coming to light is the fact that the far right is addressing a change in the working classes who, in order to be able to survive, find themselves relying on a proliferation of financial instruments.
Within the feminist movement, we are discussing how going into debt to be able to live is a form of economic violence. It is important to understand that living in debt – and at very high interest rates to survive, as has been the case in Argentina since 2018 – is economic violence.
It is crucial to untangle this process, which began with the entry of the International Monetary Fund into the country and the imposition of austerity policies. Many people have had to supplement their income by getting into debt, drastically changing the relationship between income and debt, which is now linked to food, medicine and health services, bills, and even forms of micro-speculation through digital finance tools. The presence of the IMF and austerity policies has turned debt into a constant element of daily life.
When does the IMF enter one’s home? How does it affect women and dissenters?
Debt particularly affects women, because they have high rates of informal labor and are doing much more unpaid work than men. They are central in sustaining the household economy; in a context of crisis and austerity, they take on more debt and in more informal conditions. When the state devotes most of its resources to paying off foreign debt, as has been happening in Argentina since 2018, this takes away from key areas such as health and education.
Since the state is indebted to the IMF once again, resources allocated for allowing women to retire when they don’t have the necessary amount of contributions due to high rates of informal labor have been systematically reduced. Debt hampers the possibility for women and sexually non-conforming persons to gain more rights: it is the main enemy of the recognition of unpaid labor, because debt lives off such labor, as well as the growing number of sectors in which wages continue to deteriorate with ever-higher levels of exploitation, including exploitation of the territory.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/luci-cavallero-letture-femministe-del-debito on 2025-03-07