Vivências de gênero e pobreza de beneficiárias excluídas do Programa Bolsa Família

Abstract

Discussions about gender are historically related to poverty; however, public policies address the issue from a familistic perspective, which places women in a position of domestic management, producing ambivalences and contradictions. In the case of the Bolsa Família Program (PBF), it is aimed at families living in poverty, preferentially electing the female member as the beneficiary. The intersection between gender and poverty makes this study relevant in understanding the impacts of the PBF on the production of subjectivities and ways of life. Historically, women have been in charge of caregiving activities, which is unpaid work, but indispensable within capitalist relations of production. In this sense, the PBF offers opportunities to expand the alternatives of existence, the exclusion from the increase in per capita income may withdraw the benefit from women in whose lives contexts of poverty persist, pointing to the weaknesses of this assessment. Based on this issue, we present as a starting question "how do women excluded from the PBF perceive their lives based on this benefit?" The general objective is to understand the psychosocial implications of poverty in women excluded from the PBF and, as specific objectives, to analyze the effects of the Bolsa Família Program for the excluded beneficiaries, to apprehend the resources for coping with poverty in excluded women, to describe the ways of life of the excluded Bolsa Família Program beneficiaries based on the categories gender and poverty. Qualitative research was carried out using field diaries and qualitative interviews with 7 women living in Jabuti-Eusébio, excluded from the PBF. The material was submitted to Content Analysis from the perspective of Bardin mediated by the help of the Atlas Ti 9 software. As results we identified shame, humiliation and stigma as psychosocial implications of poverty, which can be amplified by gender, but we also found the tightening of deep ties of cooperation and solidarity. Among the effects of the PBF we list the increase in consumption capacity, the increase in self-worth, the expansion of decision-making power within the family, and the extension of motherhood. Issues such as child marriage, child domestic violence, teenage pregnancy and school dropout were experiences associated with the ways of life. Married relationships in adulthood emerged as complex themes where processes of overcoming unsatisfactory relationships, the conscious and deliberate choice of being alone, with none or several partners, or even the development of a relationship of financial support and friendship after the separation were manifested, presenting affective relationships as coping devices. At the time of the research, material, symbolic, and structural conjunctures persisted that supports the cycle of poverty, such as the difficulty of feeling financially contributory, the difficulty of obtaining their own income was found to be related to disabling diseases, unemployment, or domestic responsibility for daily care. Therefore, we point to the importance of broadening the poverty criteria of the PBF so that this benefit reaches more people in multidimensional poverty situations, who remained after exclusion from this benefit.