Expolio y servidumbre: apuntes sobre la llamada deuda de cuidados

Abstract

The term patriarchal debt has been used for the last decades to express the significant amount of care work that women have historically done which men have done in a lesser extent. This concept appears in the context of questioning the legitimacy of public debt by social movements in the South. In the current economic crisis, these analyzes reveal that austerity measures, legitimized by the need to repay illegitimate debts, not only represent a flow of transfers from the population to the political and financial elites, but also from women to the whole society. In this sense, it has notably interest to perform a  conceptualization of patriarchal debt. What we propose in this paper is exactly to practice this exercise and discuss whether patriarchal debt is really a debt or, contrarly, how could it be characterized.