Bodies of and against austerity: gendered dispossession, agency and struggles for worth in Portugal

Abstract

This article explores the relationships between the body, gendered dispossession and agency under conditions of austerity in Portugal. Drawing from ethnographic research undertaken in 2015 and 2016 in a Portuguese post-industrial town, this article focuses on the examination of how concrete physical experiences and social anxieties framed working-class women’s experiences and explanations of the austerity-led crisis of social reproduction and the ways through which the body was mobilised as a metaphor to make sense of forced and disruptive reconfigurations of the means of livelihood reproduction. It examines how working-class women resorted to embodied practices, knowledges and moralities as a way of fulfilling provisioning pursuits, and to assert rights, entitlements and aspirations. Throughout this article, women’s bodily experiences and embodied practices, knowledges and moralities are the main point of entry from which to reflect on the gendered, contested and negotiated nature of the austerity economic and political project. This article argues for the relevance of addressing the mobilisation of historically embodied legacies of gendered and classed dispossession in the making of ‘actually existing austerity’.