'Bad Mothers' and 'Delinquent Children': Unravelling anti-begging rhetoric in the Ecuadorian Andes
Title:
'Bad Mothers' and 'Delinquent Children': Unravelling anti-begging rhetoric in the Ecuadorian Andes
Author:
SWANSON, KATE
Appeared in:
Gender, place and culture
Paging:
Volume 14 (2007) nr. 6 pages 703-720
Year:
2007-12
Contents:
In this paper I examine the rhetorics that circulate surrounding the lives of young indigenous women and children who beg on the streets of Quito, Ecuador. I focus particularly on rhetorics being produced and reproduced by urban planners, social workers, religious leaders and the media. Drawing on in-depth interviews, I reveal how these groups regularly imagine indigenous women and children in terms of child exploitation/child delinquency, false manipulation of public sympathies, ignorance, laziness and filth. Indigenous women and children are further understood as being fundamentally 'out of place' in the city. I unravel these rhetorics in order to draw attention to how begging is differentiated according to gender, race and age and to reveal how these rhetorics become inserted into exclusionary policies and practices. Moreover, and as a counterpoint to such rhetorics, I provide an alternative understanding of women's and children's involvement in begging by drawing upon the perspectives of indigenous women and children themselves. I argue that far from being passive victims, indigenous women and children work with and around oppressive conditions and mobilise them to their own advantage.
Journal description