Consumer Politics as Gender Politics: How the Military Dictatorship Tried to Tame Inflation and Govern the Family in Argentina (1976-1983)

Julia Ballester, The New School for Social Research

This paper analyzes the gendered politics of consumption during Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983). It demonstrates how the state-led consumer education campaign explicitly targeted the family, positioning women—specifically amas de casa (homemakers)—as key to combating inflation. While this has been largely overlooked by scholarly research, I argue that the campaign illuminates how intimate, gendered practices were woven into the Junta’s macroeconomic program. By tying inflation to household management, the regime moralized economic instability, framing it as a matter of family and, more specifically, women’s responsibility. However, as inflation persisted, women organized as amas de casa to mobilize against the regime, most notably through “empty shopping bag” protests in Greater Buenos Aires. By drawing on a range of archival sources—including government documents, women’s magazines, images of the “empty shopping bag” marches preserved in the archive of the newsroom of Diario Crónica, and other materials—I argue that during the late seventies and early eighties in Argentina, consumption functioned simultaneously as a pillar of an emerging neoliberal form of citizenship and as a platform for asserting more democratic claims to social and economic rights, worth examining in their full range. Ultimately, this study shows that economic crises are inherently cultural and political, contributing to broader debates on the gendered politics of the political economy.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 117. Morality in Economic and Political Transformations