Familialism, patriarchy and female impoverishment in government public communication on the Bolsa Família Program

Abstract

The aim of this article to discuss the image representations of women beneficiaries of Bolsa Família Program in the publicity made by the government about the program. We will discuss aspects related to the discursive dehumanization and disfiguration of women, who are obligatorily holders of the benefit received by their families. We will also show how moral frameworks widely shared by society lead some images and patterns of representation to gaind more prominence then the others. We argue that the governmental disclosure of redistribution programs and the circulation of images that show impoverished women produce circuits of values ​​and moral standards for the evaluation of lifestyles and their vulnerabilities that can affect the political meaning that the images acquire in their social circulation. We argue that images that refer to familialism and patriarchy are validated by a moral economy that establishes how we judge and define the value of lives and forms of life in neoliberal and meritocratic societies.