Distributed agency: Care,human needs,and distributive struggles in Portugal

Abstract

Austerity policies in Portugal unleashed a violent crisis of well-being and social reproduction which intensified the ‘triple burden’ placed upon women, making them the primary ‘shock absorbers’ of the crisis. This article addresses the critical role of working-class women’s various forms of paid and unpaid care work in responding to the material and immaterial needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households. It is shown that women’s care-based responses and distributive struggles sought to minimise the risks that the agency of those they cared for could be compromised in the present and the future. Expanding feminist approaches and broader contributions decentring agency from the ends of individual choice and freedom, the article argues that agency is a distributed capacity and potentiality produced by, and productive of, embedded interdependent caring practices, relationships and investments across space and time to define, fulfil and negotiate the inescapable existence of fundamental needs.

Austerity policies in Portugal and across southern Europe unleashed a violent crisis of well-being and social reproduction (Cabot, 2016; Knight and Stewart, 2016; Muehlebach, 2016; Narotzky, 2020). The combined effects of austerity policies of welfare rescaling, mass unemployment, lack of public investment in care and health services and the breakdown of expectations of inter-generational projects of upward social mobility intensified the ‘triple burden’ (Chant, 2007; Moser, 1989) placed upon women. This development echoed the unequal gendered effects of neoliberal macroeconomic restructuring programmes in Global South contexts throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Benería and Feldman, 1992; Elson, 2000; Sparr, 1994). In Portugal, austerity policies forced women to revert to long-lasting and self-sacrificial feminised roles to fulfil the household’s and its members’ everyday material and immaterial needs. ¹ In particular, the growing ‘re-familiarisation’ of welfare and care (Ferreira and Monteiro, 2015; see also Ferreira, 2014) placed a more significant burden upon women in the private and public spheres (e.g. UN Women, 2014), making them the primary ‘shock absorbers’ of the austerity crisis (Elson, 1991; Bakker, 1994).

In 2015, one of my first working-class female interlocutors was Maria (then aged 53), a single mother living with her two daughters, completing secondary education. ² Maria was the single provider of the household. She worked (formally) in the refectory of a charity organisation, working from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. preparing vegetables, cooking and cleaning, and (informally) as a domestic private cleaner and carer from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. She had obtained both jobs through friends and acquaintances after experiencing a long period of unemployment, which forced her to renegotiate the terms of her mortgage with the bank after missing the payment of three-monthly instalments, ‘I had to decide what was more important, to have food on the table or to keep paying the loan. It is very painful to go to bed knowing you do not have food to give your children the next day.’ A few days after my first conversation with Maria, I met Silvana (63). She was living with her husband in a house which used to belong to her mother. Between the ages of 19 and 21, Silvana married and lived first at her mother-in-law’s before moving to her own home, which was paid in full after 30 years. Her mother had a severe stroke which left her unable to live alone or care for herself; Silvana looked after her mother for 14 years, ‘I was the one who took care of her, which is why I inherited her house.’ Since her mother died in 2000, Silvana has had several intermittent jobs as a domestic cleaner. Silvana had two sons (aged 42 and 32) who were both unemployed. Her eldest had two sons (aged 3 and 9). Her daughter-in-law worked night shifts (from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m.) cleaning at a local hospital, earning the minimum wage. Silvana often remarked during our conversations about her concerns for her two sons and grandsons, insisting that ‘if it weren’t for us [the grandparents], they would have starved of hunger’. Silvana’s husband, Paulo (61), started working as a baker and moved into the fisheries: ‘almost all his life. He has been working for the same boss for the last 19 years. My eldest has now started going with his father to the sea ….’ Silvana insisted several times on the harshness of ‘making a living out of the sea’, ‘today he went to the sea, and he may return tomorrow or in one week, it depends on what they can find on the sea’. When we had our long talks, Silvana invariably took care of her two grandsons, which she has been doing for the last two years (since her eldest son was unemployed). In the summer periods, the boys spent all day with their grandmother. She provided all the daily meals (lunch, an afternoon snack and dinner). Once, she had a pile of second-hand children clothing standing on top of the table, given by a neighbour who migrated to Switzerland and returned during the holidays. The main reason why Silvana was living in her mother’s house is that she lent her house to her youngest son, who is unemployed, ‘this way he doesn’t have to pay the rent’.

When I asked my female interlocutors what was it that motivated them to pursue multiple and demanding caring efforts, that is, what was it that ‘kept them going despite everything’, the answers were the following: ‘because I want my son to have a better life, to go to university’, ‘because I have to help my daughter to maintain her work’, ‘because I want to ensure my grandsons don’t feel hunger’, ‘because I want my mother to be treated with dignity at this stage of her life’, ‘because my son is unemployed’, ‘because I want to help my son finishing paying his house’, ‘because previously it was the sons that use to help their parents, and now it’s the opposite’. These were not the only explanations but the most recurrent ones. I do not wish to imply that women accepted without complaint a sacrificial vocation towards fulfilling the material and immaterial needs of others. Instead, I want to highlight the relational, moral, and interdependence premises underpinning what they care for and what they value and evaluate as worthy of caring and struggling for (Narotzky and Besnier, 2014; Sayer, 2012). What mattered most to the working-class women I came to know was seeking to minimise the risks that the agency of those they cared for could be compromised in the present and the future. By analysing my female interlocutors’ care-based responses and distributive struggles in relation to the austerity harm of ‘compromised agency’ (Miller, 2012), I aim to contribute towards rethinking the nature of agency in the context of expanding neoliberal austerity, which has deepened inequalities, reconfigured the relations between citizens and the state, and intensified feelings of ontological precarity (McNay, 2014).

In this article, I address the critical role played by women’s combining of various forms of paid and unpaid care work to respond to the material (e.g. food, nutrition, shelter, income) and immaterial (e.g. recognition, worth, social value, inclusion) needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households amidst rising unemployment, economic hardship, food poverty and welfare dispossession. In Portugal, women's various forms of care work, its constitutive practices, ethics and values (Held, 2006; Tronto, 1993) prompted and enabled resource allocation, circulation and distribution to define and fulfil fundamental needs hindered by austerity policies. Following Miller (2012), fundamental needs ‘arise in situations or conditions in which the agency (or the potential for agency) of an individual is acutely endangered. They are fundamental in that such needs must be met for an individual to develop, maintain, or re-establish agency’ (2012: 4). Through their caring labours, investments and relationships, my working-class female interlocutors engaged in distributive struggles to sustain and maintain provisioning networks of resources while negotiating the ambivalence of fundamental needs.

Among my female interlocutors, distributive struggles emerged when tackling the tensions and conflicts shaping informal networks of resource distribution across spatial scales of provisioning (e.g. household, neighbourhood, workplace, public spaces of the city), and also those emerging from conflicting valuations of how best to potentiate across time (i.e. inter-generationally) projects of livelihood improvement, rights recuperation (for instance vis-à-vis the state) and futures of worth beyond the austerity predicament. Echoing the literature on survival strategies in post-socialist countries, in Portugal, the austerity reinforcement of feminised distributive struggles was also shaped by the enactment of old and new kinship forms and networks of reciprocity and interdependence to secure the generational transmission of skills, resources, capabilities and modes of living to prevent the ‘failure of reproduction’ (Pine, 2017). Further, distributive struggles were underpinned by an ambivalence shaping the notion of human need. Human needs can simultaneously designate necessities of physical survival and the aspirations and hope conducive to a ‘good’ life (Doyal and Gough, 1991; Heller, 2018; Soper, 1981). As I show in this article, among my female interlocutors, the former ambivalence encompassed negotiating the commensurable and incommensurable dimensions of human needs as expressed in factual-driven needs, whose fulfilment determines people’s capabilities for material survival, and value-laden needs, whose satisfaction determines people’s capabilities for defining and pursuing a worthy livelihood (Narotzky and Besnier, 2014).

Early and more recent studies address how caring regimes are deeply entangled in producing and reproducing global and structural inequalities (Nakano Glenn, 2010; Ticktin, 2011). Other studies emphasise how care is mobilised as an instrument of political critique, generating and affecting social change, transformation and hope (Buch, 2013; Gutierrez Garza, 2018, 2020; Han, 2012). This article adopts a processual conceptualisation of care (Thelen, 2015) as distinctively involving the definition, negotiation and valuation of needs, and embedded in more extensive and situated economic and political restructuring processes. Approaching care as an open-ended process shows the potential of care to reproduce unequal gendered forms of distributive care labour and promote ‘alternatives to austerity’ (Bear and Knight, 2017). In the present article, ‘alternatives to austerity’ emerge from women’s deployment of care practices and ethics, which empowers other people’s sense of agency and their capabilities and possibilities for exercising it.

Building upon feminist theory, throughout this article, agency is neither a privileged quality of structures nor subjects but rather the emergent outcome of relational and negotiated processes within conditions of unequal access to essential livelihood resources and claims-making instruments (i.e. practical or discursive devices which enable oneself and others to make material and moral demands to challenge conditions of compromised agency in the present and the future) to fulfil fundamental needs. ³ The feminist critique of the rational and sovereign agent prompted the decentring of agency from the tenets of reflexive choice, self-determination, autonomy and independence. Against a thin conception of agency tied to the rational individual capacity to act, feminists have underscored the relevance of addressing how agency is socially and historically mediated, embedded in relations of power and inequality, and shaped by emotionality, relationality and interdependence (Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000). Against an ideal of agency constituted by abstract capacities and potentials, the feminist literature strove to re-value the concrete, situated, embodied, relational and emphatic acts and bounds associated with women’s morality and often relegated to a secondary status (Benhabib, 1992). This was a definitive contribution towards an expanded notion of agency founded on the primacy of interdependence, embodied interactions and caring relationships.

The notion of agency, however, has remained a contested term within feminist literature, torn between oppression and emancipation, between false consciousness and free will, or between victimisation and romanticised resistance (Fraser, 1992: 17). Feminist approaches to agency range from language-based performativity with the potential for subversion and resistance (Butler, 1990, 1993) to works criticising the romanticisation of gendered resistance (Abu-Lughod, 1990) and stressing the relevance of turning our gaze towards non-secular contexts. The latter shows that a universal theory of motivation and meaning-making framing women’s agency is empirically and historically inconsistent (Mahmood, 2005). The work of Saba Mahmood is inspirational in its refusal to define women’s agency as inherently oppositional, highlighting the various ways agency may emerge as a ‘capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create’ (Mahmood, 2006: 34). Expanding feminist approaches and broader contributions decentring agency from the ends of individual choice, freedom, and autonomy (Enfield and Kockelman, 2017; Mialet, 2020), in this article, I suggest that agency is a distributed capacity and potentiality produced by, and productive of, embedded interdependent caring practices, relationships and investments across space and time to define, fulfil and negotiate the inescapable existence of fundamental needs.

In what follows, I address the conditions of possibility for and consequences of distributed agency within the conjuncture of austerity in post-crisis Portugal. First, I examine how fundamental needs are fulfilled and defined through care in everyday household provisioning and community life. I focus on the everyday continuum of women’s unpaid and paid care work across the private and public spheres, and the maintenance of informal distributive networks among friends, neighbours and acquaintances spread throughout the cityscape. Second, I explore how caring labours, investments and relationships mediate how needs are mobilised as value categories to challenge pre-determined inter-generational austerity futures. Women’s response to the intensification through austerity of the devaluation of human needs as a relevant public policy category included feminised intergenerational networks of care, sustaining the circulation of resources which shaped people’s potential for being and becoming an agent within and against the austerity constraints.

Caring within and outside the household: needs that bind

Most of the working-class women I met in Setúbal identified and justified the fulfilment of their own and their household members’ needs by referring to morally bounded livelihood spheres of concern (Sayer, 2012), tied to kinship obligations and relations of interdependency, solidarity and mutual help. These guided how women mobilised care as a basis for action (Tronto, 1993) to access and redistribute material and immaterial resources considered essential for survival and self-worth, to minimise material vulnerability and enhance interdependent well-being modalities amidst shifting economic, political economic, and political landscape. Thus, my interlocutors mobilised care as a ‘species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto, 1993: 103).

Ana (46) lived in a household with her husband (48) and son (27). While explaining how she organised the weekly preparation of meals, she stressed the importance of hunting for local supermarket discounts, particularly for more expensive items such as meat and fish. Stocking up in advance was not an option as money was in short supply. Instead, she took advantage of the discounts and planned what to cook to accommodate her husband and son's tastes. This was not the first time Ana and her husband had experienced difficulties sustaining the household. In 1999, they acquired a joint bank loan so she could open a small sewing business, which they had to close following the 2008 financial crisis. Ana started working as a private cleaner in 2010 due to lacking other possibilities; her husband migrated to Scotland to work in a frozen fish factory. In 2016 he returned to Portugal as an unskilled worker in a local sugar factory.

When I met them in 2015, their livelihood was particularly precarious, as they were having to repay debts while having scant access to cash. Amid difficulties, Ana often framed her caring labours, efforts and investments – which she considered fundamental to the household’s livelihood and dignity – as a constant struggle (uma luta constante). The care work involved in household budgeting, shopping, planning meals, cooking and cleaning was for Ana – as for many other women – motivated by instrumental, affective and ethical reasons tied to livelihood spheres of concern, cross-cutting present and future temporalities. Ana did not disguise the physical and emotional exhaustion of managing the daily threats to the material livelihood of the house while struggling to ensure that her son would, in the future, become a ‘subject of value’ (Skeggs and Loveday, 2012). Ana was proud that her son was completing a Master’s programme at the university, and neither she nor her husband expected him to work for wages while studying. Instead, they needed their son to pursue a ‘better livelihood’ (uma vida melhor) through studying, an opportunity they never had. Although she knew that a university degree was no guarantee of stable employment, her son obtaining a degree and the need to ensure a sense of future was something Ana acted upon through care, with and against the precarious present.

My visits to Ana’s household often occurred after work on weekdays or the weekends. I would arrive early in the evening, and Ana would prepare dinner. Neighbours or friends would often pass by to leave fresh vegetables or fish not sold that day at the market. Investing in relations of trust and reciprocity with friends, neighbours and acquaintances served to uphold informal distributive networks shaped by the constant flow of resources. Once, Ana was preparing fresh lettuce for dinner, ‘brought to me by a colleague who also works in cleaning in a house nearby’. On another occasion, a ‘friend I met on the bus brought me strawberries’. Ana recounted how she made friends on the bus on her way to work by listening to them talk about their hardships: ‘Then people feel that they must thank me. Sometimes I do not know how to thank them in return, but I try to do it in the way I can. For example, I gave one an apron the other day, and she was thrilled.’

On one occasion, a neighbour asked Ana to prepare four dozen cod and shrimp pastries. This was one of the neighbours Ana calls when she’s making Christmas pastries in case they want to place an order. In Ana’s words:

I decided to spend the last 10 euros in my wallet because I knew she would pay for the pastries. I spent all the money because I don’t use cheap ingredients. I only use good ingredients. I was in the kitchen all morning preparing the pastries. When I called her to come and pick up the pastries, she told me she couldn’t keep them because she had to go to the hairdresser! She told me to try to sell them to another person, that she would pass by when she left the hairdresser in case she still had money, adding that ‘because I know that maybe you need the money’.

Ana resented the neighbour’s attitude, saying, ‘I was furious because in her house 1000 euros come in [each month] and in this one only 400, which is my wage, and she knows it.’ Ana’s husband told her to call the neighbour back, telling her she would never cook her any more pastries. Ana explained that she felt hurt but decided to say to her that the pies had already been sold to another person; and ‘in the end, we ended up eating the pastries during the week with salad’. Informal distributive networks were shaped by conflict as much as by mutual aid, solidarity and cooperation. Negotiating disputes arising from the lack of reciprocity demanded further caring investments in an ethic of exchange among participants with unequal and binding needs.

While there is a prominent tendency to link the development of agentive dispositions to the expansion of people’s capabilities for freedom and autonomy (Sen, 1999), ⁴ the specificity of the modus operandi of distributed agency resides in grounding and sustaining people’s agency needs by nurturing their capabilities for interdependence, relationality, obligation and affect. Distributed agency operates not only by expanding substantive freedoms alone but also through developing, sustaining and maintaining substantive care and sociality networks. The latter secures the circulation and allocation of various kinds of individual and collective agency resources, enabling recipients’ material autonomy and capabilities to make claims and articulate the legitimacy of their entitlements. The classic study of Carol Stack (1974) in a poor African-American community exemplifies the relevance of substantive care and sociality networks for acquiring and maintaining individual and collective agentive dispositions. Stack shows how domestic networks of cooperation and mutual aid among kin, involving, for instance, the delegation among extended kin of child-caring, enabled the stable circulation of livelihood resources supporting interdependent strategies for coping with poverty and potentiating the agentive capabilities for subverting state welfare agencies’ depictions of black women as deviant or dysfunctional (Fraser, 2013: 75).

Caring within and against austerity: needs as a value category

Austerity policies in Portugal intensified the neoliberal devaluation of fundamental human needs as a relevant public policy category. Fundamental human needs were framed as a form of deficiency conducive to dependency and passivity, requiring the institution of policies of welfare residualisation and conditionality, and a greater emphasis on the merits of having an entrepreneurial and pro-volunteerism attitude towards work, welfare and life (Collins and Mayer, 2010; Fraser and Gordon, 1994; Muehlebach, 2012; Peck, 2001). In Portugal, banking and economic elites stressed that ordinary people would need to adjust their behaviours to the new livelihood conditions, including being inventive and proactive rather than passively expecting the paternalist support of the state. In 2012, a national food bank charity representative commented in a television debate that people should ‘re-learn how to live with less’ to act upon and satisfy their tangible and intangible needs. Underlying such comments was a tacit understanding that human needs should not inform social policy – that although the term could be used for minimal charity-based policies of poor relief for the poorest of the poor, for those in greater need – human needs are an obstacle to the development of people’s capabilities for independence, adaptation, self-sufficiency, individual responsibility and strategies of self-care. The devaluation of fundamental human needs went together with a broader intensified economisation of life, prescribing that people should be available to detach themselves from anachronistic solidarities to become emancipated neoliberal subjects capable of embracing the sacrifice of neoliberal citizenship to the benefit of restoring prosperity and economic growth to the country (Brown, 2016). By overvaluing an ‘economic calculus’ to the detriment of the fulfilment of fundamental human needs (e.g. resources and claims), austerity policies obscured people’s logics, orders and regimes of value underpinning the socialities, ethical forms and everyday political worlds through which people engage with life and work (Bear, 2015).

In contrast, for the working-class women I followed, unfulfilled fundamental needs implied an evaluation of livelihood conditions and a valuation of the possibilities for pursuing or preventing change. Needs triggered a caring assessment of how to minimise the material vulnerability of those in need, and a valuation of how best to promote and sustain their claims, aspirations and hopes. In doing so, my informants partly expanded Tronto’s (2013) distinction between ‘caring for’, ‘caring about’ and ‘caring with’. My female informants’ caring actions and practices to meet the needs of significant others, along the lines of kinship obligations and intergenerational responsibilities, constituted a way of ‘caring within and against’ austerity, enabling others to overcome the severe effects of austerity policies and expand their possibilities and capabilities for confronting the present and producing worthy futures. Caring labours, investments and relationships aimed to make life liveable and worth living.

Beverly Skeggs (1997) has shown that working-class female caring subjects sometimes adjust differently to their classed and gendered subordinated positionings and classifications. Instead, they engage in various processes of subjectivity construction that negotiate, challenge or accommodate the fit between social positions and dispositions (1997: 81). Ultimately, Skeggs’ study is a particularly relevant demonstration of the explanatory limits of assuming a complete internalisation among subordinated and dispossessed subjects of dominant orders, logics and regimes of value and valuation. Similarly, I want to suggest that my female interlocutors’ caring labours, investments and relationships suggest that one should not assume the prefiguration of the internalisation of the logic and regime of valuation of the austerity economic and political project. Instead, my interlocutors’ evaluations and valuations of existing fundamental needs sought to expand agentive capabilities and claims possibilities hindered by, and beyond, austerity policies and normative prescriptions.

Sara (51), a part-time cleaner in a private medical office, lived with her second partner (62), two daughters (21 and 27) and one son (31) from a previous marriage. In the same neighbourhood, in another house lived her sister (42) and her mother (85), and in another, her eldest daughter (35). Sara’s house was part of a social housing project run through a partnership between the municipality and a private company. The tenancy contract was in the name of Sara’s mother. Sara explained that moving the tenancy contract to her name would mean losing the possibility of maintaining a low and ‘socially conditioned’ rent. Sara’s mother moved to her sister’s house when Sara’s first partner, the father of her children, died. This was a difficult moment as Sara had few resources to sustain herself and her children. Over time, ensuring that the municipal authorities remained unaware of the arrangement enabled the fulfilment of various needs.

I followed Sara’s daily care tasks between households and throughout the city. In the mornings, she would do the housework of her family (preparing meals for everyone, washing and ironing clothes, and cleaning the house). Sometimes she would go shopping and deliver her mother’s groceries to her home. She would go to work in the afternoons, except when she took her mother to the medical centre or the social security bureau. Sara felt obliged to follow her mother to the social security bureau because ‘they tend to think that just because we live in social housing, we are less worthy, and if you can’t read or write [which was her mother’s case] you can’t defend yourself’. Towards the end of my fieldwork, her eldest daughter gave birth. Sara began caring for her eldest daughter’s baby in the mornings, and her two other daughters began helping with housework. Taking the baby to a nursery was not an option; there was no public nursery network, and the private ones were too expensive. Sara once recounted how her son had returned home after having his wages held back due to an unpaid debt to a private credit agency. ‘My daughters and my son are everything to me’, she said. Sara’s caring labours sustained the emotional, relational and affective capacities that enabled others to exercise agency beyond the sphere of the household: in encounters with the state services (her mother), in overcoming dependency on a credit institution (her son) and being a worker and mother (her eldest daughter).

I found a broader pattern among my older female interlocutors about the intergenerational transfer of money from old-age pensions, goods and care work. Most of my interlocutors framed these interrelated forms of care to compensate for the breakdown of the social contract between citizens and the state, which once held the promise of supporting intergenerational livelihood improvement projects. Vitória (69), retired for three years, lived alone in a small terraced house she owns in a fishing neighbourhood. Vitória had worked in canning factories since the age of 13, done domestic labour in private homes and commercial offices, and been a cleaner, later promoted to team leader in a prestigious hotel in downtown Setúbal. She now earns a pension of around €500 per month. Her only son (40) had emigrated to Brazil with his partner and daughter some years ago after losing his job as a mechanic in a local aircraft company that relocated to another country. In our encounters, Vitória always linked her current economic difficulties to the fact that she had to help her son repay a bank loan he acquired to buy a flat before he lost his job. Vitória regularly transfers money to her son’s Portuguese bank account to meet the mortgage payments: ‘You want to see, I’m not lying, I have all the receipts here [showing me the bank receipts], sometimes I transfer 150 or 200, never more than 300 euros.’ More than half of Vitória’s pension thus goes to her son. In addition, she earns some informal income by helping a disabled senior woman in the neighbourhood, shopping, cleaning her house, going to the pharmacy when needed and keeping her company during the afternoons.

Vitória understood her continuing care for her son as part of the intergenerational caregiving and life improvement project. However, she also blamed the state for her son’s unemployment and for not protecting the welfare and investments of working citizens through, for instance, regulations to prevent companies from leaving the country. Her perceptions of state negligence were only heightened by her experience of having her pension captured, which she trusted the state would protect. She told me about the many times she encountered in the local supermarket ‘people from the charity associations asking us to help with food goods’, adding that ‘the state should help these people, and they ask us to help’. She would compare her livelihood with that of her parents, saying ‘my parents went through hunger, but they worked, made their life (fizeram a sua vida), raised me and went ahead. But now it is different; the parents must help the sons.’

The efforts of working-class women in Setúbal to respond to the needs of household members, extended family and loved ones were grounded in an ethics of care driving the valuation and evaluation of needs. Caring with concern and acting upon the needs of others was not caused by arbitrary definitions of deservingness but centred on fulfilling claims and expectations of human worth and changing entitlements to resources. Women’s care work and ethics reinstated an embedded definition of need, acting upon the ‘ongoing contested and negotiated interpretative dimensions of needs’ (Fraser, 2013), which reaffirmed that ‘inside every “need” there is an affect, or “want”, on its way to becoming an “ought” (and vice-versa)’ (Thompson, 1978: 36, quoted in Sayer, 2012: 42). In doing so, they mobilised need as a category of value, framing their household strategies to confront the reallocation of resources at larger scales and potentiate intergenerational agentive capabilities beyond the austerity horizon.

In her research on Latin American female migrants in the UK in care work and sex work, Gutierrez Garza (2018) notes the paradox framing the trajectories of migration of these women, since the gendered roles and expectations of their countries of origin that many women wanted to escape in the first place were also instrumental in them achieving a certain degree of emancipation (2018: 49–50). Similarly, in Portugal, the intensification of women’s ‘triple burden’ under austerity framed how various forms of feminised care work played a crucial role in sustaining, promoting and restoring individual and collective agency needs and claims within and against austerity.

Conclusion

How does agency, or the potential of agency, emerge within crisis contexts shaped by accelerated economic and political reconfiguration processes? Or, to put it differently, can agency emerge from a broader crisis of social reproduction shaped by conditions of material dispossession, citizenship destitution and the erosion of inter-generational projects of worth? As mentioned, the unequal gendered effects of austerity policies in Portugal intensified the ‘triple burden’ placed upon women during times of economic crisis and severe disruptions in the means of livelihood reproduction. In this article, I show that women did not passively accept their undervalued feminised destiny amid austerity processes of dispossession. Rather, I highlight the critical role of my informants’ care-based responses to, and distributive struggles against the austerity harm of ‘compromised agency’ (Miller, 2012). My informants’ enactment of various forms of paid and unpaid care work included the maintenance of informal distributive networks of resources and mobilising needs as a value category by re-embedding human needs in the claims, aspirations and hopes of those cared for towards a worthy livelihood. In doing so, my informants fulfilled immediate survival needs while seeking to negotiate and challenge austerity across spatial and temporal scales. Caring within and against austerity encompassed a struggle for resources, the value of needs and different ways of being and becoming an agent beyond the austerity predicament. The distributive struggles of my interlocutors highlight a crucial point – the achievement or projection of a worthy livelihood relies upon the fulfilment, definition and realisation of various dimensions of human needs. These dimensions, which are both factual and value-based, are not solely ambivalent but are, in fact, co-constitutive and entangled in the politics of interdependent survival and human flourishing in crisis contexts. Therefore, the standpoint of human need becomes a particularly productive analytical nexus that allows for the examination of the modes of satisfaction of that need, and the politics and negotiations of its meanings and values, while also decentring agency from the individual’s autonomous and reflexive choices for self-improvement and self-care. Instead, the focus shifts towards the relations through which interdependent individuals and collectives confront need, lack and vulnerability, without being oblivious to issues of power, inequality, oppression and differentiated patterns of obligations and responsibilities.

At a broader level, and in response to the questions raised at the beginning of this concluding section, I argue that austerity relies upon the distribution of unequal and gendered forms of caring relationships and responsibilities while simultaneously creating the conditions for the possibility of distributed agency. This form of agency is not based on the tenets of rationality, autonomy and independence espoused by orthodox economics and liberal philosophy. Rather, it is a form of agency produced by, and productive of, embedded interdependent caring practices, relationships and investments across space and time to define, fulfil and negotiate the inescapable existence of fundamental needs. My informants’ care work aimed to address the needs underlying the ability to exercise agency, not despite but because their actions were grounded in the ethical premises of vulnerability, interdependence, relationality, obligation and affect among kin, family, friends and neighbours. In doing so, they were underscoring the importance of attending to the immediate material needs that increase the autonomous capacities of individuals and their interdependent and relational abilities to claim worth, value and recognition – in the present and the future, and in private, public and institutional settings. Distributed agency is the product of the unequal, gendered and historical relationships that generate the need for care (Lawson, 2007) and the producer of the gendered processes and modalities of emergent care that promote and sustain alternative ways of being and becoming an agent in times of austerity.