Moral economies of childhood care. Foster care policy and biological families

In this article, we analyze the principle characteristics of the “foster care” programs, with the aim of problematizing the modes in which policies participate in the configuration of family affections and emotions and in the moral, gender-based and class-based redistribution of the responsibility for children. Using data from an investigation on state and non-governmental programs developed in Argentina, we aim to problematize the assumptions about care interwoven in these programs, notions about maternity, paternity and childhood privileged and also how those notions connect to the forms of social organization of care and the feelings about childhood that are deployed by the working class sectors. As such, these programs make up a relevant subject to the extent that they allow us to observes the processes of redefinition of the relationships between the state, marketplace and families as well as of the production of exclusions and gender hierarchies.