Biopower, Motherhood, and Surveillance: The Gendered Impact of Anti-Poverty Technologies in Latin America
Olivia Licata
Biopolitics denotes the way in which the state uses, harnesses, controls, subjugates, and exploits bodies, which allows the state to limit the autonomy individuals have over them. [1] Michael Foucault brought the concept of “biopolitics” to mainstream political science thinking, identifying it as the mechanism of political power that is used over populations. [2] Foucault applied the concept of biopolitics to discussions surrounding medicine, national sovereignty, neoliberal governmentality, and biohistory. [3] Thus, biopolitics is deeply intertwined with political governance, capitalist economic systems, and technological development. This paper will explore how biopolitics are integrated into development policies and implemented through technology, specifically illuminating the disproportionate impacts of this technology on the privacy and autonomy of women.
Biopolitics
Biopolitics have historically centered around the female body. Because women’s bodies are capable of reproduction, they are of special interest to the government. The “quality and quantity of women’s reproductivity” is particularly noted by Foucault because of the implications they have on the population generally. [4] Women’s choice of partner has the potential to “ensure the future of people,” while women’s indifference to partnership could have “the most dangerous alternative consequences.” [5] Therefore, because women’s personal choices are believed to have societal, and thus political, implications, there is a sense of national responsibility associated with having a female body.
While feminists across the political spectrum have advocated to reform women’s reproductive and maternal rights, they have also stressed women’s unique reproductive capability. [6] The duality of this perspective reflects how feminists acknowledge the important capabilities of the female body, and therefore the need for special rights and protections for women that respect women’s individual autonomy and establish conditions that support women who choose to reproduce. However, the biopower behind the politics often fails to be feminist.
Biopolitics are implemented through biopower. [7] Foucault explains how the advent of medicine granted the government an opportunity to expand the realm of its political and economic administration. [8] Thus, biopower was firmly established when state power and the political economy was medicalized, allowing the state to exert power over individuals through healthcare.[9] This dynamic carries particular implications for women, since their reproductivity is a vital interest of the state. The capitalist emphasis on the maximization of output, in conjunction with the rise of biopolitics, unequally targets women because of their reproductive capability.[10] Thus, capitalism incentivizes the government to paternalistically exert biopower over female bodies.[11] Instead of a woman having exclusive rights over her body, governmental biopower overlaps “individual, family based, expert-mediated and state-located care and administration of life.”[12] The myriad actors influencing the health of a woman reveals how female bodies are perceived as public entities. It also reinforces the idea of the female body as part of the biomass – the dehumanizing understanding of bodies as units of a population.[13] Therefore, biopolitics subverts the autonomy of women by prioritizing reproduction over privacy and self-determination.
The Advent of Biotechnology
Technology has become an instrument of biopower due to its ability to collect and share health data. As discussed above, biopolitics disproportionately targets women because of their reproductive abilities. Thus, both the private and public sectors’ use of data from health technology unfairly invades the privacy of women, consequently impairing their autonomy to choose where their data goes.
Biotechnologies that track ovulation and menstruation are called “FemTech.”[14] This area of innovation emerged in the last decade and has revolutionized the way women track and assess their health. FemTech companies collect the data that women input into the app, allowing them to grow a database of biodata. While many users once believed that their data was secure, in 2018 Privacy International reported that 61% of the 36 menstruation apps they studied transferred data to Facebook when a user opens the app.[15] Some apps also send the data regularly to Facebook even if the user is not logged in or does not have a Facebook account.[16] This connection between FemTech and social media companies reveals the societal commodification of womens’ health. By exploiting women’s health for profit, technology companies invade the privacy of the users and place women’s privacy at risk of data breach. They also make it difficult for users to know how their data is being used, constraining their ability to make an informed decision about their data.
Because this data is made accessible, it can be obtained by actors in both the private and public sectors . Private companies can use this data to maximize their profit, while public entities can exploit this data to surveil reproduction. Thus, feminine technologies hold a significant amount of biopower. The concept of “platform intimacies” describes how intimate lives are “increasingly mediated, managed, and surveilled via digital platforms,” revealing how interconnected humans have become with technology.[17] In this way, humans not only use, but also rely on technology to understand their own body, endowing them with “biodigital bodies.”[18] Therefore, by integrating biopower into technology, the boundaries between private and public information have grown increasingly blurred, particularly for women.
Biotechnology for Development in Latin America
In the name of development, governments use technology to exert biopower across the world. Through partnership with private technology companies, governments collect biological data and use it to advance their political agendas. In the examples presented below, regional governments and technology companies enter into agreements where the technology company works with local officials to collect data that the company then organizes and assesses. The company then shares the data and its analysis with the government, which the government then uses to inform its policies.
This paper provides three examples of Latin American governments using biotechnology to surveil their populations as part of anti-poverty programs. By demonstrating how governments use biotechnology to further politics, this paper reveals how the privacy and autonomy of women are sacrificed in the name of public interest. It is important to note that there is limited information about the specifics of each program, the impact of the data on policy, and the real experiences of people targeted by the data collectors and resulting public policies.
Salta, Argentina
Salta, an Argentinian province, has high rates of poverty. In 2020, 37.7% of the population in Salta was in poverty. Given that the national poverty rate increased from 36% in 2020 to 53% in 2024, it is likely that the poverty rate in Salta has also increased dramatically.[19] Moreover, according to the report published by the Pacific Disaster Center in 2020, Salta is the sixth most vulnerable province in Argentina.[20] It has extremely low resilience due to the population’s economic constraints, vulnerable health status, weak governance, and low communications capacity.[21] Salta is home to a significant indigenous population and is a destination for migrants coming from Bolivia and Paraguay.[22] Thus, the population is particularly vulnerable to marginalization and discrimination from public services.
The Salta Ministry of Early Childhood enacted “La Plataforma Tecnológica de Intervención Social” (The Technology Platform for Social Intervention) in 2018 in collaboration with Microsoft.[23] The Salta government was interested in preventing pregnancy among adolescents and lowering school drop-out rates with the hope that this would reduce the amount of poverty in the province. Salta leaders implemented a system that used artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood that a girl would become pregnant in the subsequent five years.[24] The system was trained on the data of 12,000 women and girls between the ages of 10 and 19 in Salta.[25] The assessment was based on factors such as age, ethnicity, country of origin, disability, whether the home had hot water, number of people in the household, type of neighborhood, history of pregnancy, and whether the head of the household had dropped out of school.[26] The system did not collect information about contraception use, sexual education status, history of abortion, or sexual violence records.[27] The data was collected by “territorial agents” who visited homes, asked survey questions, took photos, and recorded GPS location.[28] Among the 3,000 cases assessed through this program, the algorithm determined that 492 children were 88% likely to drop out of school and 397 girls were 87% likely to become pregnant as teenagers.[29] However, a study published by the Laboratory for Applied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Buenos Aires revealed that the results from the algorithm were incorrect.[30] The study claims that the results were oversized due to statistical errors in the methodology, bias in the database, and the challenges to accurate data collection on pregnancy.[31]
The Salta government defended this program amid criticism from national news sources and human rights organizations. The Minister of Early Childhood, Carlos Abeleira, argued that the state needs to investigate what goes on in a home through the technology at its disposal in order to provide the most effective solutions.[32] Abeleira also contended that issues related to pregnancy, parenthood and the family must be addressed in anti-poverty policies.[33] Furthermore, he argued that by detecting social patterns, people can know the likelihood of certain situations and prepare in order to avoid poverty.
The agreement between the Salta Government and Microsoft for the implementation of “La Plataforma Tecnológica de Intervención Social” (The Technology Platform for Social Intervention) was for six months, thus it has since elapsed without renewal.[34]
Campina Grande, Brazil
Brazil integrated technology into its anti-poverty program for a similar purpose. In 2019, the Ministry of Citizenship in Brazil signed a contract with Microsoft to collaborate on the “Criança Feliz” (Happy Child) Program. They agreed to implement technologies that could “optimize resources and build initiatives that can provide improvement in the provision of services aimed at early childhood, in a more customized and more effective way.”[35] The technology director of Microsoft in Brazil, Ronan Damasco, explained that the technology would use artificial intelligence to anticipate malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, school drop-out, and disease.[36]
The city of Campina Grande in the State of Paraíba was the first municipality to implement this technology. The program was enacted through 166 data collectors who made home visits throughout the city. They collected information about vulnerability specifically from children and pregnant women.[37] By monitoring child development from pregnancy to age six, the government hopes to ensure that each child receives comprehensive care and that families receive the services they need.[38]
The “Criança Feliz” (Happy Child) Program is ongoing and was awarded the WISE award in recognition for being the largest and fastest growing home visiting anti-poverty programme in the world.[39] However, research reveals that the program has little to no impact on the Ages and Stages Score (ASQ3) of respondents, indicating that development is generally unaffected by the program.
Colombia
Finally, Colombia also has integrated technology into its anti-poverty program. Since 2000, Colombia has operated a welfare program called “Las Familias en Acción” (Families in Action).[40] This program is a money transfer program with a significant number of conditions that a beneficiary must meet in order to receive money.[41] The government uses “El Sistema de Identificación de Potenciales Beneficiarios de Programas Sociales” (System of Identification of Potential Beneficiaries of Social Programs) (SISBEN) to collect data on the vulnerable population and determine if they meet the conditions on not.[42] The conditions are that children attend school, eat “properly” and receive health examinations.[43] Also, women must participate in community groups.[44] These conditions are enforced through a “complex web of surveillance and data exploitation” that defines what type of family (or more specifically – mother) is suitable for this program.[45] While the data was collected by human data collectors, it is analyzed by artificial intelligence systems, providing the government with program-generated assessments.
Because women are disproportionately impoverished in Colombia, this program overwhelmingly focuses on women, particularly single mothers. Therefore, Castro and López argue that this program “limits the autonomy of women in poverty through the imposition of gender stereotypes, and the autonomy of women who are poor and dependent on welfare.”[46] The program does so by employing technology that tracks the changes in responses of participants over time, thus surveilling their changing living conditions. Furthermore, the use of surveillance technology to enforce the conditions of the welfare program disproportionately impacts women’s privacy because they are more likely to carry the burden of upholding the very conditions that are assessed by the program.
This program is ongoing, however there is no information available about how the use of “El Sistema de Identificación de Potenciales Beneficiarios de Programas Sociales” (System of Identification of Potential Beneficiaries of Social Programs) (SISBEN) has changed the “Las Familias en Acción” (Families in Action) program.
The Implications of Using Biotechnology on Women and Girls in Anti-Poverty Programs
Flow chart developed by Not My AI
These examples demonstrate how subnational governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia have employed biopower through technology to advance anti-poverty initiatives. These programs have invaded the privacy and autonomy of women and girls by using their bodies as units of analysis.
First, by collecting data on the socio-economic, demographic, and personal background of girls and their families, the government and the technology companies impede upon the private nature of the home. By obtaining and maintaining access to sensitive data about vulnerable groups, such as minors and marginalized populations, technology companies gain valuable information. Governments entering into agreements with these technology companies can gain access to this data and exploit it to develop policies that target specific ethnic or racial populations, as was done in Salta. This system has serious implications for the safety and well-being of girls, especially from particularly vulnerable groups, such as immigrant or indigenous populations.
Second, these programs demonstrate how women’s reproductive abilities place them as targets of family-based anti-poverty policies. Biotechnological programs specifically exploit a woman’s role as a mother. By targeting mothers through the anti-poverty program, the burden of poverty alleviation and data collection are disproportionately placed on women. These burdens reinforce how women’s reproductive abilities put them at the forefront of public interest, making them more likely to receive assistance from development initiatives. Moreover, the defense of the programs by public officials reflects the assumption that monitoring and influencing reproduction is an effective strategy to promote human development and reduce poverty, reinforcing the socioeconomic burden that is placed on women.
Third, the algorithm dehumanizes girls by reducing their current and future economic contributions only to their reproductive abilities. By valuing the female body exclusively for its potential biological output, the government is able to transform womens’ personal circumstances and decisions into public matters. Therefore, the government’s use of biotechnology to surveil the activities of girls and women in the name of public interest reinforces the distorted perception of female bodies as objects of external control.
Finally, it is essential to note the specific demographics that are targeted in these programs, in collaboration with multinational technology companies, such as Microsoft. Not only are each of the programs previously mentioned located in the Global South, but they are located in specific communities with high rates of marginalized ethnic or racial groups, particularly indigenous populations. By having access to sensitive information about vulnerable populations, multinational technology companies wield significant power and influence over these communities by collecting, processing, and storing sensitive data that is shared with the government. Moreover, because these technology companies are working with regional governments, they are creating an opportunity for data-informed policy to target specific populations. This capability has the potential to unfairly burden specific populations with invasive anti-poverty policies, such as those related to pregnancy. While it is unclear that this has occurred in any of the three examples, in the future, it is possible that the data could be misused since it is being stored by multinational corporations for the purpose of government policy.
Conclusion
Through the use of biopolitical technology that predicts pregnancy and surveils the quality of life for children, the government can collect data and target anti-poverty initiatives. However, these technologies disproportionately impact women because of their reproductive abilities and the primary role of the mother in family life. Thus, women’s privacy and autonomy is unduly imposed upon by governments through the exploitation of technology for public policy. As these examples demonstrate, governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia are able to effectively exert biopower over the bodies of women through technology and achieve a political end.
Endnotes
3. Nale and Lawlor, “Biopolitics.”
5. Deutscher.
6. Deutscher.
7. Nale and Lawlor, “Biopolitics.”
10. Nale and Lawlor.
11. Deutscher, “Reproductive Politics, Biopolitics and Auto-Immunity.”
12. Deutscher.
13. Deutscher.
16. “No Body’s Business But Mine: How Menstruation Apps Are Sharing Your Data | Privacy International.”
18. Balfour.
21. “Salta NDPBA Province Profile.”
24. Jemio, Hagerty, and Aranda.
25. Jemio, Hagerty, and Aranda.
28. Jemio, Hagerty, and Aranda, “The Case of the Creepy Algorithm That ‘Predicted’ Teen Pregnancy.”
31. Varon and Peña.
33. Mora.
41. {Updating}
46. Castro and López, “Vigilando a Las Buenas Madres.”
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