Frontier Diagnostics

Expert Knowledge on Labor Informality and Women's Work in Latin America (1965–1980)

Abstract

From a history of the present perspective, this article aims to reconstruct the emergence of the analytical linkage, now considered as evident, between two intensely debated topics today: informal labor and women's work. We analyze expert debates through which both issues became objects of study and specialization within a knowledge network forged between regional bodies of the United Nations system and academic institutions from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s in Latin America. Through a exhaustive archival study of expert debates that took place during that period, we demonstrate that, far from being obvious, the convergence of these two issues resulted from changes within knowledge fields, tending towards the unification of analytical coordinates on underdevelopment issues under a structural reflection framework. We explore the effects of this convergence on the problematization of labor and on what is perceived as non-work. We argue that its particularities are discernible under a regional scale of analysis.