by Rémi Fernand Lavergne and Bernadete Beserra
The Bolsa Família Program is the flagship of Brazil’s targeted public policies. It exemplifies a particular approach to the public management of alterity, an approach that reveals a state more preoccupied with rationalizing public expenditures and building social peace than with policies oriented toward income distribution, democratization, and the expansion of social rights. The program is a form of biopolitics, inscribed in a framework aimed at the normalization, regimentation, and control of the population that receives the benefit. Lifelong social assistance and education are important instruments of subjectivation and the production of subjectivities with an eye to influencing the conduct of indigent and marginalized populations. The goal is to influence the conduct of indigent and marginalized populations and, in a movement quite the reverse of the touted “inclusion,” to separate them more and more from the citizenship that the program advertises and promises.
