| Summary: | The present article analyzes how and why women are those who “lose their sense of shame” to coordinate and take part in social interventions and dissident activities based on the notion of “participation” in the peripheries of La Laguna, a rural agro city in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Supported by extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article asserts that an emic worldview in which women are associated with mothers and mothers with care enables women in La Laguna to withstand stigmatization and oppose hegemonic views on agricultural production and health in a district where social protest is nearly completely absent. The political maternalisms that we describe let women “take care” of “society”, the “neighborhood”, their “children” and even themselves. When doing so, they put themselves at risk, but such social risk is much less than it would be for men, who, with identities linked to notions of “real work” and “discretion”, do not have time for “stupidities”. Women are, thus, doubly able to both resist and fulfill gender expectations.
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