Evaluating, punishing, and enduring: Gender and precarious work of women in the health sector

Abstract

This article examines labor precarization in the health sector from a Marxist–feminist–socioanalytic perspective, articulating capitalist exploitation, the feminization of care work, and the production of subjectivity. It argues that precarization cannot be reduced to contractual deterioration; rather, it constitutes a historical intensification of exploitation that produces specific modes of subjectivation among female physicians and nurses. Based on qualitative research conducted in Mexican public hospitals—including in-depth interviews, participant socioanalysis, prolonged pedagogical observation, and the systematization of experiences—the study analyzes three dimensions: evaluating, punishing and enduring. The analysis shows how seemingly technical devices, such as institutional evaluation, operate as technologies of differentiation shaped by systemic, gendered, and epistemic violence; how demands for permanent availability and disciplinary punishment secure labor docility; and how normalized sexual harassment forms part of the instituted dynamics of hospital work. In this sense, the article argues that psychic distress cannot be reduced to individual diagnoses such as burnout, but must instead be analyzed in relation to the sociohistorical conditions that organize contemporary hospital labor.