ABSTRACT
Community; state; and international definitions of childhood and vulnerability play a central role in determining which people and families receive the limited resources available to support vulnerable children's survival and thriving. International definitions of childhood and vulnerability are often assumed by international development organizations (IDOs) to embody universal human rights and equality norms; and thus to serve as an appropriate basis for creating universal categorization frameworks to identify vulnerable children across communities and states. Community definitions; on the other hand; may be viewed as particular and potentially biased; embedded as they are in local power dynamics and social relations. Nonetheless; IDOs increasingly rely on communities to identify and distribute support to vulnerable children. This paper utilizes vertical ethnographic approaches to map and compare the gendered moral assumptions that shaped community; state; and international conceptions of childhood and vulnerability and responses to vulnerable children in border communities in Malawi and Mozambique. It argues that a gendered lens on childhood and vulnerability reveals both the gender inequitable assumptions underlying international and community childhood and vulnerability frameworks; and the urgent need for gendered analyses of childhood and vulnerability that engage honestly with people's lived realities; opportunities; and social relations. These analyses would explicitly link efforts to improve children's lives to gendered analyses of the local; national; and international social and political economic systems that differentially shape survival strategies and opportunities-and people's judgments of the morality of these strategies-for females and males