Gender in Latin America Research Paper

This essay incorporates studies from the traditional Latin American region: South America (including the Southern Cone of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay and the largely Portuguese-speaking Brazil; Central America and Mexico; and the south-to-north diasporas in the Americas). The area is largely a Spanish-speaking one, which overlays indigenous populations who undergo assimilation into the dominant language regimes. The Caribbean English-, Creole-, Dutch- and French-speaking populations fall outside the geographic space addressed in this essay.

1. Gender: Grounded In Area Studies Approaches

The study of women and gender in Latin America is informed by the history of the region, its nation-states, especially their centralized (often Spanish) colonial experience and incorporation into the capitalist world system. Gender scholars are firmly grounded in analyses of countries with firmly defined class systems and economic ‘dependency’ on the global economy (Safa 1976, Latin American Perspectives 1977). Compared to other world regions, the study of women and gender has been more fully accepted and legitimized in Latin American area studies, thus transforming regional studies as a whole (Staudt and Weaver 1997, p. 84). Why has this happened? Gender scholars acquired legitimacy from their firm grounding in the social structural, class, and dependency/global perspectives. Besides that, though, leadership of the Latin American Studies Association has been in women’s hands not just once, but several times, including the hands of strong women/gender scholars such as Carmen Diana Deere, Helen Safa, and Jane Jaquette.

2. Global And Social Structural Perspectives

Beginning with the global and connecting it with the national and local, Latin Americanists have analyzed public policy agendas imposed by foreign investment, dependency on outside capital, and specific state downsizing strategies from international banks in the name of ‘structural adjustment’ (Leon 1982, Deere and Leon 1987, Benerıa and Feldmann 1992, Bose and Acosta-Belen 1995). Gender scholars have influenced WID and GAD with respect to the need to contextualize analysis in the global economic context.

This structural approach, in both Latin American studies and women gender scholarship, created an early scholarly climate of attention to the social construction of male and female, the power relations between men and women, and the complex intersection of economic class. Thus, we might say ‘gender analysis’ was pioneered in Latin America, even before this once uncommon term became the millennial codeword for what was once known as women’s studies. Latin Americanists analyzed the social construction of men and women, even though they, too, titled their studies with the word ‘women.’ With the strength of social constructionism, an essentialist or biologically determinist approach never took hold among Latin Americanists. The analytic breakthroughs and predominance of social constructionism preceded those of other world regions, including the USA (often regarded as a region unto itself ).

Despite an overwhelming scholarly approach to the social construction of male and female, popular widespread perceptions until recently projected a deep and essential difference between men and women. Such internal cultural constructions are at odds with scholarly interpretations and worthy of study in themselves. These male–female differences were viewed as both temperamental and behavioral, and the expectation of difference deeply permeated the economic, political, and religious institutions imposed upon people in their everyday lives. The counterpart to the (now contested) machismo, or ideology of virulent men, is marianismo, a parallel ideology that idealizes women in terms of saintly mothers who sacrifice themselves for family. This Madonna image offers a dichotomous polar-opposite outcast female (‘whore’), unworthy of protection reverence. Perceptions, inaccurate or blurred as they may be, are used to justify interpersonal violence against women in homes and on streets. The marianismo writings (Stephens 1973) gave rise to insightful analyses of women in politics, from formal governance to everyday politics that crossed the public–private borders which historically defined female as apolitical. Marianismo also aids in understanding interpersonal relations within households.

Supermadre is the title of a pathbreaking book that draws on interviews with Peruvian and Chilean women in government (Chaney 1979). These ‘super mothers’ worked in institutions with deeply differentiated expectations for female and male civil servants and politicians. Idealized images of women as uncorrupted, honest, caretakers of the household allowance and the public purse led to some interesting female niches in government: accounting, personnel, and budgets. Deep prejudice persisted even into these marianismo-legitimized roles, as women described their work with the saying: whereas a man may be made of silver, a woman must be made of gold (Chaney 1979, p. 110).

3. Political Structural Perspectives

As Latin American countries moved toward revolution or military regimes, so also would analyses move to women’s actions therein. Under military dictatorships in many Central American and Southern Cone countries, women took the risk of moving politically in the streets with the motherhood mantle as (semi-) protective cover. Mothers of disappeared children and husbands circled central city squares with pictures of their loved ones hanging around their necks. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, symbolized to the country, region, and world, their grief, anguish, and willingness to seek accountability on life and death from dictatorships.

‘[T]he concept of politics expanded to include the daily universe that had been invaded by the dictatorship. The dividing line between the public and the private became increasingly hazy as the repressive policies of the regime affected domestic unity and as its economic policies pushed women into the workforce’ (Schmukler et al. 1998, p. 628).

In Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere, scholars analyzed ‘social motherhood’ and the ways it extended women’s activism, participatory process, and public space itself. But women also assumed militant, revolutionary actions in civil wars throughout the hemisphere and in revolutions that triumphed. Many scholars have analyzed women’s involvement in the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions especially, as well as the consequences of revolution for women and gender equality. The social imposition of motherhood on women, coupled with economic desperation for the majority of the population, usually casts shadows on women’s ability to gain more power in and from formal politics and policies.

Under the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, a revolution in which women participated in critical-mass numbers, the social differentiation of male and female continued to diminish women’s ability to gain from real gender equality. Economic crisis also challenged the regime’s ability to respond to people’s wage and employment demands.

Women’s everyday responsibilities for children, plus their significant numbers as heads of households, lead to social activism to push for ‘practical’ versus ‘strategic’ gender interests (Molyneux 1985). If and when women gained successes, their practical needs were met, but the social and legal differentiators that institutionalized male privilege remained in place. Molyneux’s language would soon be popularized and spread globally with the prolific WID and GAD scholarly-activist writings.

Cuban women also confronted the deep hierarchy of gender privilege and hierarchy after the 1959 revolution. Women never gained hold in formal power exercised from the top; however, more than half of adult women belonged to the Federacıon de Mujeres Cubanas by 1970, and official policy legitimized ‘strategic’ gender claims. Cuba’s Family Code of 1975, its pioneering feature on interpersonal relations that became famous worldwide, called for equality within marriage, establishing equal responsibility between husbands and wives for household work and childcare. Although the policy is not enforced (as governments generally retreat from policies that affect ‘private’ space), judges incorporate the Family Code language in civil marriage ceremonies (Hernandez and Esperanza 1998, pp. 623–4).

4. Toward Democracies?

Despite attention to revolutions, ‘transition’ was the norm, with the common claim of transition to democracy. By democracy, claimants meant civilian rule, with people’s participation in elections and civil organizations, known as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Would women be part of this transition or its eventual consolidation, and might their participation create a new way of doing politics (una nueva manera de hacer polıtica) or more gender-equal policy outcomes? These are the questions that inform edited collections on Latin America (Jaquette 1994, Jelin 1987) and comparative or global collections on movements and political institutions with chapters on Latin American countries (Nelson and Chowdhury 1994, Basu 1995). Statistical profiles paint a grim picture of gender equality in the region (Valdes and Gomariz 1993, UNDP 1990–2000), but women fare better in education and health indicators in Latin America than their counterparts in absolute and gender relative terms in Asia and Africa.

While women are gaining ground in the formal political process, their engagement with the state offers long-term challenges for achieving gender equality. One collection, with a section on in adiendo las instituciones polıticas (invading political institutions) makes it clear that women must address the details of institutional mechanisms if they are to gain political space and use it for gender-equal outcomes (Tarres 1998). Among institutions are the multiple political parties themselves, their policy platforms, and the electoral lists that privilege names at the top of lists in the common Latin American Proportional Representation electoral system. ‘Women, Vote for Yourselves!’ was a Peruvian feminist campaign, but the United Left listed women at the bottom (Vargas 1986). Yet women in Argentina have gained nearly a third of legislative seats (a level only reached in Western Europe) since early 1990s laws that required party quotas for women (Jones 1996). In Mexico, women’s political work in multiple parties and civil organizations has begun to produce gender-equality gains (Rodrıguez 1998).

Women’s political advocacy work inside government institutions would also get attention. In Brazil, short-lived but influential women’s commissions would engage women’s NGOs and influence government budgets (Alvarez 1997). Their niche in the Chilean state did not go so far (Waylen 1997, Goetz 1998). Again, the Latin American experience would consolidate and inform knowledge about women’s bureaus and gender in bureaucracy worldwide, predating the Australian-labeled ‘femocrat’ writing.

Once-autonomous radical feminist organizations struggle over the compromises they make with liberal feminist proposals that engage the still male-dominant legislatures (Staudt 1998, pp. 19–31). In Mexico, new policies to reduce interpersonal violence and sexual assault against women reflect these compromises (Lamas et al. 1995); the lingering shroud of death hovers over large Mexican cities like Juarez with its 200-women girl murder record since 1993 (Benitez et al. 1999). Some women are reluctant to compromise, as with selected mothers’ groups and their moral stance.

5. Everyday Lives

Yet does increased female space in political institutions, with occupants from economically privileged backgrounds on the whole, have consequence for working class women and those earning little or nothing in informal economies? And what about the women working the doble jornada, or double day of unpaid work inside the home and paid work outside the home? Although globalization and structural adjustment may have heightened women’s work burdens (Moser 1997), even women less enveloped in the national political structure and global capitalism experience subordination in the indigenous gender hierarchy (Bourque and Warren 1981). Gender hierarchy is complex, with its double decked ‘modern’ subordination overlaying internal subordination. Cultural constructions of gender difference offer rationales for hierarchical continuity.

In the real economic options of the free-trade regimes of late-twentieth century Latin America, the majority of women work in export-processing factories (Fernandez-Kelley 1983), home-based contracting (Benerıa and Roldan 1987), domestic service (Chaney and Garcıa Castro 1989), and informal labor (Berger and Buvinic 1989, Rakowski 1994, Staudt 1998a). Women’s struggle to maintain economic livelihoods is constrained in a savage capitalism that provides little social support from political regimes, themselves constrained in the global economic contexts.

Women’s efforts to reform or transform interpersonal inequality and violence have met only modest successes, as noted above. From multiple-country anti-violence measures to the Cuban Family Law, the cultural construction of gender difference, notably unequal difference, helps to sustain female subordination.

The borders of women’s realities are moving northward, challenging the traditional northern border of Latin America: Mexico. These borders move just as the supposed ‘free trade’ sheds commercial borders.

6. Borders: Moving North

Border studies have been in place for a quarter century, but confined to the narrow zone of space around national territorial lines, particularly the USA and Mexico. Borders as metaphors for cultural lines and linguistic code switching (mixing two or more languages, especially Spanish and English) emerged in feminist literary work (Anzaldua 1987, Garcıa 1992). Literary work has always expanded the intellectual borders of political economy to include the cultural and interpersonal relations of everyday life.

Economic crises in Latin America have prompted many to seek employment en el norte, to the north in the USA. With the US Bracero Program and the amnesty provisions of the 1986 immigration law reforms, people of Mexico have become the largest category of ‘foreign’ residents and naturalized citizens. This Latin diaspora into the USA is redefining the boundaries of area studies in the western hemisphere. Informal economies, so common in Mexico and countries to the south, are alive and well on the US side of the border (Staudt 1998a). Perhaps informal economies flourish elsewhere, though the scholarly questions of Latin Americanists rarely emerged in US studies.

From international and comparative studies, scholars have coined terms like transnational, globalization, deterritorial, and debordering to understand people’s movements that carry cultural, linguistic, and identity baggage in that migration (Staudt and Spener 1998). Through migration, both men and women bring experiences and expectations that are not gender neutral (Pessar and Grasmuck 1991). Latin Americanists should confront and engage the challenge to move from national-centered analyses (albeit in global contexts) to transnational attention to border spaces, regionalism, migration, and movements.

7. Conclusions

Latin American gender studies, which inform the study of women gender worldwide, draw on the structural approach and particulars of this area. Gender is situated in the relations between women and men of different classes in the global capitalist economy. Yet gender studies necessarily draw on internal cultural constructions of everyday male–female relations that range from reverence to brutal violence, reflecting the marianismo–machismo constructs. Women’s activism brings these agendas into political struggles toward policy change and democratic transition.

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