Stéphanie Rousseau

Women's Citizenship and Neopopulism: Peru Under the Fujimori Regime

This article argues that the increased participation of women in Peruvian politics in the 1990s and the advances made in some areas of their citizenship rights are connected to the strategies put in place by some sectors of the womens movement and to the openings provided by the Fujimori regime. Some of the impact of neopopulist rule on political institutions is shown to be positively related to womens increased opportunities during this period; yet the weak rule of law and the political use of the womens agenda by an increasingly questionable regime placed the womens movement in a complex political panorama. A disaggregated analysis of the politics of womens citizenship reveals that women from the popular sectors did not benefit from the same progress in their rights claims as women from the feminist movement or women in party politics.

Fujimori’s Peru

A few months after being elected in 1990, President Alberto Fujimori declared 1991 to be the “Year of Austerity and Family-Planning” for the Peruvian State, at a time when Peru experienced its worst crisis of the century. Central to his policy goals was stabilizing the economy and addressing poverty. Women’s role would be emphasized as key to the state’s strategies, particularly in dealing with the social impact of adjustment. Facing enduring hyperinflation, a war with deadly insurgent forces that resulted in more than half the territory being under a state of emergency, a deeply shaken political party system, and a state on the verge of collapse, Fujimori and his allies significantly reshaped Peru’s political institutions and state-society relations. In this process, women were the first to ask for authoritative and efficient state action to reduce the daily sources of insecurity. However, what at first seemed to the majority to be a “strong” government ended up in the second half of the 1990s to be increasingly seen as corrupt, self-serving, and authoritarian. Over and above the evolution of public opinion on the government’s legitimacy, the persistence of a “culture of fear” and the use of special so-called antiterrorist laws, human rights violations and lack of guarantees for civil rights were some of the tools used and instilled by Fujimori to demobilize civil society (Burt 2006).

Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America . Edited by Jane S. Jaquette. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 272p.

tive” conceptions and members of the canon pigeonholed (by Berlin himself, as well as others) as exemplifying either the positive (usually Rousseau and Kant) or negative (usually Hobbes, Locke, and Mill) variety. This has been a mistake, according to Hirschmann, who seeks to show how this mistake has obscured a richer understanding of freedom found in each canonical thinker. To different degrees and in different ways, she shows how, from Hobbes to Mill, all of these thinkers understood freedom as both noninterference and self-mastery and grappled with the challenge of resolving the tensions that arise in light of the ways in which these two dimensions of freedom interact. Concerning the second theme, social construction, despite the fact that few scholars today would deny that the idea of freedom is in some sense socially constructed, only Mill in his famous essay on “The Subjection of Women” is typically remembered as having recognized this insight. Before the twentieth century, most thinkers grounded their political theories on beliefs about the Godgiven and immutable nature of men, seen as born free, in a state of nature, possessed of rational capacities, and with a peaceful or warlike character. Such foundationalism, whether religious or naturalistic, placed (most of ) these thinkers at a far distance from anything that could be recognized as social constructivism. Yet each was concerned, in different ways, with positive freedom and, thereby, the internal aspects of freedom. They all addressed the question of the kind of subjects that can enjoy freedom, and they all defined freedom in a manner suited to the particular way they wanted men to be. And they intended their theories to be read and adopted by men of power, who would fashion institutions and laws so as to ensure that such subjects of freedoms were created. In this, these thinkers, no matter how “foundationalist” their views of human nature, were alive to the complex relationships among individual freedom, the family, and citizenship, and thus to the importance of the social construction of freedom. Hirschmann’s third and overarching theme is gender and class. Whereas few would deny that the thinkers she analyzes were influenced by their gender or their class, few would argue, as she does, that gender and class play central and defining roles in the way that each thinker approaches freedom. According to Hirschmann, one cannot understand what freedom means in these different approaches without understanding the gendered and classbased dimensions of their arguments. This is because women, the poor, or the working class were the real-world counterexamples against which freedom, which was enjoyed mainly by wealthy men, was conceptualized. The concept of freedom is constructed as male, in part, because those who lacked freedom were female. And freedom is elitist because the elite were, indeed, freer than the poor or the working class. And so a second question about this book presents itself: why gender and class and not race? Racial inequality shaped the societies in which these philosophers lived, and some of these thinkers (e.g., Mill and Kant) evidently thought about the circumstances of nonwhites and non-Europeans. However, Hirschmann argues, in most cases little if any evidence exists that these philosophers used a “racial” model, as they used a “gendered” model, to construct the self who is (or could be) free. This is less because they were blind to racial diversity than because they lived in racially homogeneous societies and, thus, simply took race more or less for granted. Clearly, this is truer of some of these thinkers (Hobbes in particular) than others (Mill in particular). But the author offers good reasons to suppose that her book covers the most important grounds of freedom, and leaves to other scholars the task of uncovering additional “models” of how the subject of freedom has been understood and shaped in the modern world. Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory is an impressive piece of scholarship. At its heart are the five chapters devoted to each philosopher, each of which is rich in detail and nuanced argument. The book covers a great deal of ground. At times, the detailed arguments and complex relations among Hirschmann’s three themes overwhelm a more generalist understanding of what the five different philosophers argued about freedom. In other words, this book is written for those who already understand, or think they understand, the Western canon. It promises to change how this canon is conventionally understood. And it delivers on this promise.

79.95 cloth,

Since around half of the population in Peru’s capital city is poor or extremely poor, analyzing the social construction of women’s citizenship requires looking at the dynamics of Lima’s shantytowns.1 This chapter is about the millions of women who live in the sandy hills that surround the city—in Lima’s conos as Peruvians call them. More precisely, this chapter is based on a case study of a particular type of women’s organization, neighborhood-based collective kitchens. Its leadership relied first on the formation of a National Commission of Collective Kitchens and then on the Federation of Collective Kitchens of Metropolitan Lima. Both played important roles in mobilizing popular sector women in the 1980s and early 1990s.

22.95 paper.

Neopopulist politics is a fundamental element conditioning the impact of political democracy on women’s movements’ opportunity structures in some Latin American countries such as Peru in the 1990s. As shown in this book, neopopulism has negative effects on the institutional checks and balances and undermines collective action in civil society. This has a specific impact on women’s citizenship, mediated by class and ethnic social structures. The case of Peru reveals that neopopulism can produce advances in women’s citizenship construction even if these are limited and fragile. Overall, a gendered analysis of neopopulism under Fujimori highlights important paradoxes for the study of democratization and gender politics in Latin America.

Women Organizing in Shantytowns

If traditional political science equated the low number of women in partisan politics with their being absent from the political sphere (Duverger 1955), feminist critiques have now well shown that this equation was based on a limited view of what is to be considered political (Jones and Jonasdottir 1988; Barrett and Phillips 1992; Vickers 1997). However, it remains true that a low level of participation in political institutions potentially implies a severe deficit in women’s capacity to influence a central decision-making space. Running as candidate and being elected as representative is an important facet of citizenship, yet it is also one of the greatest challenges facing women in their efforts to penetrate the public sphere in democratic regimes.

Conclusion: The Paradoxes of Constructing Women’s Citizenship under Neopopulism

El articulo analiza el caso del proceso de elaboracion de politicas de salud reproductiva en el Peru, en el contexto de las reformas de las politicas sociales implementadas durante los ultimos 15 anos. Las reformas en el sector de la salud solo han reparado en forma parcial el acceso desigual de las mujeres a la planificacion familiar, a los derechos reproductivos y a la atencion materna. Las fuentes principales de desigualdad estan relacionadas con la naturaleza segmentada del sistema de la atencion de la salud que ocasiona, entre otros temas, que la mayoria de las mujeres sin seguro provenientes de las clases populares dependan de que y como sean provistos los servicios publicos de la atencion medica. Por otra parte, el continuo papel de sectores conservadores en los debates sobre politicas de salud reproductiva sigue teniendo un impacto sobre los servicios publicamente disponibles de planificacion familiar.