9th March 2011
Guest blog: The challenges of making Bolivia a less patriarchal society
To commemorate the centenary on 8 March of International Womens Day, I am delighted to welcome to our site a guest blogger, Katia Uriona Gamarra*
Bolivia is living a political process in which women from different organizations and movements have arisen as political actors, placing in the public debate agendas related to raising complaints and the enforceability and generation of proposals that challenge the subordination, exclusion, discrimination and poverty faced by the majority of women in the country.
The actions of this plural and diverse movement of mobilized women with a leading role at national level achieved the inclusion in the new political Constitution of the State (January 2009) of principles and articles relating to social equity and gender, equivalent representation and recognition of specific women’s rights. This new regulatory framework forms a new base for the enforcement of public policies and social practices that enable the transformation of State, organisation, community and family institutions and patriarchal structures which make up society.
Depatriarchalisation has been raised as a challenge. This is understood as a structural basis to transform the relations of power that exclude and oppress women; the removal of the patriarchy, defined as “A social hierarchical structure, based on a set of prejudices, symbols, ideas, customs and even laws regarding women, by which male gender dominates and oppresses women” (Montero and Nieto 2002).
Part of this challenge should be to distort hierarchical practices based on the exercise of power of men, the modification of norms, values, functions and symbolic imaginary roles that are assigned to women within families, schools, religion, the media and the State’s own structures and policies.
The proposed women’s agenda at the same time raises the need to articulate it with the agenda of decolonization proposed by different indigenous, native and peasant movements. And the recognition as the transformative base of the Bolivian political process of two historical forms of oppression based on power relations that, in the case of Bolivia, have subordinated the majority of indigenous peasant and native women.
*Katia Uriona is a womens rights activist and Director of the Co-ordination of Women, a network of NGOs in Bolivia that works on processes of empowerment, emancipation, organisational capacity building, and for the promotion and defence of the rights of women www.coordinadoramujer.org