“This Is Not a Meeting for Women”

Abstract

Study of women's political participation in two rural municipalities in Bolivia challenges the notion that Andean gender complementarity is necessarily a sign of gender equality. Analysis of the function of gender complementarity in rural communities uncovers its inherent epistemological dynamics and demonstrates that, rather than producing gender equality, it serves to reproduce women's political exclusion from both communal political institutions and the relatively newly created rural municipalities, in spite of legislation that stipulates women's participation here. The assumption that gender equality exists in indigenous communities because their cosmology contains a paradigm of gender complementarity has real and negative repercussions in rural Andean women's lives. Women express a desire to participate and clearly identify the obstacles to their participation and the mechanisms that perpetuate them.