Courts of Desire
Courts of Desire
Gender, Power, and the Law
This chapter explores how gender becomes another key social category in Bolivia through which the points of tension created by the engagement with liberal legality are brought into sharp contrast. It begins by exploring the way “gender” emerged as a category for social analysis and political action, first as a transnational discourse in the post-war period, and then, more recently, as part of Bolivia's liberal renaissance over the last twenty years. Within the Andean studies literature, the application of gender analysis has provided a wealth of deeply nuanced studies of different aspects of male-female relations, which explore the structural and conceptual aspects of complementarity as well as the economic and political factors that cause the social practice of gender to deviate from the cultural ideal. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the study of gender and legal subjectivity points to another kind of complementarity, one that is both parallel to the male-female opposition and which illustrates the dilemmas that mark Bolivia's modern trajectory.
Keywords: Bolivia, gender, liberal legality, law, social analysis, political action
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