Gender and politics in Latin America.

McGee Deutsch, Sandra. “Gender and Sociopolitical Change in Twentieth-Century Latin America”. The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (May, 1991). Duke University Press.

McGee departs from Scott's statement that politics construct gender and gender constructs politics. She shows how traditional gender roles have been historically used as a paradigm of society. Likewise, power relationships of class and labor have been expressed in gendered terms. In this way, gender ideologies have often served to instill, legitimate, and to make seem "natural" values of industrial/capitalist societies under which the citizens are disciplined. Gender has allowed state discourse to project relationships from the familial to the national order (i.e., symbolizing state-citizens relationships as Father-children bonds). This, in turn, argues McGee, means that to transform social relationships and hierarchies we would need to re-imagine and reformulate the gender relationships, that are their material and symbolic support, in more democratic ways.

McGee is interested in the ways that gender is mobilized in the context of political change, looking at revolutionary Mexico, Argentinian Peronist administration, Cuban revolution and Chilean Unidad Popular. A common feature is that in all these cases the state's efforts and discourse, far from being a unitary and monolithic one, is rather heterogeneous and contradictory. McGee notes that at one level, the Mexican revolution discourse was formulated as oppressed men reclaiming and re-asserting their manhood, thus requiring female subordination for their project of social change. Women were then incorporated in the revolutionary project as secondary and subordinated subjects, companions of men. While the revolution promised to free women from capitalist oppression and church control, at the same time, the desired outcome was that women could perform better their roles as respectable mothers and wives. Moreover, women's moralizing role controlling men's behaviour was seen as key for the production of disciplined productive citizens, as in the formula “well order family = well ordered state.”

In regards to the Argentinian case, she notes that Peronist ideology wanted to incorporate women in their traditional roles and without challenging gender ideologies, so they distanced their discourse from feminism by defining it as foreign and “anti-national.” The Perons as a couple (Juan and Eva) projected the image of parents of the nation and promoted values that overall confirmed conservative gender roles, while standing for women's participation in paid work and in politics (though defined as “social” concerns).

Within the Cuban revolution, the socialist project claimed that gender roles were in need of transformation in order to achieve complete equality. This translated into many concrete policies, legal changes and programs that enabled women to become workers, political actors and to receive state support. Still, the revolution's rhetoric sustained a normative vision of Cuban revolutionary womanhood, expecting women to perform a sober (heterosexual) and attractive femininity. In a sometimes contradictory and ambivalent discourse, Revolutionary Cuba still makes old traditional notions of womanhood coexist with an emancipating view of gender equality. In turn, revolution detractors have presented these changes in gender roles and social hierarchies in terms of family 'disorder' and 'promiscuity.' McGee also notes that even though the Cuban revolution has made a conscious effort to achieve gender equality, its has emphasized a target on women and not men.

Finally, McGee looks at the Chilean socialist project, which assumed that overthrowing capitalism and capitalist exploitative relationships would automatically ensure gender equality and women's emancipation. However, the socialist government had a contradictory discourse and practice in relation to women's and gender equality. In their rhetoric, leaders of the UP relied frequently on traditional gender roles and presented workers dignity and empowerment in terms of restoring their masculinity. Furthermore, like the Cubans, Chileans socialist leaders put little effort in making men a target for changes in gender relations.