Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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serve to disarticulate power relationships (Amorós, 2005) and to expose their lack of legitimacy from the
point of view of gender equality.
The failure to identify social relations between men and women as political or power
relationships forms part of the dichotomous construct that excludes the private sphere from power
relations and accounts for the subordination of women in the public sphere (Scott, 1996). Conversely, the
feminist movement criticizes gender systems as binary arrangements that place men and women, the male
and the female, in opposition, but not necessarily on an equal footing. Politics is about power, and power
—following this line of argument— is present in all relationships. The State has been one of the
institutions most heavily criticized for producing and perpetuating gender discrimination. In formulating
this criticism, the feminist movement has drawn on reflections about sexuality and the cultural
construction of sexual difference.
Increasingly since the 1980s, concomitantly with redemocratization processes in the region, a
notion that has been regaining credence is that the State can also help to change sociocultural patterns and
create the conditions for true and effective equality and equal opportunities for women. In this argument,
tension arises between criticism of androcentrism and demands for redistribution based on considerations
of equality (Puleo, 2005). This is the tension described by Valcárcel (1997, p.101) between Weberian
politics, as a managerial activity for solving macroproblems, and the influence of a tradition that seeks to
transform power relations. The effort to influence State political reforms managed in a rather Weberian
way, in which politics is defined more narrowly, while reconciling them with a vision of politics and
power as things that must be dismantled, is a constant in the relationship between democratic governance
and gender.
To address the matter of power relationships within the public and private spheres implies the
analysis —and even a redefinition— of what a State may or may not legitimately do. The notion of
sovereignty as referring to the ultimate power of command in a political society (Matteucci, 1991) ties in
with the concept of State, since the State is sovereign insofar as it makes decisions within the territory in
which it is established. Decisions are taken in accordance with the State’s norms and institutions, but also
in an environment in which a number of coexistent yet disarticulated types of society overlap, thus
creating relationships of domination and hierarchies based on the different cultures and powers with
which they interact (Zavaleta, 1990).
With the acceleration of globalization, societies are becoming more deeply intermixed in terms of
economics, politics and culture, and new cross-boundary public and institutional problems are emerging
to compound long-standing, unresolved difficulties. In many cases, the exercise of sovereignty, i.e., the
State’s capacity to decide (in this case in favour of women’s demands) runs counter to efforts to improve
governance, and this situation threatens the universal human rights principles to which women are
appealing.
New means of regulating different spheres of social life —laws, standards and institutional
practices— are debated, negotiated and decided upon not only nationally but also in the international
community. Relationships of force, hierarchies and conflicts operate at the international level, but so do
global consensuses on the rights of citizens that all States must respect.
The inclusion of gender equality, as well as the general issue of human rights, in public and
institutional agendas has challenged the notions of sovereignty that are most closely associated with the
national State framework. Lobbyists for the inclusion of gender equality on such agendas form networks
of actors drawn from civil society, the political system and the State, who transcend national boundaries