Meaning and Implications: Women’s participation in Chilean politics

Meaning and Implication :Women in politics

the Chilean case

May 2007

Paula Pereda candidate PhDVictoria University of Wellington

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Women in politics

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Presentation Structure

• Bourdieu’s theoretical framework- key concepts

• Chile’s history - women’s history in the public sphere

• Applying Bourdieu’s theory to the Chilean case

• Doxa :natural attitude in a phenomenological sense.

• Symbolic Domination :misrecognition of the relations of domination.

• Masculine Domination :embodiment of the masculine order in the form of unconscious schemes of perception and appreciation.

• Habitus :system of durable dispositions that produces collective and individual practices and representations.

• Strategy : capacity to manoeuvre and improvise

Bourdieu’s theory I

Reproduction and production of social practices

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Objectified sexual divisions

Practices

Habitus

Practical sense Common sense Objectified sense

Bourdieu’s theory II

Embodied schemes of perception and appreciation

Bodies Institutions

History

Doxic

experience

Masculine Order

Gender

Gendered

PhenomenologySubjectivism

Structuralism Functionalism

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Chilean President Michelle Bachelete

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Women in politics

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History - Pre Pinochet (until 1973)

• Example: women’s activism not aimed at extending political but at protecting ‘women’s natural role’.

• Women always in public realm

• Presence does not disrupt ‘natural social order’

• Never ‘feminist movements’ always ‘feminine’

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• Pinochet regime actively sought to strengthen women’s traditional roles

• Extending public sphere roles

• Women active in terms of economic and human rights areas

• Developing organisations to face the economic crisis

History - Pinochet (from 1973 to 1989)

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Recent history – post-Pinochet from 1989 to 2007

• Further extensions public sphere activity by women

• Political expediency in wooing women voters

• Women were often key to the democratisation processes

• Some increased awareness of gender issues in part due to CEDAW

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Process of democratisation

• Structure of the political system legacy from dictatorship period

• Complicates bringing women’s issues to the fore

• Recent memory of dictatorship so people want political stability

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Why women at the top?

• 17 years of ‘democracy’ but little advancement for women

Women in work force 36%Women earn 68% as much as men Women in the congress• 5.2% senate• 16% parliament

• Suddenly ‘women come to the top’ in politics2000 onwards under Lagos

2006 elections - President and cabinet

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Why? Back to Bourdieu I

• Coalition needed renew their image

• It is NOT a sign of a disruption of gender order

• A step towards real democracy and progress

• Clean-sweep – space for women to get in

• Scandal and corruption in politics

Strategy Oriented to maintain power in politics

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• Political symbolic domination – ‘women are there representing women’ BUT tokenism; jeopardise coalition and her position; no women’s organisations outside.

Why? Back to Bourdieu II

Symbolic Power• Symbolic efficacy – Political representation

produces and reproduce groups. “Real existence of women” as a group.

• Masculine domination – objective gender divisions changing, but cultural system keep gendered cognitive schemes.

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• Own instruments of representation ‘feminine habitus’

• The paradox of doxa – Naturalisation of masculine order. Reflection on what women’s in politics mean in real terms.

Why? Back to Bourdieu III

Production and reproduction of social practises

• Habitus – Internalizes masculine order, and reproduces it through practices.

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From here . . . Work in progress

• The big picture of the thesis

• Systematic history and structure of society (done today to some extent)

• Demographic/statistical overview

• Interviews – self-perceptions

• Mass media analysis – ‘societal’ perceptions

• Understand women in politics in Chile

• And contribute to operationalising Bourdieu’s work

The end