Twenty-first century socialism in Bolivia: the gender agenda

Over the past decade, there has been a notable rise in the visibility of women and women’s issues in Latin America. First, there has been a rise in the number of female heads of state. Women’s issues – even a feminist agenda – have also been embraced by governments of all stripes, particularly the more radical experiments in ‘twenty-first century socialism’ such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. Yet, talking about feminism and having more women in political office does not translate automatically into women’s empowerment. After all, neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank promote the agenda of ‘gender equality’. When conceived solely as the ability of women to make individual choices and compete equally with men in cultural, social and economic spheres, gender equality does nothing to reverse extreme impoverishment and exploitation experienced by the majority of women. To what extent, then, has the project of ‘twenty-first century socialism’ advanced women’s emancipation? This essay explores this question in the context of Bolivia, which is widely invoked as being one of the most radical experiments of twenty-first century socialism. Unlike the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, the self-styled revolution in Bolivia is often praised for being ‘bottom-up’, inspired by militant social movements. Responding to popular demands, the Movement towards Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo – MAS) has introduced gender-sensitive reforms that expand cash transfer programmes which especially target women, as well as quota legislation to increase women’s representation in the formal political sphere. These can help build capacity for collective struggle, but pushing the agenda forward requires reforms that address not only the unequal relations of race and gender but also class, which has been given a backseat in the context of what Jeff Webber has described as ‘reconstituted neoliberalism’ in Bolivia. Progressive agendas involving a redistribution of productive resources, such as agrarian reform and food sovereignty, offer the best way forward in the context of a country where the majority of precarious workers in both rural and urban areas are women