958 - Rural and Gender Transformations

20.07.2012 | 08:00 - 13:30

Coordinator 1: Farah Quijano, María Adelaida (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá , Bogotá, Colombia / Kolumbien)
Coordinator 2: Karnopp, Erica (Universidade de Santa Cruz do Sul, Santa Cruz do Sul - RS, Austria / Österreich)

Within the last three decades deep transformations have occured in rural areas of Latin America: modernization processes in agriculture, environmental degradation and protection, changes in policies and laws; global orientations of new social movements, international migration and restructuration of rural labour markets led to a dynamisation of spatial structures and social networks. Gender relations on local, regional and national levels are affected intensely by these changes. The new rurality approach, which studies rural transformations since the 1980s in Latin America, highlights the relevance of gender issues in rural dynamics and requires empirical evidence and conceptual development in relation to the link between gender and the new rurality. In the last few years, there has been a progressive change from a focus on just women to gender. Thus, newest studies apply conceptual and methodological approaches to capture the relational feature of gender, and not just the gender characteristics of individuals. At the same time, many studies and in fact many policies and programmes integrate a gender perspective by focussing mainly on women taking into account their interactions with men. Our proposal attempts to join studies with a gender perspective in the sense of observing gender relationships, their powerful bias and not just women and men separately. The women’s movement has been advocating globally that formal gender equality in legislation and state policies is essential to actual gender equity. The literature shows that although there is legislation in Latin American countries to ensure gender equality in property rights, there is still a gap between the law and the actual distribution of assets between men and women. However, there are little studies to demonstrate the links between formal gender equality in legislation with actual gender equity or inequity in households, which we examine in this proposal together with the time lags between laws and actual practices involved in the process and the interactions with a range of other institutional factors such as social norms and religion.

Palabras claves: new rurality, state policies, legislation, Gender transformations