Women in politics: from the adjective to the substantive: Representation, power and masculine grammar of politics in Latin America

Abstract

This essay develops a theoretical-critical reflection on the conceptual frameworks that structure the contemporary debate around women and politics in Latin America. From a situated reading of Women in Politics. National and subnational experiences in Latin America (Freidenberg et al., 2018), the argument is not aimed at empirically evaluating parity policies or the effectiveness of affirmative action mechanisms, but rather at interrogating the conception of “the political” that makes them intelligible and the performative effects that said conception produces.

The central argument maintains that much of the debate on female representation operates within a political grammar that identifies power with formal authority, institutional visibility and electoral eligibility. Beyond the relevance of this approach, we rethink the risk of reproducing a restricted definition of the political that makes other forms of political agency fundamental to social life invisible.

Through a dialogue between autoethnography and critical feminist theory, the essay proposes to expand the frameworks from which the political is defined, placing the struggles for parity in a broader and more transformative horizon.