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Female Body as a Gender War Zone: "New" Form of War(fare) in Lima

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2019

Abstract

Social condition of gender "new war" has been occurring in Lima since August 2016 when the city witnessed NiUnaMenos, a historic street manifestation resulting from grassroots feminist activism that visibilized violence against women in Peru. This critical event brought about alterations in the sociopolitical status of violence against women and, through that, in the sociopolitical status of women.

The principle war territory and action-inducing phenomena has been the female body. The article, informed ethnographically and written from the perspective of the anthropology of violence, explores the post-NiUnaMenos warlike circumstances of the shifting gender-power distribution.

It explains the macho, anti-woman nature of local gender relations, which the organized women are contesting, as working within three spheres, or war fronts: the private, the public, and the structural sphere of the State. As a consequence of the pro-women activism, current government has adopted a more active role in securing women's rights.

The concepts treated include machismo, female body dispossession, rape culture, pedagogy of violence, and street sexual harassment.