Dimensions of Gendered Political Violence: Media, Budgets, and Representation in Latin America

Abstract

This panel examines violence against women in politics as a multi-sited strategy of exclusion that operates well beyond overt coercion, shaping who can speak, govern, and be believed in Latin America. It connects scholarship on VAWIP and semiotic violence to analyses of how women’s bodies and legitimacy are policed through aesthetic scrutiny, media framing, digital attacks, and institutional obstruction—forms of harm that often appear ‘normal’ within political life yet work to reproduce gendered and racialised hierarchies. At the same time, the panel treats implementation as a political battleground, showing how budgetary decisions and funding regimes can quietly disable gender-equality policies after formal adoption, turning resource allocation into a mechanism of adaptive resistance. Conceptually, it foregrounds intersectional and decolonial approaches—including body–territory perspectives—to capture how attacks on women politicians are simultaneously attacks on the communities and projects they carry into the state. Across cases, the panel argues that political violence is not an episodic disruption but a constitutive feature of contested democracies, and that resisting it requires reframing both representation and governance as matters of safety, resources, and power.

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