Engendering the State through the Margins: The Pitfalls of Peru's National Women's Machinery

As coined by McBride & Mazur (2012), the concept of women's policy agency or gender machinery refers to formal state structures designed to implement policies to create gender equality in society. Peru was the first Latin American country to create a ministry on women—PROMUDEH (Ministerio de Promoción de la Mujer y del Desarrollo Humano)—in 1996 during the government of Alberto Fujimori. While twenty-five years have passed, the legacies of Peru´s “state feminism” are ambivalent. The ministry started as one of the channels for Fujimori´s clientelistic social assistance programs. The 2000s and 2010s have seen important reforms of the state and of the ministry itself, as well as the adoption of a national gender equality policy. Yet the role of the MIMP (Ministerio de la Mujer y Poblaciones Vulnerables) remains almost exclusively centered on issues of gender violence and social assistance for vulnerable sectors of the population. Efforts at “gender mainstreaming” within the state have been limited and often strongly resisted. No social programs have gender equality as an explicit goal, and discussions about care work and its impact on women´s social and economic opportunities only modestly started in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic. What explains the resilience of the gender machinery is also what explains the limited transformation of the state when it comes to gender mainstreaming: an NGOized women´s movement that has largely supported the trajectory of the gender machinery, and the lack of embeddedness of gender equality policy in the Peruvian political system. Through a detailed analysis of the structure and agendas pursued by the Peruvian state gender machinery over the last twenty-five years, as well as its weak institutional power overall within the state apparatus, the paper argues that the causes of this ambivalent legacy are to be found in patterns of state-society relations dating back to the 1990s.