Las trayectorias femeninas y feministas hacia lo público en Colombia (1970-2000): inclusión sin representación?

It is generally accepted that modern democratic regimes originally excluded from the newly created citizen community many social categories –women, illiterates, non-tax payers, unmarried men and slaves were generally left out of public and political life. Through the struggles and vindications of the formerly excluded, the boundaries of citizenship formally expanded. Although the traits of this incorporation are fairly common to many countries, the final concrete result of the struggles varies from one society to the next. The aim of the dissertation is to understand the way Colombian women fought for their full citizenship in two public domains –the political and the academic—from 1970 till the year 2000, and how their claims were fought back or institutionalized in both spheres. The research starts from an analytical distinction between two dimensions comprised in full incorporation to public life: presence and representation. In order to evaluate the results of the women’s struggle in Colombia, presence as stated by numbers (how many women have accessed the two spheres) and representation as condensed in discourses (what agendas and vindications in their name have been publicly discussed) have been taken into account. Both dimensions do not evolve simultaneously. Many more women can access the two spheres without any increasing in the efforts made by institutions to take into account and reflect women’s needs, interests or political expectations. The main argument of the dissertation is that in Colombia the two dimensions are disjointed: by the year 2000 there were more women doing politics, holding office, participating in electoral campaigns than by the beginning of the seventies; however, the issues raised by gender discrimination were seldom publicly addressed and translated into sustained policies, whether at the political or academic level. The evolution of feminist counterpublics and political and social women leaders’ discourses and of their strategies, actions and omissions within specific institutional and political contexts, explain why the representational gender dimension lags behind the numbers in Colombia.