The Gender Wars

...In his inaugural address to the nation on July 28 of last year, President Fujimori unexpectedly broke ranks with other Latin American countries on the issue of birth control, announcing that the state would facilitate access to family planning for poor families...

...It seems clear, however, that these common stances rest on fundamentally different assumptions...

...The gender debate that it has prompted in Latin America is clearly a smoke screen The Catholic Church's virulent opposition to the word "gender" is clearly a smokescreen for a vicious attack on women's rights...

...One objection raised by Vatican spokesman Joaquin NavarroVals was that the word "gender" was used more frequently than the word "mother...

...Not only is the Church fighting a losing battle, but more seriously, its campaign has obscured the real issues...

...It is in the world conferences organized by the United Nations that the Vatican is most active in its campaign against feminism and reproductive rights...

...He refrains, however, from exploring the reasons for this situation on the grounds that "it would not be easy to attribute precise responsibility considering the strength of cultural sedimentations that, through the centuries, have formed people's mentalities...

...According to this conception, the difference between the sexes does not have a natural origin, a view that has consequences for the individual, for the family, and for society...

...However, this claim to be protecting women rings hollow given that Fujimori has demolished workers' rights, including health and safety regulations for women in the workplace...

...It is these debates that should have been foregrounded and not the struggle over the use of the word gender...

...Family" is the other sensitive issue, not only because of gay and lesbian households but also because the Church's ideal of a married couple as the pillar of society is unrealistic for many Latin American women...

...Mention of Darwin and Lamarck had been eliminated, references to sex education had been erased, and the word "gender" had been replaced by "sex...

...Church leaders denounced it as a proposal "for the 'mutilation' of men and women by the power of darkness...

...Abortion is the fourth most common cause of maternity deaths and the third most common cause of hospitalization in Mexico...

...The news that the word "gender" was unacceptable quickly surfaced in Latin American discussions prior to Beijing...

...Likewise, the Church considers abortion a "grave sin," yet it is widely practiced in the region...

...For those belonging to this "social surplus," the document recommended vasectomies for men and tubal ligation for women...

...Peruvian women must be in control of their own destinies...

...The touchiness of the Church on this matter can be read as a reaction to the growing number and influence of feminist and women's groups...

...for a vicious attack on women's rights...

...While these two sectors of the Latin American women's movement have their differences, there is an ongoing effort by many groups to bridge the divide...

...The preparatory document gives no evidence to support such a claim...

...Archbishop of Tegucigalpa and president of the Latin American Episcopal Conference, Oscar Rodriguez, asserted that the aim of the Beijing conference was "to force society to accept five types of gender: masculine, feminine, lesbian, homosexual and transsexual...

...Since abortions are performed clandestinely and often in less than optimal conditions, this is also a pressing health issue for Latin American women...

...While Latin American feminists see these issues as essentially about the rights of women to control their own lives, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank are primarily interested in population control...

...The differences between women's and men's achievements and activities," the draft platform states, "are still not recognized as the consequences of socially constructed gender roles rather than immutable biological differences...

...A poll taken in Lima after President Alberto Fujimori's recent decision to make contraception available to poor families is a case in point...

...Clearly, the senators' position is an argument for the exclusion of gay men and women from citizenship and the criminalization of abortion...

...He urged the faithful to stand up against this "colonialism...

...Hundreds of Latin American delegates participated in the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995...

...Harshly criticized for its heavy-handed approach in Cairo, the Church shifted gears in the preparations for the Beijing conference, initiating an allout ideological war against the concept of gender...

...In an interview with Politica y Sociedad, she tried to wiggle out of the controversy by defining gender according to the Dictionary of the Royal Academy as "a group of beings who have one or various characteristics in common...

...For example, it continues to oppose birth control, even though most Latin American women favor the use of some form NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 6UPDATE / FEMINISM While it may be amusing to think of the Catholic Church hierarchy wading through feminist theory, its attempts to demonize feminism by associating it with communism should not be taken lightly...

...While only a handful of feminist organizations existed in Latin America two decades ago, now hundreds of women's organizations throughout the region define themselves as "feminist...

...Both multilateral lending institutions and feminist groups are in favor of promoting sex education, making contraception widely available to women, and decriminalizing abortion...

...Once that conference got underway, the Vatican allied itself with Islamic fundamentalists in an attempt to scuttle documents favoring reproductive rights...

...The document forecasted that, at its current growth rate, within four decades Peru would have to support "a population of eight million hungry uneducated and unemployed people in a climate of absolute poverty and deeply inured delinquency...

...Precisely because its position is so rigid (neither abortion nor contraception) and has such little relation to reality, the Vatican must woo women by other means...

...Senator Herndn Larrain Fernmndez reminded Bilbao that she herself had declared that homosexual families were not "part of Chilean reality...

...Latin American governments are caught in a bind between this imperative to "modernize" and opposition to birth control and abortion coming from the Church and other conservative groups...

...In Chile, there are an estimated 170,000 abortions a year...

...The fact that the debate over gender has surfaced simultaneously in recent months in many different Latin American countries suggests that this concern for semantics masks a surreptitious campaign against women's and gay rights...

...These rights were described as "highly inconvenient and dangerous...

...She wishes to thank Marta Lamas, Tunana Mercado, Rosa Maria Fort and Kemy Oyarzcn for providing material for this article...

...He announced that a "social miracle," which would boost women from mere survival into productive development, would follow his "economic miracle...

...These "ambiguous ideas" were declared unacceptable...

...A group of conservative senators, however, challenged the position paper, centering their attack on the use of the word "gender...

...Given the difficulties of access to contraceptive methods, abortion has become a major form of birth control in Latin America...

...We have been and shall continue to be a pragmatic government, without taboos or 'sacred cows,"' he said, in a pointed reference to the Church...

...In Chile, it began even before Josefina Bilbao, minister of the National Women's Service (SERNAM), had published the government position paper on Beijing...

...What the Pope does not seem to realize is that, when he refers to the obstacles that impede women's full incorporation into social, political and economic life, he needs the word "gender" in order to explain the "cultural sedimentations" that account for inequalities...

...When it was unsuccessful in its bid to erase certain clauses from the final documents, the Vatican resorted to insisting on bracketing phrases it considered controversial, including "family group" and "gender...

...The Church views this trend with alarm...

...In a clear fence-mending move prior to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Pope John Paul II addressed a Letter to Women in which he thanks them for their devotion, and praises their mission as mothers, wives, daughters, workers and nuns...

...In Chile, for example, 40% of all families are not headed by a married couple...

...On the other hand, emphasis on birth control and abortion rights to the exclusion of women's education, development, and changing role in society is just as questionable...

...Illegal abortion, perhaps the most inflammatory issue, is a significant threat to women's health in Latin America, and criminalization only serves to perpetuate the problem...

...They claimed to be defending that tradition against "value-oriented totalitarianism" (code for feminism), which they argued would allow all kinds of unnatural practices...

...For post-1960s feminism, gender refers to socially constituted differences between masculine and feminine...

...The bishopric of Argentina recently argued that abortion is a form of "modern biological colonialism inspired by powerful nations that impose their decisions on those of weaker peoples who cannot make themselves heard...

...In Colombia, 74.5% of maternal deaths are the result of botched abortions...

...Firestone applied Marxist dialectics to the male/female relationship, said Aguer, "in order to reach the conclusion that Marx had not dared to make: namely to modify the sexual condition of woman to liberate her from maternity and her dependence on the family...

...The Dialectic of Sex to highlight the "dangers" of feminism...

...In short, what is proposed is a cultural revolution...

...The Vatican's Vol XXIX, No 4 JAN/FEB 1996 7UPDATE / FEMINISM In Ciudad Segundo Montes, El Salvadoc residents meet to organize observer status at the United Nations gives it the right to participate in these UN conferences--a right not accorded to any other religious group...

...The platform is a complex document that deals with a vast number of women's issues-from population to the feminization of poverty to violence against women...

...In fact, some sectors within the grassroots women's movement have become increasingly receptive to feminist political goals, including the championing of reproductive rights...

...Meanwhile, the Catholic Church continues its virulent opposition to reproductive rights...

...Using the word gender "as a purely cultural construct, detached from the biological," he warned, "makes us into fellow travelers of radical feminism...

...The Beijing conference, if it achieved nothing else, registered the fact that "women's issues"-including their human rights-have moved to the fore of the world's political agendas...

...The alternative position paper that the senators came up with, although eventually defeated, is illustrative of what lies behind the struggle over the meaning of gender...

...In July of last year, several members of the Argentine planning committee that had drawn up the guidelines for a national curriculum resigned when they discovered that changes to their proposal had been made, apparently by the Minister of Education under pressure from the Catholic Church...

...The World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank see these policies as a way to reduce poverty and facilitate women's participation in the wage-labor force...

...Peru illustrates the hard choices that neoliberal governments face on this issue...

...Once the position paper was published and being debated in the Senate, Bilbao attempted to sidestep the issue of gender altogether, focusing instead on the conference themes of poverty, education and political participation, as she would do in the paper she later presented at the Beijing conference...

...Of every seven babies born in that country, one is the child of an adolescent, and in 61% of those cases, the baby is the offspring of an unmarried mother...

...Fujimori was playing the modernization card, appealing to multilateral lending instituions by promising that by the year 2000 poverty would be reduced by 50% and that 50% of social spending would be targeted for women...

...The Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires, Hector Aguer, defended the removal of the word "gender," arguing that its use "intended to provoke an ideological shift and to generate a new conception of the human person, of subjectivity, marriage, the family and society...

...In the poorest sectors of society, women often bring up children on their own...

...A government document drawn up in 1993 and obtained by the Peruvian journal Oiga revealed exactly how large the population problem loomed in the government's scheme of things...

...nstead of recognizing these realities, the Vatican is trying to discredit feminism...

...In the planning stages of the Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development (1992), the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (1994), and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), the Vatican was vocal on questions of family, marriage, divorce and reproductive health...

...The Catholic Church's position appears to be out of touch with public opinion...

...of artificial contraception...

...A key battlesite was the "Draft Platform for Action," a preparatory document for the Beijing conference...

...The senators complained that "many people use the word without further clarification, claiming that masculine and feminine respond merely to cultural and sociological constructions and not to biological conditions that constitute the psychology of woman and man...

...While it may be amusing to think of the Catholic Church hierarchy wading through feminist theory, its attempts to demonize feminism by associating it with communism should not be taken lightly...

...Women have also become prominent actors in grassroots social movements...

...By challenging the word "gender" and alternative definitions of family, the Church hopes to strike a blow at the very foundations of feminism...

...Argentine President Carlos Menem was recruited to the cause, and tried to get a declaration affirming the sacredness of life from the moment of conception included in the Presidential Summit Meeting of Latin American leaders held in Cartagena just before the Cairo conference...

...According to critics of "gender," once people accept that differences between men and women are socially constructed and hence modifiable, then the road is open for legalized abortion, the acceptance of homosexuality, the recognition of "irregular" families, and the collapse of family values...

...Every Chilean, said the dissident senators, had the constitutional duty to preserve "the essential values of Chilean tradition...

...The Catholic Church has also found itself pitted against multilateral lending institutions over population-control policies...

...These senators defined the family as the stable union of men and women within marriage, and they deemed inadmissable any term or action that threatened the family or "admitted that persons of the same sex might constitute a family...

...As Cecilia Olivares of the Free Choice Information Group (GIRE) in Mexico points out, "Despite its status as observer, the Vatican-a state that includes neither women nor children in its territory and whose members don't have sex and do not reproduce since they have made a vow of chastity-places obstacles in the way of decisions on the sexual and reproductive lives of millions of people on the planet...

...Bishop Aguer went on to quote well-known U.S...

...The Catholic Church's defense of the poor--especially in these neoliberal times-is a praiseworthy goal, and the argument that the North is imposing population policies on the South is not without some validity...

...Fujimori answered his critics in a speech at Beijing, where he characterized himself as "a blue-jeans President" in touch with contemporary problems...

...Not surprisingly, this language led to comparisons between Fujimori's population control and the Nazi's "final solution...

...This definition of gender is considered a dangerously destabilizing concept in Latin American circles close to the Catholic Church, one that undermines the natural relations of marriage and reproduction...

...But, of course, this was precisely the definition of gender that the Vatican found perturbing...

...One out of every two pregnancies in Mexico and one out of every three in Peru ends in abortion...

...The poll showed that 95% of the population believed in God, yet 80% also said that Peruvians agreed with using contraceptives...

...In order to do this, the Church uses trendy-sounding rhetoric which equates feminist platforms with imperialism...

...But for many women in the hemisphere, abortion is not an absolute good-it is, rather, a desperate remedy...

...Larrain also argued that reproductive rights implied a view of reproduction in a "purely animal context, dehumanized the concept of sex, and opened the door to the argument in favor of abortion...

...For example, the Church put pressure on Latin American governments to send anti-abortion delegates to the Cairo conference...

...In his letter, the Pope recognizes that women have frequently been marginalized and even reduced to slavery, and he expresses regret that certain "sons of the Church" might have contributed to women's oppression...

...feminist Shulamit Firestone's Jean Franco is the author of Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (Columbia University Press, 1990) and a member of NACLA's editorial board...