Reforma agraria: representaciones de género y política de tierras en Colombia

This article analyses the role and operation of gender representations regarding, on the one hand, the definition and allocation of women’s interests in relation to access to land processes and, on the other, their actual achievements in this respect. For this purpose, it examines the gender representations displayed by peasants’ organizations, women peasants’ organizations and civil servants during the negotiation processes for including a gender perspective into the Colombian land policy. In this regard, special attention is given to Law 30 of 1988 and Law 160 of 1994. More specifically, the article argues that the symbolic constructions of the role of peasant women and men have significantly determined the kind of formal and de facto recognition of land ownership rights. From a Bourdieun perspective, it is maintained that those participating in the land policy negotiation where constituted by habitus, of which gender representations are expressions. Besides being closely connected to the socioeconomic and cultural location of the subjects, such representations function as one of the resources whereby agents provide meaning to social reality. In this sense, the article reads the land policy in Colombia as a Bourdieun field where gender representations guided both the perception and the actions taking place there. Such field is organized into a grid of institutional practices and discourses seeking to circumstantially regulate land and land conflicts.