ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a brief overview of the relations between the state and peasantries through time, followed by discussion of the theories on gender and the state. It examines in a preliminary way how the relations between socially articulated peasant femininities and state-sponsored images of women were negotiated, and through which practices. In the arena of political culture and political symbolism, peasant women protested against attempts to shape their identities. Protest in this sense refers not to classic actions of formal protest but to resistance by ethnic minority peasant women to attempts by the state to hegemonize female identities. Over the period under consideration in this chapter, the Peruvian state attempted to hegemonize, via its programmes and legislation, various ideological femininities which were generally remote from peasant women's concerns and identities. The chapter also has attempted to illustrate these points by examining state constructions and re-presentations of femininities, and the resistance to these by groups in civil society.
