“Ni paisana, ni Jacinta”: Language and the Scaling of Indigenous Femininity in Peru

Abstract

In Peru, Andean indigeneity is often discursively gendered as female. Such a connection between indigeneity and femaleness is invoked in a range of discourses that marginalize the status of Indigenous individuals, and different forms of Indigenous heritage in the country. Yet does this imply that all variations of Indigenous femininity are evaluated and ideologized the same way? This article complicates the semiotic logics and frameworks by which Indigenous female figures have been evaluated and analyzed across different historical moments and ethnographic contexts in Peru. I use the concept of “scale” (Blommaert 2007; Gal and Irvine 2019) to highlight the conflicting and competing ideologized stances and modes of evaluation that compare Indigenous identities, female bodies, and linguistic practices in relation to each other. Through this analysis, I will show that the evaluation of Indigenous female identities is enmeshed in a matrix of competing ideologized scalar regimes, highlighting the need to think about the construction and evaluation of racial and gendered types as shifting across multiple semiotic fields and different ideologized paradigms of evaluation.