Toward a Decolonial Feminist Research on Indigeneity in Contemporary Peru

Abstract

Author(s): Valdivia, Carmen | Abstract: This paper proposes a decolonial feminist framework for doing research on the representation of Indigenous women in contemporary Peruvian cultural and media production. It argues for an analytical methodology that recognizes Indigenous women gendered experience of colonialism—of being subjected to violence, made invisible and muted throughout historiography, and reduced to stagnant and degrading stereotypes in current cultural representations. It appositionally reads both the modern Peruvian nation-state and Western academic research as structures of colonial figurations that obscure the gender complexity of Indigenous identity, engaging a gender perspective that considers the contested relationship between Indigeneity and Peruvian identity, while centering Indigenous women’ political and cultural mobilities shed light on the complexities of identitarian politics and the role of hetero—and ethnonormative neoliberal regimes.