Social Control, Punishment, and Gender: Silenced Memories of Peruvian Women in Wartime

Abstract

This chapter examines prison experiences of women who joined two Peruvian left-wing armed groups, the Peruvian Communist Party-Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Female participation in this recent stage of political violence in Peru (1980-2000) was widespread, which led to the construction of the social representations of women belonging to these groups as “cruel, perverse and unnatural”. This stereotype and prejudice contribute to punished women social, symbolic and judicially more severe than men, even if they were accused of lesser charges. Many of the punishments that these women suffered, were and still are, based on gender. Furthermore, this gendered character of punishment is clearly interwoven with another kind of violence and discrimination, racism.