A Sign of New Times: Indigenous Feminist Intellectuals in Peru

The United Nations Fourth World conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 had the mandate to include "the voices of all women everywhere". Participant countries were invited to send delegates from their different ethnic groups and nationalities. Peruvian feminist organizations prepared a delegation that included indigenous women through a series of sessions summoning women from different peasant communities in the Andes and the two indigenous federations from the Amazonia, which until that moment did not have a women's section or a female representative in their directives. Very rich processes have occurred since then. The space created for Beijing gradually became one for the dissemination and discussion of the ideas of the transnational indigenous movement; and the funding available from the organizations supporting this movement allowed Peruvian indigenous leaders to attend international meetings and engage in discussions of their counterparts in the rest of the Americas to now be part of the . They are now part of the Continental Network of Indigenous Women that held its last meeting in Peru. This paper examines the discourses of a group of Peruvian indigenous female leaders- articulating radical dissidence, indigenous rights, feminism of difference, anti racism, and ideas about human development, that have evolved in more than a decade of intense debate in these NGO-funded and protected spaces, and in the local political scenarios where some of them have become local politicians.