"Una super madre al poder". Representation and positioning of a woman political leader in the Bolivian case of the ex-president Jeanine Añez

In recent years, in Latin America there has been a substantial improvement in formal gender equality thanks to some government agreements that have implemented legal and institutional reforms to guarantee women's fundamental rights and legal equality be-tween men and women (Marchionni, 2018). This created an institutional mechanism that have promoted not only an improvement of women's condition in terms of equality, but also the adoption of laws against familiar violence and in favour of women's right to a life free from violence. In Bolivia, the political presence of women in state and non-state public spaces and their protagonism in social movements and other collective actions has gradually increased and has contributed to a wider democracy and important transformations in political culture. A decisive contribution has been given by Evo Morales, especially by the law 26/2010 which allowed a wide access of women to Parliament. At the same time, howev-er, this law has highlighted resistances and structural restrictions of a patriarchal-oriented, colonialist and liberal political system that prevents the gender equality that has been reached in the legal system from being reached also at a substantial level, overcoming conditions of inequality, discriminations and social exclusion. Within this framework, our contribution analyses the figure of Jeanine Añez, who was in-terim President after the golpe against Morales in 2019, until the election of the current President Arce. She’s leader of the conservative, right-wing populist, and neoliberist-oriented party “Movimiento democrata social”; she’s a Catholic and white lawyer com-ing from the upper middle class and she introduces herself as a woman aware of her gender identity and who has embodied some principles of feminism, joining them with nationalist and liberal positions. The analysis of her political discourse shows a “femonationalist” (Farris, 2019) repre-sentation of the woman, combined with that of “super mother” (Montero, 2019) who is loving and dedicated to the care of her children, that are people. This representation, in which her gender identity, conservative values, ideologic position, party affiliation, religious faith converge, corresponds to a contradictory political dis-course that uses, on the one hand, the maternal feminine to show sensitivity towards the excluded people, and on the other hand racist expressions towards indigenous peoples. Her representation ends up reproducing gender stereotypes and strengthening the patri-archal colonial social structure, in line with other more studied cases of women leaders.