GENDERED ARRANGEMENTS IN PATRIARCHAL PERUVIAN CULTURE By Sharon L. Flannery   Fundamental to the argument of how women and men develop gender identification and feminine and masculine personality within existing Latin American patriarchal culture is a conceptualization. This process begins early in life, anticipating and reinforced through the acquisition of one's sex role, a concept denoting the transmission of behavior, role, attitudes, and beliefs to the next generation through direct prescription and implicit expectations in the culture's central socializing institutions. "It is a process that is largely unconscious, which is the result of a complex interaction of biological forces, parental assignment of and attitudes toward the sex of their children, and family psychodynamics" (Renny Golden, The Hour of the Poor, the Hour of Women: Latin American Speak Out (New York: Crossroad. 1990, pg. 113). From earliest infancy on, little girls introject representations and self and other encoded with culturally defined gender attitudes and expectations. These introjects provide the unconscious psychological infrastructure that creates within woman a receptiveness to the ideologically and socially subordinate status accorded to them by patriarchal culture. The subjectivity sacrificed, women are prepared to assume their role, one that calls upon their capacity to maintain connection to others' needs at all cost, frequently at the expense of their own psychic integrity and health. Women fulfill this role in the best of times and in the worst of time. One could say that in Latin America and more particularly Peru, the majority of women manage to care for others' needs within a context of grinding poverty and social violence. The misery is the same for everyone, but women live with it day and night, seeing the children cry from hunger, watching their stomachs swollen with worms. To them falls the care of the children with diseases that can not be cured, to them falls seeing the children die without being able to do anything. The women are the ones who know everyday that there is not enough food to go around. My friend, Raul, speaks of the many differences in the way boys and girls are treated and raised by their culture. It is not much different than we did in the U.S. prior to the women's movement. Girls are raised to clean the house, cook the food, and take care of the family; while the boys are taught to take out the trash, be the man of the family and protect them when the father leaves. They clearly have gender stereotypes and are encouraging such stereotyping to go on. Raul told me that in Peru, girls are not allowed to have a boyfriend until they turn 18 years old; however, they have no such rules for boys. The Peruvian people try very hard to teach those values that our parent tried to instill in all of us - - trust, honesty, and fairness.