Paper short abstract:

Rwandan gender friendly laws have reshaped rural femininities, generating exclusion and inclusion, constructing new moral and social categories of women with more or less right to land. This paper explores the case of women living in informal monogamous and polygamous unions and their land rights.

Paper long abstract:

Rwanda is known for its commitment in promoting gender equality, which has become one of the government priorities after 1994. Being the economy mainly based on subsistence agriculture, land reforms are considered key to foster women's empowerment. The Law 22/1999 allowed daughters to inherit land and wives married under community of property to co-own land with their husbands. The Land Law and the Land Tenure Registration Program have also strengthened women's access to land, by obliging married couples to have both names on their land title(s).

Although these new laws and programs have contributed to reshape rural femininities as "more equal to men" than before, some categories of women have been actually produced as "excluded from" the right to land: mainly the women who are informally cohabiting with their spouses, either in monogamous or polygamous unions. The Rwandan Law only recognizes the civil marriage, leaving out all other forms of consensual unions, religious or traditional. The research conducted by our Centre show that women living in such kind of unions, with no secure right to land, risk to be left destitute in case of death or separation from their husbands.

The new reforms and laws have produced new gendered hierarchies, new moral and social categories of women with less (or more) right to land, and new form of subaltern and hegemonic femininities. This paper explores such identity and power dynamics through an analysis of the experience of ordinary rural men, women and local leaders dealing with land related conflict resolution.