Gender, Sexuality and the Latin American Left: testing the transformation (original) (raw)
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SEEKING RIGHTS FROM THE LEFT Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Pink Tide
Seeking Rights from the Left offers a unique comparative assessment of left-leaning Latin American governments by examining their engagement with feminist, women's, and LGBT movements and issues. Focusing on the “Pink Tide” in eight national cases—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela—the contributors evaluate how the Left addressed gender- and sexuality-based rights through the state. Most of these governments improved the basic conditions of poor women and their families. Many significantly advanced women's representation in national legislatures. Some legalized same-sex relationships and enabled their citizens to claim their own gender identity. They also opened opportunities for feminist and LGBT movements to press forward their demands. But at the same time, these governments have largely relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power, ignoring or rejecting the more challenging elements of a social agenda and engaging in strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights. Moreover, the comparative examination of such rights arenas reveals that the Left's more general political and economic projects have been profoundly, if at times unintentionally, informed by traditional understandings of gender and sexuality.
Seeking Rights from the Left: Latin American LGBTQ+ Politics
ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, 2023
Nearly a decade ago, I attended a regional academic conference in Medellín, Colombia, to present on an eight-country study I was coordinating, which asked: do LeA governments help to achieve women's and LGBTQ+ people's rights? Exploring a long-held assumption, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from across the Americas were focusing on the "Pink Tide" (2000-2015), studying whether governments which sought to eliminate inequality included gender-and sexuality-based movements and demands. I walked out of the conference hall one evening with collaborators hailing from Canada to Argentina to the sight of hundreds of people gathered in a candlelight vigil. We drew close, eager to understand their plight. "Con mis hijos no te metas!" read the slogans on their baby blue and pink banners: don't mess with my kids! A middle-aged woman thrust pamphlets at us explaining their demand: to stop the promotion of "gender ideology" through sex education programs. They claimed that teaching children gender is a social construct, that people should have control over their bodies, and that LGBTQ+ people are deserving of dignity, was a frontal attack the family and could convert boys and girls to homosexuality. As my dispirited colleagues explained
Latin American Politics and Society , 2020
Seeking Rights from the Left is an original and provocative comparative assessment of eight Pink Tide nations and their engagement with the demands of feminist and queer movements. Elisabeth Jay Friedman has assembled a noteworthy group of distinguished and fresh voices, which outline and analyze the ways the contemporary shift to the left in Latin America has (or has not) addressed gender-and sexualitybased rights. The volume illuminates the paradoxical policies, actions, rhetoric, and relationships among states and social movements in the region from roughly 2000 to 2015. The depth and broad scope of the book make it one of the most comprehensive and innovative publications on the impact of left-leaning governance in Latin America. The book is divided into a foreword, an introduction, and eight chapters, each analyzing national case studies, followed by an afterword. The introduction, written by Friedman and Constanza Tabbush, is a clear and well-formulated overview of the policy arenas covered in the book and includes a detailed section on the conceptual and methodological framework. Although the volume has a total of 16 contributors, the chapters are seamlessly tied together through a common objective of illuminating the complicated and contradictory impact of the Pink Tide on women and queer communities. The national profiles are organized from most to least successful in implementing progressive policies that challenge the heteropatriarchal societal order. Each chapter provides rich historical context specific to the cultural and geographical location in which the analysis takes place without overwhelming the reader with arduous detail. Furthermore, the contributors engage in a refreshingly approachable writing style that is appealing to academics, students, and activists alike. Friedman's volume deepens Latin American studies scholarship by engaging with interdisciplinary methods, concepts, and frameworks that draw from critical development studies, as well as gender and sexuality scholarship. The overarching question that Friedman and the contributors seek to answer is whether left-leaning governance has led to widespread progress in the struggle for gender and sexuality rights in Latin America. The national cases profiled in Seeking Rights from the Left demonstrate that the answer is complex and varied. While the past twenty years have been a period of rapid change for the region, that change has been inconsistent. Ultimately, the relationship between progressive political and conservative religious forces has determined which countries have enjoyed greater transformation and which have suffered "a lost decade" for gender and sexual equality. Several lessons are to be gleaned from this volume. The first and perhaps most salient is that when analyzed through the lens of gender and sexuality, the ties that bind Pink Tide nations as sharing a common political experience quickly disintegrate. Although poor women undoubtedly achieved noteworthy economic advancement as a result of Pink Tide policies, the positive impact on women and queer populations is much more inconsistent, acute, and often paradoxical. Pink Tide nations BOOK REVIEWS 161
Hypatia
, in the afterword of this book, correctly characterizes it as an "unprecedented, richly detailed collection" of essays (306) that enable us to examine a period in which center-left governments provided an alternative to the neoliberal wave that left nations impoverished, with a more inequality and corruption, by the end of the twentieth century. The Left's resurgence renewed coalitions, and its political form was for the most part defined as populist, following Ernesto Laclau's interpretation (Laclau 2005). In terms of gender and sexuality, the hope that this Pink Tide generated at the beginning of the twenty-first century was based on the actions of militant progressive forces that included women's, feminist, and LGBT organizations, which in some cases, like Argentina, led to the granting of rights for trans citizens and a new conception of identity and inclusiveness. The elections of the early 2000s politicized gender and sexuality for the first time through the introduction of policies dealing with women's work, gender identity, and gay marriage. The integration of gender and sexuality in the political debate led to a backlash that was one of the factors in the reorganization of the right's agenda after the peak of the Pink Wave around 2008. At this time Venezuela,
The Reactive Left: Gender Equality and the Latin American Pink Tide
Social Politics , 2017
This introduction assesses the effects of Latin America’s pink tide on gender equality in the region. We find that left governments and left competition provide an opportunity for advancing gender equality. However, the dominant pattern during Latin America’s pink tide was one of a reactive left. Pink tide governments typically did not have clearly articulated gender equality initiatives on their immediate policy agendas. Instead, left governments mostly reacted to pressures from domestic gender equality activists. In addition to left ideology and feminist mobilization, left party type and policy type explain progress and setbacks in gender equality across six outcome areas.
Lasa Fórum, 2020
A conservative backlash against gender equality has been detected in different parts of the world. It can be traced from the 1990s, when new coalitions against gender rights were formed to oppose feminist and LGBTQ movements in the United Nations international conferences of Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995). Reproductive and sexual rights have always been especially contentious. But how did conservative actors bring “gender” to public debate as a fundamentally negative agenda in the 2000s? And what explains its effects in Latin America, where the campaign against “gender ideology” has brought thousands to the streets of different cities to protest against sex education and same-sex marriage? In this article, I will briefly present three chains of facts, ideas and actors which could help us approach these questions. The answers are not to be found in any of these factors alone, but in how they intersect at this precise context. The first corresponds to the temporality of “gender” as a political disputed set of moral and political values and proposals. The second takes us more directly to the changing patterns of religious adhesion and political action. Finally, the third focuses on the complex relations between the backlash against gender and the democratic backsliding in the 2000s.
REVISTA SAAP
The "pink tide" or turn to the left that altered the Latin American political landscape brought promises to promote equality, social justice, and new forms of democratic participation on the one hand, and stronger and more centralized states, with greater capacity to intervene and regulate the economy and society on the other hand. This paper examines if and how these promises affected women's policy machinery in four countries in the region. Now that the pink tide era is fading and the region is facing an increase in conservative and anti-gender movements, it is important to know if statesociety architectures changed in any substantial way to provide some level of protection or resilience against backsliding.
The moral crusade on "Gender Ideology": notes on conservative political alliances in Latin America
Sociologies in Dialogue, 2018
This article presents a brief synthesis of a broad and complex situation comprised by a reaction against advances in sexual and reproductive rights that emerged in several Latin American countries showing common elements, among which a shared vocabulary that labels such rights as “gender ideology”. Politicians and interest groups, acting as opportunistic moral entrepreneurs, have come to adopt the term as an electoral strategy by converting the grammar of the political dispute into the moral conflict between “good citizens” and others, often identified as feminists, homosexuals ands trans people. Such Latin American crusade against “gender ideology” in its different national manifestations has already various consequences and results, but also common ones such as the impediment to the adoption of a gender perspective in educational policies, thus contributing to the maintenance of inequalities between men and women and above all to discrimination and violence against gays, lesbians, trans people and others.