Abstract
This article focuses on youth feminist political action in Ecuador and Peru and its relationship to contemporary gender hierarchies. I examine how and why youth gender justice activists understand their political action differently from the professionalized adult feminists who mobilize them. Grounded theory was used to collect and analyze interviews with 21 young women and men activists on gender justice. Youth activists seek cultural changes using social advocacy to target the family, household, and intimate partnerships, what I describe as politicizing the sociocultural. They develop new ways of perceiving political action in response to challenges produced by emergent gender hierarchies, which they understand as blurred gender inequalities or processes that simultaneously enable and constrain gender equality.
Research on the professionalization of feminism in Latin America (Alvarez 1999; Markowitz and Tice 2002) has served as an entry point for theorizing the complex relationships between different sectors of feminism, diverse forms of political action, and changing social and political contexts. Yet, young people’s feminisms in Latin America are largely overlooked in this research. This article focuses on youth feminist political action in Ecuador and Peru and its relationship to contemporary gender hierarchies.
Professionalized adult feminism refers to one sector of women’s movements that originated among middle-class, educated women in the 1970s in these two countries. It was the first sector to self-identify as feminist in contemporary history and arose during democratic transitions when mass movements demanded changes to long-standing, elite-controlled economic and political institutions (Barrig 1989; Vargas 1989). Professionalization (Markowitz and Tice 2002) began in the 1980s as feminists developed bureaucratically structured organizations with skilled, employed staff in order to provide training and support to low-income women’s groups (Rousseau 2006; Vargas 1992).
In the 1990s, this sector shifted its goals and strategies to seek legal changes using policy advocacy targeted at state institutions (Barrig 2002; Lind 2003, 2004). Feminist policy advocacy resulted in key policy gains, such as free reproductive health services, laws criminalizing rape and domestic violence, quotas for women political candidates, and state agencies charged with advancing gender equality (Barrig 2001; Coe 2012; Lind 2003). However, it also prompted opposition from the Catholic Church leadership and its lay allies (Coe 2011; Lind 2012) and heightened gaps between different groups of mobilized women (Lind 2004; Rousseau 2006).
In the new millennium, professionalized adult feminists helped mobilize a younger generation of activists through gender training in community and university programs (Coe, Goicolea, and Öhman 2013; Goicolea, Coe, and Öhman 2014). These youth gender justice activists distinguish their political action from that of professionalized adult feminism. They seek cultural changes using social advocacy to target the family, household, and intimate partnerships, what I describe as “politicizing the sociocultural”. In this article, I clarify that a context of blurred gender inequalities shapes new ways for youth gender justice activists to perceive their political action. I develop the concept of “blurred gender inequalities” to capture the challenges young activists face due to processes that simultaneously enable and constrain gender equality. Blurred gender inequalities are due not only to progressive and regressive changes to gender relations and societal opposition to feminism, but also to adult control over youth.
I make three contributions to feminist social movement theory. First, I locate new forms of feminist political action that respond to emergent gender hierarchies. Second, I advance an intersectional analysis of gender and generation through my focus on youth activism. Lastly, I link my findings to an innovative theoretical framework composed of three tools: the multi-institutional politics approach (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008), social authoritarianism (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Dagnino 1998), and social generation theory (Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011; Woodman and Wyn 2014).
This article is based on qualitative interviews with 21 youths, women and men, in Peru and Ecuador who were mobilized into gender justice activism by professionalized adult feminists. I use the term “gender justice” because, even though all activists identified themselves as part of gender, social, and youth justice movements, some were hesitant to label their political action as feminist, since this term was associated with professionalized adult feminism in both countries. Before turning to the analysis, I will present the theoretical framework, structure of gender hierarchies in the family in Ecuador and Peru, and methodology.
Theorizing Gender in Social Movements
Gender theory in social movements has developed in response to the inattention to gendered processes in social movement theory (Ferree and Mueller 2007; Taylor 1999). In particular, gender researchers engage with the two main contemporary paradigms for explaining why social movements adopt a certain trajectory: new social movement theory and political process theory. According to new social movement theory, relative deprivation in post-industrial economies generates new types of social movements that pursue demands related to quality of life, making them distinct from class-based movements in previous industrial economies (Olofsson 1988). Relative deprivation is due in part to rising expectations linked to post-materialist values that accompany post-industrial economies (Ingelhart 1990; Neidhardt and Rucht 1991). It is further due to new types of insecurities, such as environmental degradation and nuclear arms, which threaten the quality of life (Neidhardt and Rucht 1991; Touraine 1981). Lastly, new social movements form in opposition to the life world of advanced capitalism, characterized by bureaucracies and rationalizing policies, and offer participants alternative collective identities (Melucci 1988; Touraine 1981).
According to political process theory, social movement trajectories depend upon the aggrieved populations’ organizational strength (resource mobilization), their perceptions of possible success (cognitive liberation), and their alignment with the wider political environment (political opportunity structures) (Eisinger 1973; McAdam 1982; McCarthy and Zald 1977). Other factors include protest tactics available to movements making claims upon the state, captured by Tilly’s (1978) tactical repertoire, and fluctuations of social movement activity and interactions with authorities, encompassed by Tarrow’s (1994) cycle of protest. The contentious politics approach builds upon political process theory to bring into focus the relational dynamics between nonroutine collective action and governments (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001).
While these paradigms are pillars of contemporary social movement scholarship, gender researchers demonstrate their gender-blindness and rectify this by integrating gender theory (Ferree and Mueller 2007; Taylor 1999). Gender theorizing of social movements demonstrates diverse forms of mobilization not captured by political process theory or new social movements, including challenges to social institutions other than the state (Katzenstein 1998; Taylor 1996) and across different historical periods (Rupp and Taylor 1999; Whittier 1995). Moreover, gender theorizing of social movements expands central concepts of these paradigms, for example, political opportunities to include gender opportunities (McCammon et al. 2001; Shriver, Adams, and Einwohner 2013) and tactical repertoires to include both cultural and material strategies (Taylor et al. 2009). Rather than working within political process theory or new social movement theory, I propose an alternative framework for theorizing gender in social movements, whose usefulness I demonstrate with my study findings below. My framework consists of three tools.
The first tool, the multi-institutional politics approach, was developed within social movement studies and builds directly upon gender research (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008). Multi-institutional politics draws upon conceptions of power developed by gender theories among other perspectives (Butler 1993; Collins 1990; Connell 1987; Taylor 1999; West and Zimmerman 1987). In contrast to conceptions of power as concentrated in formal political institutions, multi-institutional politics defines power relations as dispersed across and embedded within manifold societal institutions and routine everyday interactions (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008, 82-84). Accordingly, no single institution can be assumed to be the primary site for gender politics or challenges to gender hierarchies. Moreover, multi-institutional politics proposes that the operation of power varies across different institutions (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008, 85-87). Accordingly, strategies for challenging gender hierarchies will vary depending on institutional logics and even diverge as multiple institutions contradict one another. Multi-institutional politics further proposes that all institutions are reciprocally constructed and sustained by both cultural meanings and material practices (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008, 83-84). Accordingly, challenges to gender hierarchies may pursue change to meaning systems, classifications, and rules and/or resource allocation. Finally, multi-institutional politics situates social movements in space/place and time: For challenges to gender hierarchies, this requires integrating additional concepts that facilitate the contextualization of gender and other social hierarchies, such as generation/age, as my framework does here.
The second concept, social authoritarianism, emerged within the cultural politics approach to Latin American social movements (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998). Social authoritarianism denotes how gender, race, and class in Latin America establish “different categories of people hierarchically disposed in their respective ‘places’ in society” (Dagnino 1998, 47). Social place is a stringent and discernible code pervading all social institutions, including the family, in the construction of “unequal and hierarchical organization of social relations” (Dagnino 1998, 47-48). Consequently, cultural meanings embedded in social practices in daily life take on political relevance (Dagnino 1998). Challenges to gender, race, and class hierarchies in Latin America are engaged in contesting social authoritarianism. Dagnino (1998, 48) states, with regard to women, blacks, and gay people, that “a great part of their political struggle, in fact, is directed towards confronting this authoritarian culture.” Even social movements making explicitly material demands challenge cultural deprivation by demonstrating “that they are people with rights, so as to recover their dignity and status as citizens and even as human beings” (Dagnino 2003, 48). Social movements demand rights not only from the state but also from society, thereby constructing citizenship that goes beyond political-legal notions to include cultural connotations (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998, 12).
The third tool, social generation theory, was developed within the global sociology of youth (Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011; Woodman and Wyn 2014). Social generation theory proposes interpreting youth political practice through the lens of emergent contemporary conditions rather than that of previous conditions no longer present. While Latin American youth are very concerned with political issues, they are not attracted to organizations, activities, and spaces linked to state-centered politics (Coe and Vandegrift 2015). Instead, consistent with research on youth politics globally (e.g., Harris 2008; O’Toole and Gale 2010; Rossi 2009; Skelton 2013), Latin American youth prefer non-institutional forms of politics closely tied to everyday life experiences organized in local spaces and in virtual worlds (Coe and Vandegrift 2015).
Incipient research on youth feminisms in Latin America suggests the same generational break. Regardless of whether youth are mobilized into gender justice activism by professionalized adult feminism or through other forms of activism, they do not identify with professionalized adult feminists and define their own feminist political action differently (Chen 2014; Epelde 2009; Gómez-Ramírez and Reyes Cruz 2008; Moncayo 2011; Taft 2011; Vega 2012). This generational break occurs because contemporary youth develop their political identities and analyses under distinct emergent social conditions, as previous generations did not. Latin American youth become politically conscious through new peer-centered channels located within everyday experiences that are connected to wider processes of consumerism, digitalization, and globalization (Vandegrift, forthcoming). Gender hierarchies constitute emergent conditions that remain insufficiently explored in youth politics research (Coe, Goicolea, and Öhman 2013).
Combined, these three tools offer an innovative framework for locating new forms of feminist political action that respond to emergent gender hierarchies, as well as for advancing an intersectional analysis of gender and generation in youth activism.
Gender Hierarchies in the Family in Peru and Ecuador
Research on the structure of gender hierarchies in Peru and Ecuador sheds light on why youth gender justice activists perceive the family as an important target for their political action. Studies indicate mixed trends in the structure of gender hierarchies, especially with regard to the family. On the one hand, gender hierarchies in the family appear to adapt to the widening of women’s positions in other spheres (Carlo et al. 2007; Chant 2002; Lavrin 1987). While Fuller (2001) found that Peruvian men defined the public spheres of work, politics, and leisure as masculine, her work and other studies indicate that these spheres are no longer the exclusive purview of men. Women have dramatically increased their participation in the formal labor market, securing household resources and taking on political representation (Chant 2002; Lind 2012; Pribilsky 2007). Studies further find that the (male-headed) family no longer serves as the major production unit; patriarchal power in the family has declined; and norms and practices limiting sexuality to reproduction have waned, all of which may prompt families to construct more flexible and equal gender positions (Carlo et al. 2007; Lavrin 1987; Salles and Tuirán 1997).
On the other hand, gender hierarchies in the family appear to react against the widening of women’s positions in other spheres. Studies indicate that unequal gender relations within couples and families remain a source of oppressive experiences for women (Ames 2013, 275). Women and girls are expected to and do perform the bulk of care and domestic work in society, including under exploitative conditions as domestics (Ames 2013; de Casanova 2013). Men understand marriage and fatherhood as necessary to fulfill adult masculinity, yet define this as the provision of material resources and social prestige, even when this involves external migration (Fuller 2001; Pribilsky 2007). Some families draw upon new gender equality discourses to invest in daughters’ education and support them in forgoing marriage and motherhood altogether (Ames 2013, 278). Yet, while gender equality discourses offer women a range of alternatives in these two countries, they do not appear to do the same for men, as young men activists in Ecuador depicted the difficulty of developing alternative masculinities in the absence of supportive ideologies (Goicolea, Coe, and Öhman 2014). Indeed, Chant (2002) describes ordinary men’s reaction to women’s income-earning as a defensive and/or negative “backlash” manifested in increased intimate partner violence and even the murdering of young working women.
The impact of gender hierarchies in the family extends well beyond its internal structures. The family in these contexts has long been a core institution for constructing not only normative gender discourses and practices but also patriarchal nation-building in the absence of effective political and civil society institutions (Dore 1997; Lind 2012). Particular sociocultural characteristics ensure the continuation of the family’s centrality from generation to generation: strong allegiances to one’s family, maintenance of close physical and emotional family bonds, importance of the extended family, recurrent supportive behaviors among members, and a collectivist focus (Carlo et al. 2007). Thus, given that the family is a core institution for the construction of gender hierarchies, Ecuador and Peru offer unique settings to study new forms of feminist political action that respond to emergent gender hierarchies as well as advance an intersectional analysis of gender and generation in youth activism.
Methods
This study arose from the implications of previous data analysis in Peru and Ecuador, which showed a gap between how adult reproductive rights advocates and youth sexual health activists understood their respective political action (Coe 2012; Coe et al. 2015; Coe, Goicolea, and Öhman 2013). Youth activists defined their political action differently even from adults who mobilized them. This prompted the question of why the younger generation understood their political action differently. To examine this question, I carried out a new study among youth gender justice activists, 1 using Charmaz’s (2006) constructivist approach to grounded theory in order to focus on how they constructed meanings and actions within their activism.
My first step was theoretically sampling participants (Charmaz 2006; Hood 2007). I began with a sensitizing concept (Blumer 1954) from my previous data: constructing and negotiating “youth” (Coe et al. 2015). I sampled activists who identified themselves as belonging to a youth generation of gender justice activism even though their chronological age varied: Most were in their 20s, a few were into their early 30s, and all had been mobilized during their early teens. Prior to fieldwork, I found youth associations dedicated to gender justice activism with the help of contacts established during my two previous studies as well as my former work on reproductive rights advocacy in Peru. I contacted youth associations by e-mail and phone to request a single interview with as many members as they preferred: This ranged from one to six members, as shown in Table 1. For four associations, I also re-analyzed an interview conducted for my previous study in addition to the new interviews. Participants consented to the use of their association’s real name and an individual pseudonym in study publications.
Participating Associations, Number of Interviews Conducted with Each Association, and Number of Members Interviewed
The second step was collecting rich data through intensive interviewing (Charmaz 2006). I developed “a few broad open-ended questions” to be able to “invite detailed discussion of the topic” (Charmaz 2006, 26). Questions asked activists which gender inequalities were important and required political action, how successful gender equality policies were in addressing gender inequalities and what other policy changes were needed, what feminist political action was needed and how activists perceived the feminist movement, and which term they preferred for conveying their gender justice goals and how they defined this term. Specific follow-up questions on emerging patterns were incorporated into interviews with subsequent participants (Hood 2007).
The third step was documenting emerging patterns through memo-writing (Charmaz 2006). During fieldwork, I made constant comparisons between empirical materials and emerging theoretical codes. The first pattern showed that even though members of youth associations had been mobilized directly by professionalized adult feminists, they consistently perceived their political action differently from that of professionalized adult feminism. Interviews further found that members of youth associations identified themselves as coming from popular (working-class/low-income) neighborhoods and prioritized actions directed toward these sectors. I wrote memos about these patterns in my field notes. Additional memos dealt with youth activists’ perceptions of gender hierarchies as unclear, of equal opportunity policies as contradictory, and of professionalized adult feminism as exclusionary.
Using preliminary patterns or theoretical codes, I sampled two additional groups of youth gender justice activists to compare their perceptions of political action (Charmaz 2006; Hood 2007). I interviewed youth associations of private university students, who identified themselves as coming from middle-class, professional sectors, and I interviewed individual youth activists employed in professionalized adult feminist organizations. These two groups also distinguished their political action from that of professionalized adult feminism and perceived it similarly to the first group of youth activists. Because all youth associations were mix-gendered, many interviews involved both women and men. They showed similar understandings of activism, but differed in how they perceived their embodied experiences of gender inequalities.
I ended data collection when emerging theoretical categories were full or saturated in the field (Charmaz 2006; Hood 2007). In total, 21 youth activists from eight organizations participated in interviews lasting between 45 and 120 minutes. Participants were based in the two largest cities in each country: Quito and Guayaquil in Ecuador, Lima and Arequipa in Peru. Standard and feminist ethical procedures were followed. I conducted all interviews in Spanish, analyzed the Spanish transcriptions, and translated the quotations used in this article myself.
The fourth step was coding interview transcripts with constant comparative analysis (Charmaz 2006; Hood 2007). Open coding involved studying every line of written data comparatively and labeling each line/segment with a word(s) that reflected ideas identified in the data. The gerund (“-ing”) form was used to code for action (Charmaz 2006, 48-49). Open codes were sorted into clusters by grouping together those that related to one another, and each group was studied and named. In focused coding, these preliminary categories were used to re-examine all open codes, compare them with one another, and discard irrelevant codes. In theoretical coding, the connections between categories were examined and synthesized into a whole. As with interviewing, I sought to grasp participants’ perspectives by going deep into the data while recognizing that I constructed codes by interacting with the data (Charmaz 2006, 47).
The fifth step was re-constructing theory (Charmaz 2006). I developed three theoretical categories that captured how youth gender justice activists perceived their political action: building a movement, defining feminist ideology, and politicizing the sociocultural. I developed three categories that clarified why they perceived their political action this way: blurred gender inequalities, contradictory gender equality policies, and exclusionary professionalized adult feminism. This article focuses on “politicizing the sociocultural” and “blurred gender inequalities” because these show new forms of feminist political action that respond to emergent gender hierarchies. Politicizing the sociocultural consisted of three sub-categories, as described in Table 2. The first sub-category, identifying key issues, captured how youth prioritized similar issues to professionalized adult feminism: advancing bodily autonomy (sexual and reproductive rights) and addressing violence against women. However, through the other two subcategories presented below, youth clearly distinguished their political action from that of professionalized adult feminism. The final step, integration with existing theory, is presented in the conclusion.
Theoretical Categories and Their Subcategories of How and Why Youth Gender Justice Activists Perceive Their Political Action
The How and Why of Youth Gender Justice Activism
Politicizing the Sociocultural
Youth gender justice activists distinguished their political action through two subcategories: questioning cultural discourses and practices on gender and engaging in fundamental change.
Questioning Cultural Discourses and Practices on Gender
This subcategory captured youth activists’ goals of changing cultural discourses and practices on gender in the family, household, and intimate partnerships. Even men—not just women—were directly implicated in the attainment of these goals. Youth activists wanted women to have more autonomy in the family and greater agency in intimate partnerships and men to take on child care and housework. Their goals stemmed from personal experiences that were constructed as collective goals when they realized, through activism, that other youth shared similar experiences. Miguel, of Critical Action Collective in Lima, conveyed this perspective: My parents both work as professionals, maybe even earn the same, but my mother does most of the domestic work. It is implicit that she will do it and, at best, my dad lends her support. These are two people trying to be equitable. . . . When I began activism, this phenomenon repeated itself and was no longer an isolated case, but rather part of a dynamic system that has been reproduced and internalized culturally.
Youth activists emphasized the need to change how people thought about gender practices in the family, household, and intimate partnerships. “The need is to work against the cultural; the issue is pedagogical, [to change] ways of thinking, mindsets,” explained Isabel, of Youth Agenda Space on Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Lima. Their goals were not merely about the redistribution of positions and tasks but also about the meanings assigned to these. David, of the same association, depicted how changed norms accompanied new practices: “Before, in my house, my family held the common belief that the man was the man and he did not enter the kitchen, wash dishes, or even do laundry. So I started doing these and it gradually became understood as normal”.
Linda, of Critical Action Collective in Lima, described the difficulty of making these goals a priority for activism in their contexts: Women’s sexual pleasure was a complete revelation for me. Yet it is criticized as frivolous or secondary in terms of what are the most important inequalities that we are experiencing. . . . Pleasure for some is a minor inequality; for others, a major one.
In addition to their own households and affective relationships, youth activists sought to change cultural discourses and practices on gender in the family by reaching other youth as well as closely related adults (parents, teachers) in secondary schools, community organizations, and universities. Raul, of Steps and Footprints in Guayaquil, illustrated: Our actions don’t just reach adolescents, but also their families. Recently, we had a campaign against femicide and behind the adolescents came the parents. Parents, who in the past were not open to the issue, are now committed to the issue, now that their children are participating in these processes, and teachers as well.
Maria, from Youth Political Coordinator for Gender Equity in Quito, explained, “A priority is working with women and youth; it is a job that has to be done because even though people have been told, ‘You have human rights,’ most don’t know what these are.”
Youth activists did not propose abandoning the goal of legal and policy change in state institutions. They perceived that professionalized adult feminism had, through policy advocacy, improved women’s access to public resources, such as reproductive health care and domestic violence prevention. But they perceived changes to cultural discourse and practices on gender in social institutions such as the family as generating transformative change, as Ana, of the Youth Political Coordinator for Gender Equity in Quito, explained: It is necessary to contest power in public policies but being conscious that you always have an institutional ceiling. . . . Public policies cannot become our struggle; rather they are part of the strategy to attain very specific things in the moment, because what we are seeking is a social struggle.
Moreover, youth activists saw their goals as filling a vital gap in the outcomes achieved by professionalized adult feminism to address violence against women and advance reproductive and sexual rights. Finally, by seeking to change other youth as well as closely related adults, youth activists advanced their mobilization goals of generating support for, and countering opposition to, gender justice at the grassroots. Yet, they recognized that gender justice activist groups in their contexts, including professionalized adult feminism, were small and had few resources, requiring prioritizing some goals over others.
Engaging in Fundamental Change
This subcategory captured youth activists’ main strategy of social advocacy through three codes: cultural training, bypassing the state, and battling sexism in everyday life. Cultural training consisted of youth activists collectively carrying out comprehensive learning activities with other youth and closely related adults in order to change their ways of thinking about and practicing gender. Referred to as formación in Spanish, cultural training consisted of critical reflection, consciousness raising, and knowledge construction. It was carried out through workshops with specific groups, as Paula, of Steps and Footprints in Guayaquil, conveyed: We work with adolescents in secondary schools. We have an extensive group of youth promoters who participate in their schools and are linked directly to our organization. After a process of dialogue, of reflection, of proposing alternatives in the face of men’s historical abuse of power, participants realize that something is missing not only in their homes but also in other spaces as well, like their schools.
Cultural training was also carried out through interactive cultural production, as Susana, of the Safe Abortion Information Hotline in Lima, described her earlier involvement in the magazine Mestiza: It was completely self-financed, we all contributed money. . . It was a community magazine in that the editorial committee had the mission of empowering others through writing, mainly women university students who did not necessarily consider themselves feminists but were familiar with gender issues.
Youth activists recounted how they had participated in cultural training when they were mobilized for gender justice: now they did this with other youth and even adults.
Bypassing the state consisted of youth activists collectively carrying out activities and interventions to make information and services available to the population that were not provided by the state. This was best illustrated by the abortion hotlines run by one youth association in each country—the Youth Political Coordinator for Gender Equity in Quito and the Safe Abortion Information Hotline in Lima. Bypassing state activities was not as comprehensive as cultural training, but no less significant. “The hotline is an apparently very simple task, which is to provide free information about the use of a pill [misoprostol] to interrupt pregnancy, but its simplicity makes it extremely powerful,” clarified Susana, of the Safe Abortion Information Hotline. Abortion is illegal in Peru and Ecuador except under restricted circumstances, for instance, when a woman’s life or health is gravely endangered. Providing information on abortion was not illegal; however, the two groups had been threatened by state legal action. They even faced opposition from professionalized adult feminist organizations. Nonetheless, they worked together and supported one another: The Quito group took the lead and was able to provide guidance to the Lima group.
Battling sexism in everyday life consisted of youth activists confronting unequal gender discourses and practices in routine social interactions. Youth activists described applying their raised consciousness to address injustices they encountered in daily life within the family, household, and intimate partnerships, as well as in public services they used on a regular basis. This strategy was best depicted by Carla, one of two study participants working in a professionalized adult feminist organization, Flora Tristan Peruvian Women’s Center, in Lima: I am not just a feminist eight hours a day but rather twenty-four hours a day. So I face resistance not just through my work but also in my affective life, my family life, and my daily life. [As a woman] I don’t get into a taxi under the same conditions as a man.
The tactics of cultural training and bypassing the state were carried out collectively by youth activists; however, all three tactics, including battling sexism in everyday life, were understood by youth activists as collective. For example, cultural training and bypassing the state were youth-controlled activities that allowed them to create supportive spaces to try out new gender discourses and practices. In turn, they used these new discourses and practices to battle sexism in everyday life, including those produced by the generational divide in the family and household. “As young people, we are making our own proposals and participating in spaces [outside the family] that in turn empowers us in our homes,” explained Paula, of Steps and Footprints in Guayaquil. Indeed, members of Youth Agenda Space on Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Lima hoped to concretize this integrated strategy someday in the form of their own community-based school.
Youth gender justice activists perceived their own political action as politicizing the sociocultural by aiming to change cultural discourses and practices on gender in the family, household, and intimate partnerships among other youth and closely related adults, and by developing social advocacy strategies to provide alternative cultural discourses and practices on gender.
Blurred Gender Inequalities
Youth gender justice activists developed new ways of perceiving political action in response to challenges produced by emergent gender hierarchies. They understood emergent gender hierarchies as processes that simultaneously enable and constrain gender equality. Miguel, from the Critical Action Collective in Lima, explained: For our generation, inequalities are much more blurry and this puts us in the situation of explaining different forms of oppression. . . . For us, it is difficult to say that machismo and patriarchy still exist because for our generation there is supposed to be an advance in the relations between men and women.
As Miguel’s comments illustrate, these divergent gender processes posed crucial challenges to activists in the selection of goals, strategies, and targets for political action. The category of blurred gender inequalities captures the challenges activists face through three subcategories: progressive and regressive changes to gender positions, adults controlling youth actions, and facing societal opposition to feminism.
Progressive and Regressive Changes to Gender Positions
This subcategory captured youth activists’ perceptions of changes to gender hierarchies. Accordingly, they understood that women’s participation in formal education, employment, and politics had increased dramatically in recent decades, thereby expanding the range of positions available to women in society. “It is an enormous advance that has occurred; now women can study, because before they were not allowed,” acknowledged Paula, of Steps and Footprints in Guayaquil. Ana, of the Youth Political Coordinator for Gender Equity in Quito, said, “Of course, there are more women in public office, more women cabinet members, more women everywhere, congresspersons, more laws for women, more policies and programs.” These changes in gender practices had been accompanied by popular support, indicating the diffusion of gender equality discourses, as Susana, of the Safe Abortion Information Hotline in Lima, noted, “There is a change with respect to women saying that they want to study and work. So at the discursive level, I definitely feel it when comparing generation to generation.”
In contrast, youth activists perceived that unequal gender positions in the family, household, and intimate partnerships had intensified in response to the progressive changes to gender positions in education, employment, and politics. Women were valued mainly for their role as mothers and were expected to take primary responsibility for child care and housework, and men’s needs were typically prioritized in intimate partnerships. Susana, of the Safe Abortion Information Hotline in Lima, continued, But this apparently empowering discourse that places women in the public sphere does not necessarily challenge their domestic role or imply more equitable relations with their partners, but rather creates a second, third, or fourth work shift: job, student, mother, exploited.
Moreover, youth activists understood men’s situation as adapting to women’s expanded positions in society without necessarily having alternative masculinities readily available to them. “Women’s advancement has led to the questioning of behaviors, values, and decision-making within the couple, and it has made men feel threatened and increased [their use of] violence,” explained Linda, from Critical Action Collective in Lima. Progressive changes had produced tensions in the family, household, and intimate partnerships that were manifested in new types of violence against women, such as femicide or the murdering of women. Linda continued, “Femicide . . . epitomizes the problem generated by the societal questioning of what it means to be a man . . . men feel cornered.”
Adults Controlling Youth Actions
The second subcategory of blurred gender inequalities captured youth activists’ perceptions of adults’ control over youth actions. Youth activists perceived that adult generations exerted authority and control over young generations, thereby shaping the extent to which youth were able to construct more equal gender relations. While a small sector of adults pushed for gender equality in society (such as professionalized adult feminism), most adults upheld unequal gender discourses and practices. Adult control hindered progressive changes within the family, household, and intimate partners, for example, men performing housework and child care and women’s needs being prioritized. After describing himself and friends as different from older men in his family because they no longer expected women to do housework, Juan, of Steps and Footprints in Guayaquil, conveyed the limits they faced for enacting changes: I sometimes don’t do domestic tasks in my home because my grandmother has the notion that women have to do these, and it is really difficult to go against my grandmother who is older than me, or my uncle who is older than me.
Erica, of Youth Agenda Space on Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Lima, described similar limits as a young mother studying for a master’s degree, but refused to back down: My mother-in-law asked, “Who will take care of the baby?” and I responded, “The father will help with that.” She argued that men can’t change diapers and gave an entire list of all the things men cannot do. I responded, “Why are you impeding them when they can do these things without difficulty and even want to do them?”
Youth activists related their personal experiences while noting that they thought it was even harder for nonactivist peers in their neighborhoods and networks to challenge adult control and construct more equal gender relations.
Adult control extended beyond the family to include local services, such as schools and health clinics, that inhibited youth’s access to resources for practicing more equal gender relations. Sonia, from the Youth Center in Arequipa, described the obstacles encountered by young women seeking sexual health resources: Young women don’t dare ask for condoms. In the pharmacy, the attendant will call her a sex worker or a more derogatory term, prostitute, whereas the attendant won’t say anything if it is a young man. In the health post, the attendant will loudly announce that a young woman is requesting condoms so that everyone turns to stare at her.
Even if the younger generation constructed more equal gender discourses and attempted to put these into practice, adult generations limited their efforts by exercising authority ascribed to them by age, an authority difficult to resist. In this sense, blurred gender inequalities was not just about gender hierarchies, but also age hierarchies.
Facing Societal Opposition to Feminism
The third subcategory of blurred gender inequalities captured youth activists’ perceptions of societal opposition to feminist identities and ideas. In these contexts, new gender equality discourses emphasized the importance of women’s participation in formally male-dominated or masculine-assigned arenas of education, employment, and politics. Public opinion largely supported new gender equality discourses. In contrast, the general public opposed feminist ideology, which was associated with a critique of men’s privilege over women but depicted as simply the opposite of machismo (sexism or men’s domination of women), as David, of Youth Agenda Space on Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Lima, described, The majority of people don’t know what feminism is. . . . They understand feminism as the opposite of machismo. If you are a machista, you discriminate against women, you consider them inferior. If you are a feminist, you consider men inferior. This is the problem, that people understand these as the same.
Even young people lacked knowledge of feminism, which Sonia, from the Youth Center in Arequipa, attributed to absence of gender-related topics in education: “There are major gaps in secondary and university education where gender is not addressed; it is not dealt with; it is not seen as a priority.”
Societal opposition was reinforced in public debates. In Peru, feminists were characterized as lacking family values, as depicted by Carla, of the Flora Tristan Peruvian Women’s Center in Lima: It is between those bad feminists who only see women, and the good saints who are concerned with family welfare and “value formation.” I put this in quotation marks because I wonder what values we are talking about. We feminists also promote values, those of equality. I bring this message wherever I go so people understand what feminism is.
In contrast, public debates in Ecuador involved progressive government leaders adopting gender discourses so widely that the message of power differentials between women and men was diminished. “Here in Ecuador . . . it is very clear that the topic of gender has been utilized by government organizations to demobilize feminist groups, because you find this confusion when someone talks about gender; they could be talking about a million things,” described Ana, of the Youth Political Coordinator for Gender Equity in Quito.
Societal opposition produced ambiguities about what feminism was and who could be a feminist. For example, feminism was often understood as an identity available only to women, creating an obstacle for both women and men youth gender justice activists to identify as a feminist. Societal opposition to feminism further hindered youth activists’ efforts to mobilize wider groups in favor of gender justice.
In sum, blurred gender inequalities encompassed the challenges activists faced in selecting goals, strategies, and targets when emergent gender hierarchies involved processes that both enable and constrain gender equality.
Conclusion
The two concepts described above contribute to gender theory in social movements by locating new forms of feminist political action that respond to emergent gender hierarchies and by advancing an intersectional analysis of gender and generation in youth activism. In this section, I link these concepts to my theoretical framework.
To date, much gender theorizing in social movements has aimed at integrating gender concepts and frameworks into the two main social movement paradigms: new social movement theory and political process theory. For example, to take into account gender conditions shaping social movements, researchers develop the concepts of gendered political opportunities and gender opportunity structures in political process theory (McCammon et al. 2001; Shriver, Adams, and Einwohner 2013). To locate different forms of feminist political action, gender researchers apply the collective identity approach from new social movement theory to other contexts and historical periods (Rupp and Taylor 1999). Moving away from these paradigms, I propose an alternative framework for theorizing gender in social movements, the usefulness of which I demonstrate with my two concepts.
The concept of politicizing the sociocultural shows the benefits of studying the goals and strategies of challenges to gender hierarchies, as proposed by the multi-institutional politics approach (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008). Youth gender justice activists in this study aim to change cultural discourses and practices about gender in the family, household, and intimate partnerships. Ecuadorian and Peruvian youth often continue to live with and/or maintain close proximity to their parents and other adult relatives even after having completed education, entering the labor market, and starting their own families. It is not this arrangement that is under contestation by youth activists, but rather the manner in which vertical authority accorded by age and gender is exercised by adults over youth. By seeking to change the pervasive code that orders social places for women, men, youth, and adults in the family, youth activists challenge social authoritarianism (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Dagnino 1998) or the cultural dimension of gender hierarchies in these contexts. Moreover, youth activists identify these goals as responding to unique gender conditions faced by themselves and their peers, as social generation theory posits (Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011; Woodman and Wyn 2014).
Youth gender justice activists in this study employ the strategy of social advocacy to provide alternative cultural discourses and practices on gender. Because gender power in the form of social authoritarianism (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Dagnino 1998) operates through routine interactions, youth activists contest gender hierarchies in closely related networks and everyday situations. Youth activists are “insider” actors within their families, neighborhoods, and communities, with a good feel for the rules of the game, as multi-institutional politics suggests (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008, 85). They make use of supportive peer-centered spaces to learn gender-equal discourses and practices and then apply these to influence rigid spaces encountered in the family, household, and intimate partnerships. Peer-centered spaces consist of youth-led associations as well as recreational, artistic, and digital activities, both of which have become more widely available to contemporary Latin American youth (Vandegrift, forthcoming). Politicizing the sociocultural illuminates how the family in Peru and Ecuador plays a central role in the construction of gender hierarchies not only through internal learning of discourses and practices but also as a foundation for society- and nation-building (Ames 2013; Lind 2012).
By studying the goals and strategies of youth gender justice activism in Ecuador and Peru, my findings shed light on the nature of gender domination in these societies, as proposed by the multi-institutional politics approach (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008). The concept of blurred gender inequalities captures the confusion generated by contradicting gender processes across/within different institutions and the challenges this poses for youth gender justice activism. Youth activists acknowledge progressive changes to gender relations in politics, employment, and education, but perceive these as interacting with regressive cultural discourses and practices on gender in the family, household, and intimate partners. As social generation theory proposes (Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn 2011; Woodman and Wyn 2014), youth activists understand these gender conditions as emergent gender hierarchies instead of the continuation of longstanding inequalities. Their meanings and actions suggest that while social authoritarianism (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Dagnino 1998) is being challenged in educational, political, and economic institutions, it is being revitalized in the family. For example, youth activists define the problem of intimate partner violence as a response to women’s greater freedom and multiplied positions rather than as a reinforcement of women’s lack of freedom and narrow positions associated with past forms of domination. Similarly, youth activists perceive adults’ upholding of gender inequalities as a response to the younger generation’s wider options to try out and adopt alternative gender and age positions. Finally, youth experience counter-movement dynamics that clearly differ from the opposition to feminism exhibited within policy advocacy where the Catholic Church leadership and its lay allies are easily identified opponents (Coe 2011). Thus, emergent gender hierarchies involve age hierarchies and everyday societal hostility to feminism, in addition to progressive/regressive gender processes.
The trustworthiness of my analysis can be evaluated by four criteria used in grounded theory (Charmaz 2006, 182-83). First, my analysis has resonance because it depicts the fullness of this particular sector of youth gender justice activism in Ecuador and Peru. Future research should explore other sectors of youth gender justice activism, such as indigenous, rural, and Afro-Peruvian/Ecuadorian youth. Second, my analysis has credibility because the two concepts, politicizing the sociocultural and blurred gender inequalities, are based on systematic comparisons between empirical observations and between theoretical categories. Third, my analysis has originality because these two concepts linked to the theoretical framework locate new forms of feminist political action that respond to emergent gender hierarchies as well as advance an intersectional analysis of gender and generation in youth activism. Finally, my analysis is useful not only for study participants because it fills a gap in knowledge that they identified, but also for researchers because it offers two new concepts and an innovative theoretical framework for examining gender processes in social movements that can readily be employed and modified in subsequent studies in a variety of contexts. By focusing on youth feminist political action in Ecuador and Peru and its relationship to contemporary gender hierarchies, I fill a crucial gap in research about feminist and youth movements as well as gender theorizing of social movements more broadly.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Darcie Vandegrift and Yin-Zu Chen for their input and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. The author is grateful for the thorough feedback and insightful comments from four anonymous reviewers of Gender & Society.
Funding for fieldwork was provided by the Umeå Center for Gender Studies.
Notes
Anna-Britt Coe has a PhD in Sociology and works as a Research Fellow at the Epidemiology and Global Health Unit, Umeå University (Sweden). Her research centers on contemporary feminist and youth movements, their influence on policy and society, and their response to gender and other social hierarchies. She is currently studying online activism in Sweden among citizen groups organizing to improve urban safety.