Abstract
Around the beginning of the 21st century, Latin American politics underwent a profound swing towards the left. This is referred to as the ‘Pink Tide’, meaning anything from the light pink of reformist politics to the deeper red of radical socialism. This shift ushered in a new concern for social, economic, and political inequality in a region notorious for its poverty. Many viewed it as a welcome response to the negative outcomes of neo-liberal policies as well as an opening up of possibilities for improving women’s rights and increasing women’s participation in national legislatures. The hope was that feminist and queer movements would now be able to articulate and press forward their demands in ways that had been impossible before. Based on comparative studies between eight national cases (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela), the contributors of this book address the experiences and political struggles of their countries during the decades of the ‘Pink Tide’. They focus particularly on the kinds of politics and policies that emerged around gender and sexuality-based rights.
While each chapter is distinctive, reflecting the particularities of the specific national context, they are tightly organized by a comparative framework, deftly set out by Elisabeth Jay Friedman and Constanza Tarbush in their excellent introduction. This allows the reader to compare and contrast the different national cases along a series of set dimensions. Each chapter describes the social and political context in the country in question, tracing the rise of left-wing politics during the late 1990s as well as the rise of popular women’s movements, feminism, and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) activism. The chapters address the issues of social welfare, political representation, violence against women, and the trade-offs between women’s and LGBT rights. The emphasis is on politics and policies, whereby the policies are evaluated in terms of how they advance gender and sexual rights. The eight cases are organized from the strongest example of Uruguay which has consistently pushed the most progressive platforms, including legal abortion, same-sex marriage, and the recognition of gender identities to a middle group of countries that have been successful in advancing LGBT rights, while maintaining the criminalization of abortion (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil) to countries where the state pays lip service to a tolerance for LGBT rights as a sign of modernity while neglecting or repressing many gender-based rights (Nicaragua and Ecuador).
This is not a straightforward story of progress, nor does it have a happy ending. In fact, as Sonia Alvarez notes in her afterword, ‘it’s hard for the reader invested in gender/sexual justice not to walk away from it disheartened, indeed, disillusioned’. The results of two decades of left politics are, at best mixed, and, at worst, ‘disturbingly regressive’ (p. 305). Most of the left-wing governments continued to promote traditional gender roles and unequivocally supported heterosexuality as the norm. Their policies invariably favoured the heterosexual family and sexual division of labour, whereby the conservative ideal of women’s unpaid domestic labour in the family was upheld. The relatively high participation of women in Latin American legislative bodies did not mean that governments supported feminist agendas and, indeed, the women working in the government often faced uphill battles that they rarely won. Despite myriad laws prohibiting domestic violence, the family remained the cornerstone of the nation and policies tended to favour mediation rather than the protection of women and children, while the perpetrators often got off with impunity. The Catholic Church has remained highly influential throughout Latin America, particularly in the area of divorce and women’s reproductive rights. In Argentina, which was ostensibly one of the more progressive nations, the ideological radicalism of the Kirchner government went hand in hand with strategic alliances with the Catholic Church with an eye towards mobilizing voters and developing useful electoral coalitions (Friedman and Tarbush, 2019: 36). This alliance accounts for one of the most blatant ‘trade-offs’ whereby LGBT rights were supported; same sex marriage was legalized in 2010; and 2 years later, non-binary gender identities were decriminalized and depathologized (Tarbush et al., 2019: 82). At the same time, women’s reproductive rights have not fared well. Feminists’ struggles to legalize abortion have been continually frustrated and abortion to date remains a criminal offence in Argentina.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is the issue of trade-offs between feminist and LGBT demands for bodily autonomy and recognition – something the authors call ‘pink-washing’. Nations are often eager to promote LGBT recognition as a way to display their modern status, while rejecting women’s reproductive choices by criminalizing abortion or shutting down teenage pregnancy prevention programmes. Latin American governments frequently adopt a divide-and-rule approach towards women’s, feminist, and queer movements. In Ecuador, for example, President Correa explicitly mobilized his ‘citizen’s revolution’ against what he called the ‘feminist fundamentalist movements’ that were supposedly destroying the ‘basis of society, which continues to be the conventional family’ (quoted in Wilkinson, 2019: 269). At the same time, he emphasized the importance of equality between men and women and his support of popular women’s movements. These trade-offs were visible in each national context, and it is here that we as readers can find lessons for the importance of intersectional perspectives and coalition building across institutional and social movement arenas.
The strengths of this book are, at the same time, its weaknesses. The adherence to a fairly strict organizational framework lends the book coherence, but makes for – at times – tedious reading. Its comparative approach allows us to see the similarities and differences between the different national contexts in Latin America, but the rich specificity of a more ethnographic approach is sadly missing. By focusing on advocacy processes and policy outcomes, a convincing case can be made for caution in assessing all governments, including left-wing or socialist ones. Progressive ideologies do not automatically ensure gender and sexual justice. The book leaves the reader feeling pessimistic about the future of feminist and queer politics.
This gloomy view is an unfortunate and – I would argue – unnecessary artefact of the approach adopted in the book. Its perspective on Latin American politics would have been mitigated by paying more attention to the vibrant and widespread feminist and queer movements which are active outside the governmental institutions of the state. The broad brush approach taken in Seeking Rights from the Left does not do justice – and, indeed, neglects – the richness and creativity of contemporary social activism in Latin America. This activism is notable for its refusal of identity politics, its explicit celebration of intersectionality and inclusion, and its ludic and engaging street protests. Just a few examples: the ‘Marchas de las Putas’ (a Latino version of the global Slutwalks) where feminists and queers, young and old, women and men brazenly defy gender and sexual norms, demonstrating playfully together in the streets. The ‘Ni una Menos’ (Not One Woman Less) was a movement against femicide which began in Argentina and led to record-breaking mass demonstrations and public support. Their slogan has been taken up in other kinds of social activism – for example, my own personal favourite, flash-mobs in support of the rights of the elderly and the disabled together with queer tango activist/dancers (see Davis, 2020). Afro-Brazilian women and cyber-queer feminists have joined force in Blogueriras Negras to disseminate what they call a ‘post-Left-Turn political imaginary’. The list goes on and on.
Alvarez (2019) concludes her afterword of the book with the excellent suggestion that we as feminist, critical race, and queer scholars should be developing strategies for researching the social and cultural transformations being enacted by these new social movements instead of focussing our attention on policy advocacy within state institutions. At a moment when grass-roots activism like ‘Black Lives Matter’ is radically changing the face of the political landscape across the globe, I could not agree more.