After Democracy: Advances and Challenges for Women's Movements in Latin America

Feminism is now firmly established in Latin America (Craske 1999). As women's movements have matured over the past decade and a half, they have grappled with a complex panorama of structural and political transformations. The region's wave of democratization, the global institutionalization of discourses of gender equality, and the increased availability of external funding for NGO women's projects have offered potential spaces and resources to expand women's political and civil rights. The parallel advance of neoliberalism, however, has deepened women's workloads, intensified gendered processes of exclusion, and undermined women's social rights.

The books reviewed in this essay both explore processes of women's empowerment and offer important insights on key social and political issues of contemporary Latin America: the nature and quality of citizenship under new democracies; the persistent gaps between formal and substantive rights; the mediated impacts of neoliberal policies; and the possibilities and limitations of identity-based mobilization. The books' convergences in premises, approaches, and methods reflect a growing maturity and sophistication in gender research. The authors provide multilevel and nuanced analyses of feminist movements in Latin America, linking women's specific forms of making demands and mobilizing to historical processes of state formation and local, national, and transnational contexts. They are sensitive to issues of power, and they recognize the heterogeneity of women's experiences. While they explore the implications of macro-level structural changes and political opportunity structures, at the center of these works is women's own agency in reshaping and contesting gender hierarchies and roles. The authors use interviews with activists, ranging from grassroots to national-level leaders, to incorporate the voices and perspectives of Latin American women.

Intersections of Gender and Water Policies

Opposing Currents is a welcome scholarly contribution to an often neglected issue central to women's daily lives: the intersection of water policies and gender. Latin America is seeing part of a deepening global water crisis, and for many of the region's poor rural and urban women, water management is a "labor-intensive, physically demanding, and even stressful part of everyday life" (17). This book's 12 chapters include case studies from Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, and Ecuador that explore the ways in which gender ideologies, gender-differentiated access to power, and specific constructions of public-private divides profoundly influence women's access to and control over water. The book does an excellent job of linking empirical studies of the daily practices and politics of water use to wider theoretical issues, making it appealing to a wide range of readers with an interest in gender in Latin America.

The valuable theoretical overview by Margaret Zwarteveen and Vivienne Bennett asserts that a number of obstacles—limited access to land, water, credit, knowledge, and technology, as well as women's heavy domestic labor load—still impede women's access to and control of water in Latin America (23). Resistance to gender equality or incorporation of women into water management persists at multiple levels of communities, NGOs, states, and transnational institutions. Dávila-Poblete and Nieves Rico's chapter notes that global discourses and declarations about water management rarely incorporate a gender perspective. This lack of explicit recognition of gender renders invisible the processes of exclusion and inequality embedded in...