Fragmented Feminisms and Disillusion with Democracy: Social Movement Downswings, Inadequate Institutions, and Alliances under Construction in Latin America

Fragmented Feminisms and Disillusion With Democracy

Social Movement Downswings, Inadequate Institutions, and Alliances under Construction in Latin America

In the early 1990s, much of the research on women and politics in Latin America had an optimistic tone, paralleling the triumphant tone of modernist research on democratization and the expansion of neoliberalism in the region at the time. It appeared that change favoring women's rights and gender equality was at a critical juncture in Latin America and the world. Advocates of gender equality around the world were preparing for the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations' conferences in Beijing in 1995. There was a strong impetus for governments and civil society groups to fulfill promises or at least to be able to document progress in the right direction. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was frantically gathering and processing gender data from around the world, as it planned to present its own new gender indicators during the same year at the conference (1995). These indicators were to become permanent fixtures in the UNDP's annual Human Development Reports, and represented the culmination of years of work on the inside, as well as outside of the institution, to have the UN commit itself to the permanent observation and collection of gendered data. Incipient experiments with and discussion of electoral gender quotas were occurring in Latin America for the first time, pushing the limits of patriarchal political parties and states in unprecedented ways. Pilot projects with women's police stations to specifically serve female victims of sex crimes began to emerge across the region. There was reason for optimism.

In academia, the subfield of women and politics exploded with rich, often interdisciplinary debates, and hundreds of articles and texts. At professional conferences, one could no longer go to all the panels that made mention of "gender" and/or "women," as was possible only a few years ago. Many women's studies centers and programs flourished. Many hoped that "the end of gender inequality" was in sight, akin to Fukuyama's "end of history" of wars based on ideologies and cycles of authoritarian governments rising and falling.

So what has happened since? Now that we are halfway into the next decade, what happened to the fanfare for Beijing ten years later? What of all the reforms and programs and new lines on government budgets that occurred since 1995? According to the texts reviewed in this essay, the results are rather mixed, and most reasons for fanfare are at the local or national level, rather than international. As with reforms for democratization and moves to further open up markets and increase trade—and wealth—on a national level, making improvements in women's lives on a mass scale is more complicated than imagined just a decade ago. This is not to say that the texts reviewed here are necessarily pessimistic about advances toward bolstering women's rights and forwarding gender equality. Rather, as I lay out in the following pages, I found them to be realistic, as in well grounded or "down to earth," in the wake of the hopes pinned on democratization and the neoliberal economic model. One of the strengths of these texts is to bring to the fore the light and...