Gendered Paradoxes: Women's Movements, State Restructuring, and Global Development in Ecuador (review)

This book explores women's contributions to the re-democratization process in Ecuador during the 1980s and 1990s. This timely analysis explicitly examines nation building and development as gendered, discursive processes and attempts to fill the silence in the literature concerning women's mobilization and political agency in Ecuador. Research on nation building and social movements in Ecuador has focused on ethnic movements and very few analysts have analyzed the contributions of women to the democratic process. Lind's analysis, however, focuses on the effects international development discourses, neoliberal modernization, and Ecuadorian ideologies of womanhood have on the experiences of women. In turn, she analyzes how women utilize "strategic essentialisms" (10) to mobilize and subvert nationalistic, patriarchal notions of womanhood (i.e. marianismo) to further their own agendas and explore alternative solutions for development. Lind argues that an analysis of women's political agency in the neoliberal context must acknowledge the complex ways that women negotiate the ideologies and spaces of development. The sites of negotiation are at once national and transnational as women contest the contradictory and paradoxical effects that global development discourses and neoliberalism have had on women, particularly the rural and urban poor.

Lind asserts that women engage in "mothering the crisis" which she defines as the "multiple material and symbolic ways in which women have used their traditional gender roles in community activism, whether it be to survive economically; to take care of their family; to preserve a tradition, set of values, role, or activity; or to challenge traditions, values, and societal inequalities" (95). Even while Lind references the traditional role of women, she does not portray women as homogenous. The intersectionality of class and gender are appropriately dealt with in this book. She examines various sites in Quito and her methodology incorporates participant observation, discourse analysis, semi-structured interviews of more than seventy-five members of women's community organizations, interviews with professionals and activists, and secondary sources.

In the first chapter Lind illustrates that women have a long history of political involvement in Ecuador such as their participation in peasant, labor, and leftist movements of the 1930s-1960s. She also illustrates how post-World War II mentalities of state as protector, strengthened later by international development discourses, institutionalized social welfare programs. Here she introduces her argument that nation-building is a gendered and discursive process. She argues that social welfare programs in Ecuador are based in technocratic constructions of women as providers in the private sphere.

In Chapters 2 and 3 Lind explores the foreign debt crisis, state adjustment policies (SAPS) and neoliberal reforms during the administrations of Borja and Durán-Bellén. She illustrates that during this period social welfare programs were privatized thus, encompassing an "engendering neoliberalism". Through a case study of a day-care center, she asserts that "neoliberal development frameworks that target women as volunteers in the newly privatized welfare distribution schemes, which include communal kitchens, food-for-work programs, day-care centers, and women's community organizations, tend to exacerbate the workloads of poor women, rather than alleviate them, regardless of the intentions of development planners" (57). Illustrative of Lind's gendered paradox is her exploration of the Citibank protest of May 1992. In her analysis of this protest she asserts that women used state constructions of motherhood by representing themselves as mothers of the 'underdeveloped' Ecuadorian nation.

Chapter 4 further develops the utilization of "strategic essentialisms" and how women "mother the crisis". She does this in a case study of the Quito organization, Centro Femenino "8 de Marzo." In this study voices of women in the organization are represented. The organization serves as an example of successful organizational networking. The chapter, however, would be enhanced if more voices from the organization were heard. A central focus is the contested, complex space of negotiation between the local (Centro Femenino), state institutions, and...