Strong Kichwa Women are Made, Made Up, and Make Others: Feminist Theory Meets Amazonian Ethnography of Gender, Bodies, and Social Change

This ethnographic snapshot of indigenous Kichwa women in Ecuador's Amazon examines how processes of social change play out in/on women's bodies while paying special attention to issues of gender, generation, ethnicity, and appearance. The defining feature of Kichwa women's gendered agency is that their bodies produce on behalf of others; this is an ongoing process. Practice makes materiality of bodies. Antithetical to feminists' dispute of reductionistic sex-role theories, sex/gender-related practices of social reproduction are a source of women's strength, not weakness. Yet, encounters with globalized modernity have complicated views of gendered agency, especially for Kichwa women's children and grandchildren who feel great pressure to go to school and secure non-farm jobs. However, rather than representing a radical break with the past, school and white-collar work have contributed to a changing idea of what it means to be a Kichwa "strong woman" among young women who continue to fulfill social obligations through contemporary bodily practices like wearing lipstick and skinny jeans. The coherence of Kichwa womanhood comes from its being a cobbling together of instances of agency geared toward others. Womanhood is a site of social action rather than a static social imposition or unyielding stereotype. Kichwa women's understanding of empowerment shifts the focus to practice rather than the identities or categories that constrain practice. This is especially interesting given recent debates within critical feminism over how to re-collectivize the movement in the wake of a growing preoccupation among young Western women with individualized expressions of feminine agency. While some have observed that an emphasis on heteropatriarchal power differentials obscures feminist scholars' ability to take notice of sex/gender differences in ways other than domination, I see an opportunity to assess what we learn by combining feminist and Amazonian ethnographic theory to understand Kichwa women's experience of a changing world, specifically how gendered practice may be a source of community-sustaining productivity.