Gendered Paradoxes

Women's Movements, State Restructuring, and Global Development in Ecuador

Amy Lind

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780271025445
• eBook ISBN: 9780271032399
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its "free market" strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country's poor, including women's groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women's participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature.

Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women's activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and "unfinished" cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women's community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist "issue networks" in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 Myths of Progress: Citizenship, Modernization, and Women’s Rights Struggles in Ecuador
• 2 Ecuadorian Neoliberalisms and Gender Politics in Context
• 3 Neoliberal Encounters: State Restructuring and the Institutionalization of Women’s Struggles for Survival
• 4 Women’s Community Organizing in Quito: The Paradoxes of Survival and Struggle
• 5 Remaking the Nation: Feminist Politics, Populist Nationalism, and the 1998 Constitutional Reforms
• 6 Making Dollars, Making Feminist Sense of Neoliberalism: Negotiations, Paradoxes, Futures
• Appendix: Chronology of Events
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover