The Gender Economic Agenda in Latin America: Alliances and Topics. An Organizational Perspective

RODRÍGUEZ GUSTÁ, ANA LAURA

Norwich

Conferencia; Gender Relations and Rising Inequalities; 2015

University of East Anglia

Despite the profuse studies examining the agenda of feminist and women's movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, few of them analyze how and why these movements construct and mobilize an economic agenda for women. The present research aims to start filling this empirical void by doing two tasks. First, it reconstructs the map of actors actually involved with the agenda and identifies the topics that each actor brings to this agenda. Second, it analyzes emerging organizational forms and alliances among these actors, as well as their main strategies to push forward this agenda. The paper shows that there is an emergent feminist discursive field in which indigenous and rural women's movements as well as those of urban popular female collectives play a key role in mobilizing economic issues relevant for women. Also, this discursive field is multi-sited (as activists belong to social movements, academia and institutional arenas). Second, these movements and collectives have created hybrid organizations, because they absorb feminist claims and, at the same time, belong and participate in their social and popular movements, thus keeping their dual demands and identities. Additionally, the economic agenda is multidimensional. Particularly, it includes claims based on the rights framework (as actors mobilize labor, economic and productive demands) but it also has appeals defined in terms of criticisms to the capitalist mode of production, which supersede the rights framework. The empirical bases for the analysis are 90 in-depth interviews with activists, policy makers and academics in 18 countries of the region.