Seeking Rights from the Left: Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Pink Tide ed. by Elisabeth Jay Friedman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Seeking Rights from the Left: Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Pink Tide ed. by Elisabeth Jay Friedman Juliana Restrepo Sanín Seeking Rights from the Left: Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Pink Tide. By Elisabeth Jay Friedman (ed). Durham: Duke University Press, 2019, p. 344, $29.95. Latin America has made significant gains in the legal protection of women's and sexual minorities' rights, including comprehensive laws against gender-based violence, political participation, and some legal protections for LGBT+ folks. These advancements are somewhat recent, coinciding with the so-called Left Turn that started with the election of Hugo Chávez en Venezuela in 1998. The increased legal recognition of women and LGBT+ rights is sometimes lauded as an achievement of the Pink Tide. However, as Elisabeth Jay Friedman and the contributors to Seeking Rights From the Left: Gender, Sexuality, and the Latin American Pink Tide make clear, the relationship between progressive gender and sexuality policies and the Left is not as clear and straightforward as some suggests. Friedman's book offers a more nuanced comparative perspective building on Mala Htun's (2003) and Htun and S. Laurel Weldon's (2010) framework for analyzing gender and sexuality policies. Seeking Rights from The Left shows that, despite advancements, Left-wing governments in Latin America "relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power" and engaged in "strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights" (p. 3), promoting maternalist and familist policies instead of transformative policies to achieve gender and sexuality justice. The contributors evaluate the Left's policies in diverse areas, including welfare, redistribution, and poverty; political representation; violence against women; and bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. Importantly, the book finds that there were important advancements in regards to poverty alleviation and women's political participation. Despite the significant increase in women's political participation, which surpassed 25% regionally, and in some countries reached 50% in national legislatures, Left governments frequently engaged in "Pinkwashing:" advancing (some) LGBT+ and women's rights to obscure blatant and broader violations of human rights – including those of women and LGBT+ folks. In addition, policies and perspective that challenge heterosexual and cisgender men's privilege –what Friedman calls 'countercultural' policies – not only did not significantly advance during the left turn but in some cases were reversed. What explains these variations? Seeking Rights from the Left finds that state institutionalization and alliances between the left and religious forces are key determinants in the types of gender and sexuality policies that governments adopt. But good will and strong institutions are not enough. Rather, the strength of women's, feminist, and LGBT+ movements, and their ability to make alliances among themselves and with state actors in women's policy agencies and anti-discrimination institutions are key for advancing the policies with the [End Page 243] most potential to undermine heteropatriarchy. Importantly, Seeking Rights from the Left shows that improvements in the descriptive representation – that is, increased numbers of women in politics – are not an indicator of a country's move toward significant and transformative policy changes in support of women and LGBT+ rights. Despite these limitations, there were some important transformations promoted by some of the governments of the Pink Tide. In the recognition and protection of women's and LGBT+ rights, Uruguay stands out as the country with the most significant progress. Despite few women in Congress, feminist and LGBT+ activists used a variety of mobilizational strategies and built alliances to secure protections for some rights, including abortion, affirmative action for trans folks, and marriage equality. Even in this more welcoming context, poverty-relief and social welfare policies still relied and entrenched traditional gender roles. The limits of the left turn are even more evident when looking at the most radical governments: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Although all these countries made important advancements in reducing poverty and inequality, progress relied on the instrumentalization of women's organizations and the reproduction of maternalist and heteronormative views of the state and the family. In the two most extreme cases, Nicaragua and Ecuador, the Left turn not only failed to transform gender relations, but significantly reversed women's rights – despite international praise for (very limited) advancements in the protection...