Women played a key protagonist role in twentieth-century indigenous organising efforts in Ecuador. Scholars and activists fondly remember Dolores Cacuango for her central role in organising some of the first peasant syndicates and indigenous federations. Subsequently, Tránsito Amaguaña, Blanca Chancoso, and Nina Pacari each provided important guidance at different historical moments. Given the history of strong female leadership in the twentieth century, observers have pondered their general absence in current indigenous movements. Indirectly, this conundrum underlies Carolin Schurr's study of Ecuador's electoral geographies.
Schurr focuses her study on what she calls ‘new political subjects’, or women, indigenous, and Afro-Ecuadorian peoples who have long been excluded from formal citizenship rights. She examines the ‘intersectionality’ of ethnic, gender, and class differences to analyse their absence from local political settings. In particular, Schurr is interested in how Ecuador's legislation establishing gender quotas has transformed female representation in local elected offices. Over a period of 18 months from 2006 to 2010, Schurr interviewed more than 40 local and provincial female politicians in the provinces of Esmeraldas, Chimborazo and Orellana.
Schurr raises very enticing questions. For example, since the promulgation of the quota law in 1997 the number of women in elected offices in Ecuador has risen to one of the highest levels in the world. At the same time, however, the participation of indigenous women has not increased even though more indigenous men have been elected to political offices. She notes a tension between progressive inclusionary legislation and the persistence of an exclusionary political culture, and blames the indigenous political party Pachakutik for recreating inequalities that exclude women. At the same time, however, an increasing number of Afro-Ecuadorian women are participating in electoral politics.
Rather than a quantitative analysis of changes in representation or a narrative summary of female participation in electoral politics, Schurr presents a post-colonial analysis based on visual ethnographic research. She draws heavily on feminist theorists including Chandra Mohanty's concepts of antagonism to understand the relationship between social movements and institutionalized politics, Judith Butler's ideas on the performance of gender, and Kimberlé Crenshaw's writings on intersectionality. Schurr argues ‘that electoral geography needs to go beyond the mere analysis of electoral results to understand processes of political change’ (p. 185).
Schurr's study is politically engaged and committed to increasing the diversity of representation in electoral politics, but it also highlights the limitations of post-colonial theory in forwarding concrete policy objectives that would materially improve lived realities. Rather than addressing political ideologies or policy strategies, we are subjected to extensive theoretical discussions of performative emotions in electoral campaigns. Missing from this work is an explanation of the political context that would explain the content of the discourses that politicians forward in their electoral campaigns.
The compelling questions that this book raises and the limitations of post-colonial theory in addressing them become most apparent in the discussion of Mary Mosquera, a local politician with the Maoist Movimiento Popular Democrático (MPD, Democratic Popular Movement) in the coastal province of Esmeraldas. Even though Mosquera is an Afro-Ecuadorian woman, she primarily presents her struggle as one based on class rather than a racial or gender identity. Even though the MPD emphasises the class nature of the struggle, the party has been highly successful at training and mobilising female and Afro-Ecuadorian candidates in its political campaigns. Unfortunately, Schurr fails to explain the success of a Marxist party in realising what seemingly should be feminist goals, and how this success could be replicated elsewhere.
Schurr includes interesting insights into the potential and limitations of activist research methodologies. She came to realise that acting as a videographer legitimised her presence in the political campaign of Pachakutik candidate Guadalupe Llori in the Amazonian province of Orellana. Although she uses the resulting ethnographic material to reflect on the performance of identities, the video also served to advance Pachakutik's campaign against the government's neo-extractivist policies, even though these political conflicts are not well explained in this book. A chapter co-authored with Dörte Segebart draws on Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak's feminist post-colonial critiques to question the authority and practice of Western academic research. The authors reflect on how to engage power asymmetries without paralysing themselves as politically engaged researchers.
Much of the published research on social movement organising in the 1990s and subsequent new left political governments in South America have focused on macro level perspectives, and Schurr successfully draws our attention to the urgent necessity for more detailed studies of political dynamics on a local, grassroots, level. The book's strength is not in its examination of political ideologies or the presentation of a detailed ethnographic analysis of those specific contexts, but in its ability to bring the classic literature on feminist post-colonial theory to bear on these pressing issues.
