Lynne Phillips - Contesting Publics: Feminism, Activism, Ethnography

Contesting Publics

Anthropology, Culture and Society

Series Editors:

Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University
and
Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex

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CONTESTING PUBLICS

Feminism, Activism, Ethnography

Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole

with Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan and Erica Lagalisse

First published 2013 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martins Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole 2013

The right of Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3284 0 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3459 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 8496 4812 7 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1174 1 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1173 4 EPUB eBook

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Illustrations

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank women and men working for social change every day in diverse ways and challenging contexts across Latin America. Maria Rosa Achundia, Andrea Aguirre, Faviola Arias, Auxiliadora Dias Cabral, Mary Cabrera, Maria de Conceio Dantas de Moura, Isolde Dantas, Liliana Duran, Nalu Faria, Gladys Fuentes, Luz Haro, Maria Hernandez, Gioconda Herrera, Emma Illescas, Magdalena Len, Neylar Lins, Rosa Lopez, Monica Munz, Suely de Oliveira, Soldedad Puente, Junia Puglia, Rocio Rosero, Lucia Salamea, Neli Shewan, Analba Brazo Teixeira, Silvia Vega and Marina Vera especially gave us their time, shared their passion, energy and commitment and led us to the new theoretical insights we present in Contesting Publics. It has been an inspiring journey, one that renewed our own hopes for the future. We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding. We also warmly thank Pluto Presss anonymous readers who gave such strong support for the project and its re-visiting of old debates on the public and the private, its questioning of the meaning of civil society and its effort to clear theoretical space for imagining alternative futures.

LP and SC, July 2012

Preface: Contesting Publics

Sally Cole and Lynne Phillips

Between 2006 and 2009 we interviewed feminist activists working in a variety of transnational networks and national democracy-building projects in Latin America. We started by interviewing feminist officers of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, UNIFEM (now UN Women) in Brazil and Ecuador. Despite differences in language, colonial history and physical size between these countries, we found the comparison fruitful as both countries are tied to the machinery of the UN (Phillips and Cole 2009), yet both are also experimenting with new modes of participatory democracy in which womens movements are actively engaged. We followed (Marcus 1998; Tsing 2005) the roots and routes of feminists activities in both countries and found ourselves entering increasingly diverse spaces and scales of political action. We interviewed activists working in the national state agencies that are conceived as part of democracy-building in both Ecuador and Brazil: CONAMU (Consejo Nacional de las Mujeres, National Council of Women) in Ecuador and SPM (Secretaria Especial de Polticas para as Mulheres, Special Secretariat for Policy for Women) in Brazil. And, in both countries, we interviewed activists in unions, in transnational networks and in small non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in rural settings.