Seminars

Has the growing political inclusion of women, Indigenous peoples, and Afrodescendants in Latin American legislatures led to policy agendas that promote greater equality and justice for these groups? To answer this question, Making Substantive Representation analyses an original dataset of over 40,000 bills combined with qualitative interviews with legislators to systematically compare the politics of representation in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. This book explores under what conditions political inclusion in formal political office leads to substantive representation on political agendas, and importantly what types of historically marginalized interests are most likely to get political traction, and why. Moreover, this study considers the representation of intersectional interests – the political interests of those that are multiply marginalized – and the degree to which we see intersectional politics in today’s Latin American parliaments. It asks, for example, when do we see support for intersectional issues such as the rights of domestic workers – a workforce that is largely Indigenous and Afrodescendant and 95% female? And, which politicians are most willing to work across the boundaries of identity to support the political interests of multiple marginalized groups? By studying women, Indigenous peoples, and Afrodescendants together and in comparison, this book offer a sweeping assessment of the legislative politics of inclusion in Latin American since democratization. Moreover, it offers a fresh theoretical framework for applying intersectionality to legislative processes. While far from a utopia, and rife with continuing inequalities, the inclusion of more women, Indigenous peoples and Afrodescendants among the ranks of Latin American politicians has led to significantly greater representation of issues important to these groups on political agendas. But the paths to substantive representation have not been the same for each of these groups, and intersectional coalition building has been the exception, rather than the rule.

Saying that sisters are important in crime narratives is about as groundbreaking as noting that there are a lot of orphans in literature. Sisterhood is low-hanging metaphoric fruit for examining women’s lives and what we do and should mean to one another. But is a sister someone who comes to your rescue, who helps you hide the body? Or is she part of the trauma that honed your detective (or killing) skills in the first place? Does powerful sororal identification lead to justice, or to rumination and destruction, like in the rape revenge film “Promising Young Woman”? International crime narratives by and/or about women are increasingly drawn to violence and reflect a skepticism towards the kinds of female solidarity across differences that are necessary to deliver a more just world. And while sisterhood seems self-evidently universal, we know that our understanding and representation of familial relations are culturally specific. If transnational critical work might prefigure global feminist solidarity, how do we avoid the errors of a second wave feminism that flattened difference in order to organize around shared oppression? What can we learn from crime narrative’s army of angry women in a time when the moral arc that would bend away from patriarchy has flatlined?