Journal of Latin American Geography
Volume 16
Issue 1 Critical Geographies in Latin America
Article 11
2016
The Challenge of Feminist Political Geography to
State-Centrism in Latin American Geography
Zoe Pearson
University of Wyoming, [email protected]
Nicholas J. Crane
University of Wyoming, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/jlag
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Recommended Citation
Pearson, Zoe and Crane, Nicholas J. (2016) "The Challenge of Feminist Political Geography to State-Centrism in Latin American
Geography," Journal of Latin American Geography 16(1): 185-193.
Available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/653100
This JLAG Perspectives is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in
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INTRODUCTION
In 2003, Juanita Sundberg provocatively claimed that masculinist epistemologies
“predominate” in Latin Americanist geography (Sundberg 2003: 180). Sundberg
argued that this masculinism has found expression in some scholars’ claims to
disembodied objectivity in the research process, and in a widespread
unwillingness to acknowledge social positions that facilitate our production of
knowledge about Latin America. Here, we are interested in a collateral tendency
of such masculinist scholarship: state-centrism. Ince and Barrera de la Torre
(2016) clarify that tendencies towards state-centrism are not specific only to
geographical research in/of Latin America. We suggest that the moment is ripe for
reflecting specifically upon the stakes of a more robust feminist turn in the
political geography of Latin America, a turn that would examine the state as an
effect of everyday life and processes of social reproduction. Specifically, we
argue that a feminist orientation towards ethnographies of the state is important
for challenging masculinist tendencies towards state-centrism that naturalize the
“view from nowhere” (Haraway 1988: 582) and thereby lend “the state” its
power. Looking beyond the illusion of state space as a neutral backdrop for
political life (Coleman and Stuesse 2016: 528) allows us to recognize how people
who identify or may dis-identify with “the state” produce situations of
governability or, conversely, elicit radical social change through practices of
social reproduction that state-centric scholarship on political life may not
immediately identify as its object of study.
While we observe decades of important feminist contributions to
geographical research on the region (e.g. Radcliffe and Westwood 1996; Cravey
1998; Sundberg 2003; Mollett 2010; Swanson 2010; Radel 2012), we also note an
enduring state-centrism in commonsense geographical imaginaries of Latin
America, for which feminist political geography could serve as a corrective. The
proponents of state-centric geographical imaginaries are rarely explicit about their
assumptions. Indeed, more prevalent is what Ince and Barrera de la Torre (2016:
13) call a “silent statism,” or a failure to recognize the contingency of the state
form as a mode of organizing society. In the remaining pages, we reflect upon and
assess the implications of a feminist turn away from silent statism in geographical
scholarship in/about Latin America – a turn that resonates with the work of
feminist political geographers in other research communities.
Feminist political geographical literature on the state has, since the 1990s,
challenged statist theories of the political that reproduce a myth of the state’s
autonomous power to determine the coordinates of political life. Its adherents
have subjected state power to critical scrutiny through an ethnographic approach
that reveals how everyday practices of social reproduction may construct spaces
for the exercise of state authority. In what follows, we first define what it means
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to think about the political “beyond the state,” with an eye to social reproduction.
We briefly summarize feminist political geographers’ contributions to the relevant
transdisciplinary scholarship, and we clarify how this feminist shift in orientation
matters for geographical scholarship in/about Latin America. In the second
section, we present brief examples from our efforts to look “beyond the state” in
our own research. We show how Bolivians and Mexicans participate in
constructing an actionable state/non-state distinction, and producing governable
“state space.” We conclude by arguing that a feminist turn in political geographies
of the state in Latin America would train our attention to the vital role of struggles
over social reproduction in recent political developments in the region, while
promising to denaturalize a social-spatial ordering of everyday life that sustains
injustice. In short, as the editorial team of the Journal of Latin American
Geography (Gaffney et al. 2016: 1) has reaffirmed a commitment to “socially
engaged” research that confronts injustice in the region, we believe feminist
political geography has a vital role to play.
THE POLITICAL “BEYOND THE STATE”
Scholars in a variety of disciplines have worked in different ways to denaturalize
a common-sense boundary between “the state” and “its outside” (e.g., Abrams
1988; Rose and Miller 1992; Mountz 2003; Asad 2004; Painter 2006; Jones
2012). By showing that the effect of a state structure is created by social processes
that “the state” ostensibly governs (Mitchell 1991), scholars have challenged an
understanding of the state as a self-contained organization functioning for its own
maintenance, or as a force that encompasses society in top-down fashion.
Feminist political geographers are at the forefront of promoting theoretical and
methodological resources for understanding the state as an effect of daily practice
that is “shaped by [and shaping] the local and regional communities in which it
operates” (Mountz 2003: 628; cf. Marston 2004; Staeheli et al. 2012). Often
supporting their claims through evidence from ethnographic research, feminist
political geographers have shown that the apparent boundary around the entity we
know as “the state” is constructed through material and discursive practices,
frequently by people who do not explicitly identify as state actors. These accounts
cast doubt on trans-historical, statist theories of the political that would obscure
opportunities to confront injustices perpetuated in the name of the state.
To be sure, ethnography is not an inherently feminist practice. Indeed,
scholars can and have produced masculinist ethnographies of political life in Latin
America, by assuming state space as a neutral backdrop for ethnographic study,
and by proceeding without scrutiny for the categories through which state power
is exercised (Berger 1995). But feminist political geographers have demonstrated
that we can produce ethnographies of the state that denaturalize unjust social
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order and reveal the state itself as contingent (Ince and Barrera de la Torre 2016:
13). “Studying up” the state (Nader 1972) and challenging its myth of durable
coherence can create conditions for emancipatory politics.
A feminist “beyond the state” approach matters for geographic research
in/of Latin America for at least three reasons. First, we cannot make sense of the
contemporary political landscape in Latin America if we maintain a rigid
state/civil society binary in our fieldwork and political conceptualizations. As
Uruguayan journalist Raúl Zibechi (2016) recently observed, in the 1990s and
2000s, progressive “pink tide” governments in Latin America needed to create
new understandings of the state that would allow them to channel popular, often
movement-based demands into policy. Liberal theories of the state (often) forged
in the United States and Europe that assume a strict separation of “civil” and
“political” society, and which promote an emphasis on highly visible political
actors over and above ordinary people in research, are therefore inadequate to the
task of examining political developments and justice demands in the region
(Ellner 2016). Against calls for an anachronistic and arguably patriarchal strategy
of left-wing populism (Roth and Baird 2017), and against “masculinist
constructions of knowledge predicated on accessing elites” (Billo and Mountz
2016: 215), feminist ethnographies of the state promise to reorient our attention to
ongoing contestation and struggle at the level of everyday life.
Second, and related to the first point, a feminist political geographical
approach to the state in Latin America is urgently necessary for sustaining a sense
of political possibility at a time when the aforementioned “progressive cycle” of
government policy in the region is understood by many observers to be imploding
(Grandin 2015; Modonesi 2015). The consistent reference points in commentary
on this “ebb of the pink tide” have been electoral defeats, corruption scandals, and
government failures to uphold post-neoliberalism in practice. A feminist political
geography of the state in Latin America might suggest that this pessimism can be
attributed at least in part to state-centrism, by which we mean a focus on the
failures of actors one can uncontroversially identify with state institutions. In
mainstream commentaries on “the death of the Latin American Left” (Castañeda
2016), the fact of enduring movements for autonomy and creative practices of
social reproduction in the region are obscured (cf. Reyes 2015). But feminist
geographers of Latin America and elsewhere are attuned to precisely these
obscured processes, and feminist political geographers specifically demonstrate a
need to examine how everyday life and social reproduction are a constitutive
force in state formation, not secondary phenomena subsumed by statecraft
(Cravey 1998; Katz 2001; Marston 2004; Mountz 2004).
Finally, Latin American(ist) geographers should care about a feminist
“beyond the state” approach to examining political life in the region because it
would enrich existing feminist work on the region with specially feminist-
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political-geographical insights on state power. As we make this claim, we note
that political geographical scholarship of/in Latin America has recently started to
explicitly blur the state/non-state distinction, and has done so to the effect of
achieving greater clarity about where, how, and through whose practices state
power is exercised (e.g. Garmany 2009; Ballvé 2012; Meehan 2014; Boyce et al.
2015; Risør 2016). Even when these researchers do not explicitly define their
research as such, we suggest that this scholarship is contributing to a feminist turn
in our understanding of the state in Latin America insofar as it directs our
attention to the role of “non-state actors” in the exercise of state power and to the
scale of social reproduction. In short, this emerging feminist scholarship on the
state in Latin America trains our vision on everyday encounters that constitute a
fragile, contingent geography of state power. In what follows, we further
substantiate a feminist orientation towards research on state power in Latin
America by way of examples from our research in Mexico and Bolivia. Our
analyses reveal the role of ordinary people in constructing state/non-state
distinctions, and by recognizing these distinctions as constructed, works to
denaturalize the social-spatial ordering of everyday life that sustains injustice in
the region.
PRODUCING “THE STATE” THROUGH YOUTH POLITICS IN
MEXICO AND COCA POLITICS IN BOLIVIA
Neither of us began the projects discussed here with an intention to examine the
state. Instead, we initiated our projects in Mexico and Bolivia with an interest in
processes of social reproduction (memory work in the political mobilization of
young people in Mexico, and the everyday interpretation and implementation of
coca control policy among coca growers in Bolivia). In each case, processes of
social reproduction work to disseminate, recirculate, and reify categories that can
be acted upon in the name of the state. Our research projects in Mexico and
Bolivia demonstrate the importance of feminist ethnography for detailing
everyday material and discursive practices through which “the state” is given
form.
In Mexico, for example, the youth activist practice of dis-identifying from
“porros” provides a case in point. In 1950s and 1960s, popular representations of
rebellious, ungrateful youth created what came to be understood as the “student
problem,” and reflecting anticommunist anxieties, made that problem visible as an
external threat to the nation (Pensado 2013). Political and economic elites in
Mexico drew upon this popular articulation of students as a threat in order to
legitimate extralegal policing tactics of intimidation, expulsion, and detention,
including the implantation of pseudo-estudiantes in student activities. By the mid1960s, these “fake students” became organized as “porra” gangs, who would be
4
available to public authorities and economic elites alike for short term
employment to assist in policing student radicalism. Five years after one such
“shock group” famously attacked a student march in Mexico City and killed more
than one hundred people, Gastón García Cantú (1976: 4-5) described “porristas”
or porros as agents of repression that, for reason of their uncertain position vis-ávis “the state,” he understood as part of “the privatization of public authority.”
More recent events underscore the uncertainty of this relationship between
adjudicating legitimate political practice and the figure of the porro. For example,
in 2012, young participants in the protest movement #YoSoy132 initially
defended their political legitimacy by asserting that they were indeed students.
They were provoked to do this in response to now-President Enrique Peña Nieto’s
erroneous claim that the protesters who disrupted his campaign event at the
Universidad Iberoamericana on 11 May 2012 were porros paid by an opposition
party (the PRD). Here, young people claimed an identity that assured them access
to a receptive public. The identity “student activist” made sense in the context of
what Nelson (2003) would describe as sedimented political discourses. But, when
young participants in the protest movement asserted this “student” identity, they
paradoxically aligned with Peña Nieto on the political illegitimacy of porros.
Informed by popular memory of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, this position is
reaffirmed in countless activist meetings and demonstrations, when student
activists accuse other young people of being porros. For example, the disidentification with apparent porros would shape the final moments of the 2
October 2015 march to commemorate the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. From where
I (NJC) was standing to listen to the families of the disappeared student-teachers
from Guerrero (there under the sign of #Ayotzinapa), we could see an eruption in
the southeast corner of the Zócalo. At approximately 6:00 pm, people began
throwing firebombs at riot police. Photojournalists and many participants in the
march immediately broke from the planned meeting around the families and
organizers to chase photographs of the battle between the riot police and “jovenes
encapuchados” (masked young people). An organizer of the march observed this
dynamic from on top of a bus and, through a megaphone, encouraged other
participants in the convergence to “stay organized” in the face of “provocateurs
who identify with the state.” The convergence in the Zócalo would disperse less
than twenty minutes later (fieldnotes, 2 October 2015, Cuauhtémoc, Mexico
City). In photojournalists’ subsequent representation of the event as a battle with
riot police, in protestors’ reference to popular memory to make sense the molotov
cocktails in terms of porrismo, and in the organizer’s articulation of allies and
adversaries (the latter who presumably “identify with the state”), we witness an
array of people contributing to the configuration of political life in terms of “the
state” in relation to which one must either align or, conversely, stand in
opposition.
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Processes of social reproduction similarly produce “the state” in Bolivia.
During research in Bolivia, I (ZP) observed many cocaleros (coca leaf growers)
categorizing coca production in the country’s two prominent coca growing
regions as either “legal”/“legitimate” or “illegal”/“illegitimate,” and this even
while many of these same cocaleros participated in bending the rules of
(il)legality in practice. After Evo Morales became president of Bolivia in 2006,
emerging from the ranks of the coca unions in the Chapare region, the
government increasingly formalized an approach to controlling production of the
coca leaf that would be sensitive to cocaleros’ economic, political, and social
relationship to a leaf that is the main ingredient in cocaine, as well as a food,
medicine, and cultural resource used in the Andes for thousands of years. The
approach, often called “social control” was to be implemented and enforced at the
level of the unions. Social control allows some cocaleros to grow a small plot of
coca (1600 m2 to 2500 m2 depending on the growing region), through a system of
licensing and registration. Participants police themselves and each other to ensure
that all members abide by the dictates of “social control.” This approach to
controlling production of the coca leaf represents a huge break from coca control
in the past, when, from the 1970s through 2004, Bolivian government forces were
targeting peasants as part of a violent coca eradication strategy supported by the
United States Drug Enforcement Administration. Cocaleros in the Chapare coca
growing region in particular feel a sense of ownership over “social control,”
owing both to the central role these cocaleros play in carrying out the policy, and
because many of the main features of the model were formulated from within the
Chapare coca growers’ federations, still led today by cocalero President Morales
(Grisaffi 2013).
But the relay between policy and practice is not entirely smooth. During
research in Bolivia in 2012, 2013, and 2014, I (ZP) learned the extent to which
some cocaleros engaged in and/or supported practices of “cheating” even while
they accused others of breaking the rules of “social control.” I witnessed this
dynamic both within the two main coca growing regions, the Yungas de La Paz
and the Chapare, and also between them. In several places within the Chapare, I
learned that cocalero unions at several levels of governance were allowing nonlicensed federation members to grow a small plot of coca in a way that would be
illegible to the government forces charged with checking their properties. One
afternoon I met privately with Francisco (pseudonym), because he didn’t want to
be overheard in town. He spoke angrily about inequality in coca plot registration:
certain cocaleros had cheated during the initial registration process, dividing their
land and registering multiple coca plots per family. Meanwhile, Francisco knew
long-time coca federation members who had fought against punitive anti-coca
policies, but could not obtain legal coca licenses now because of inequalities in
distribution. Because these long-term members “made ‘social control’ possible,”
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Francisco argued, his federation was justified in allowing such unlicensed
cocaleros to grow a coca plot despite lacking registration (fieldnotes and
interview, 25 September 2013, Entre Ríos, Bolivia). I spoke to many other
cocaleros in the Chapare who both defended what they understood as their own
legitimate reasons for growing more coca than they were officially allowed, while
accusing others of illegally growing more than their fair share. Despite the
ambiguities in cocaleros’ execution of “social control” on the ground, according
to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the amount of land dedicated to
coca production has been decreasing since 2011 (UNODC 2016). The UN
understands this as a success. Cocaleros are therefore determining how the change
in coca control policy since 2006 is being carried out, and they are doing so not to
the letter of what is being defined by the government, but according to social
relations among coca growers, between coca growing regions, and with a concern
for what officials need to see in order to deem the policy a success. Here again,
everyday life and social reproduction are a constitutive force in state formation,
not a secondary phenomena subsumed by statecraft.
Ethnography has been crucial for generating our insights into how people
create social relations recognizable as an effect of “the state” in Mexico and
Bolivia. In both cases, immersive research has resulted in complicating
distinctions between “state” and “non-state” actors, and in both cases, people are
nonetheless observably invested in and actively upholding categories through
which state power is exercised and/or the effects of government policy can be
measured; they are understanding themselves and making normative claims about
how political life should be in relation to state authority. By learning from
individuals and communities we can understand the production of “the state” as a
process through which ordinary people (as well as practitioners of spectacular
capital-P Politics) produce a state effect that is specific to their historicalgeographical context.
CONCLUSION
This paper has argued for a feminist turn in geographical research on state power
in Latin America. We have suggested that a feminist-political-geographical
orientation to the state for critical geographies of Latin America will facilitate
greater sensitivity to the role of processes of social reproduction through which
state authority is being (re)produced and social-spatial order that sustains injustice
is maintained. Statist theorizations cannot adequately account for how the
contemporary political landscape takes shape. Furthermore, in the current political
conjuncture, attention to a bodily scale of negotiation with the capacity to produce
social relations that are widely recognized as an effect of the state could not be
more urgent. We have suggested that, absent this admission of ongoing struggles
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for social justice in everyday life, this conjuncture -- for some, the “end of a
cycle” -- lends itself to an abysmal pessimism. A feminist ethnographic approach
to state formation “beyond the state” in Latin America highlights the historicalgeographical contingency of the state form, and suggests that our political lives
have the potential to be otherwise.
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