International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Navigating The Left Turn

Amy Lind & Christine (Cricket) Keating

To cite this article: Amy Lind & Christine (Cricket) Keating (2013) Navigating The Left Turn,
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:4, 515-533, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2013.813162

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Navigating The Left Turn

SEXUAL JUSTICE AND THE CITIZEN REVOLUTION IN ECUADOR

AMY LIND AND CHRISTINE KEATING

University of Cincinnati, USA and Ohio State University, USA

Abstract -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since the late 1990s, a series of pro-LGBT reforms have taken place in Latin America,
coinciding in part with the region’s shift away from neoliberalism to the Left. The Ecua-
dorian state has been at the forefront of this trend, decriminalizing homosexuality in
1997 and including an anti-discrimination clause on the basis of sexual orientation
in the 1998 Constitution, the first in the region to do so. The 2008 Constitution went
further; redefining the family, recognizing same-sex civil unions and providing legal
protection on the basis of gender identity. At the same time, the 2008 Constitution
banned same-sex marriage and adoption and continues the ban on abortion –
indications that heteronormativity continues to underlie state policy and law. What
is at stake in the state’s seemingly ambivalent embrace of LGBT and feminist struggles
for sexual justice? We argue that this contradictory stance towards struggles for sexual
justice is a result of the interplay between homophobic and homoprotectionist state
strategies. We draw out the implications of this ambivalent form of state inclusion
for queer and feminist politics and argue that activists’ navigation of the left turn
necessitates a deeply coalitional approach to politics, one that fosters alternatives to
state-centered configurations of justice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keywords
sexual justice, post-neoliberalism, homophobia, homoprotectionism, pinkwashing,
pinkwedging, Ecuador

INTRODUCTION

In February 2012, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa (2007 –present), a leader

elected with a mandate to shift the country away from neoliberalism to the
Left, announced the appointment of his new Minister of Health. To some

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2013

Vol. 15, No. 4, 515– 533, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.813162
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 people’s surprise, he appointed ‘out’ lesbian activist Carina Vance to the pos-
ition. This announcement followed a series of press conferences from lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists regarding addiction clinics
engaged in sexual orientation change efforts; press conferences that alarmed
observers both nationally and internationally about the prospect of a
growing network of ‘ex-gay’ reparative clinics in the country. Based on
research published in two human rights reports (Varea and Cordero 2008;
Marcos and Cordero 2009), it had become known that over 200 such clinics
existed in the country. At the time, little else was known about their structure
or funding sources, but activists had circulated online petitions in Spanish and
English that reached people around the world, thus creating a global news
story practically overnight.1 Soon after news reports began to emerge in
Europe, North America and elsewhere, Correa appointed Vance to the position
and under Vance’s leadership his administration immediately promised to
regulate and condemn the clinics still operating in the country. On the
surface, these reforms appear progressive and undoubtedly are a step
towards greater inclusion and visibility for LGBT rights in Ecuador, a marker
that the Citizen Revolution initiated by the Correa administration is a LGBT-
friendly one.
Yet, the question is, how has this inclusion occurred and at what costs? In
this paper, we pay close attention to the ways that as the Ecuadorian state
moves away from the neoliberal logic of market-led development, Correa
and others have sought to reposition the state as the interlocutor of social
movements. Tremendous tensions exist among social movement organizations
that wish to remain autonomous from the state and broader ideological and
epistemological debates concerning the state’s role in Ecuador’s post-
neoliberal turn underlay many discussions and processes taking place
today.2 Does the state’s new repositioning represent the state’s commitment
to social, economic and political transformation in the face of right-wing
opposition, or does it signal that the state is merely paying lip-service to
such transformations while promoting an alternative, but no less exclusionary
or extractive, form of capitalist modernization, as critics suggest? In this paper
we look particularly closely at the ways some social movement agendas fall
within new post-neoliberal state logics, while others remain marginalized
and mostly ‘outside’ the Citizen Revolution. Specifically, we address the
seemingly contradictory interplay between politically homophobic policies
– the ban on same-sex marriage, for example – in the 2008 Constitution
and what we call ‘homoprotectionist’ discourses and policies which are
geared toward protecting individuals on the basis of sexual orientation and
gender identity. Although seemingly opposed, we argue that these approaches
are closely linked and that state and opposition leaders often rely on a combi-
nation of these approaches to achieve their political ends. We draw out the
implications of this ambivalent form of state inclusion for queer politics
more generally and we address how activists might best address the interplay

516 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

of state-sponsored homophobia and homoprotectionism in struggles for
sexual justice more generally.
In making this argument we pay particular attention to two pivotal moments
in Ecuador’s legal and political history: the 1998 Constitution and the 2008
Constitution. We address how homosexuality, same-sex marriage and trans-
gender rights have been addressed in these two sets of constitutional
reforms; reforms aimed at enabling the country to remake itself vis-à-vis
the global hegemonic neoliberal model and the legacy of colonialism in the
region (Lind forthcoming). We suggest that these constitutional reforms
point to a new model of sexual justice that presents both new challenges
and new opportunities for social movements.
Before continuing, we’d like to note that while we privilege an analysis of
the state, we do so with an understanding that the state is not monolithic or
static but rather fluid, contradictory and ever-changing. Likewise, along the
lines of recent scholarship on sexual rights and politics in transnational per-
spective, our aim is not to simply interpret emergent political subjectivities
(e.g. gay, lesbian, queer) as ‘givens’ or social movement strategies as ‘rational’,
but rather to ‘explore the conditions that shape and naturalize both subjectiv-
ities and rationalities’ (de la Dehesa 2010: xiii) and to understand how in this
case a state’s recognition or demonization of sexual rights in itself contributes
to the naturalizing of identities and the ‘marginalising’ of ‘other possibilities’
(de la Dehesa 2010: xiv) – a process we document in later sections of this
article.

SEXUALITY, STATES AND GOVERNANCE IN LATIN AMERICA: ON THE

INTERPLAY OF HOMOPHOBIA AND HOMOPROTECTIONISM

As queer scholars and activists have pointed out, struggles for sexual justice in
the global South have been fraught with cultural and geopolitical tensions,
given the colonial origins of modern anti-homosexuality laws and given how
notions of gayness and queerness themselves have become transnational ter-
rains of dispute (Murray 2007; Viteri 2008; Weiss and Bosia forthcoming).
Sexual justice claims include the struggle for the right to self-determination
as sexual beings, freedom of sexual and gender expression, the right to
control one’s own body and the right to have rights (Bell and Binnie 2000;
Cabral/Grinspan and Viturro 2006). In the shift to the new Left in Latin
America, governments have been faced with ongoing political struggles to
provide rights to LGBT individuals, at a time when laws criminalizing homo-
sexuality have only recently been overturned. In Ecuador, homosexuality was
decriminalized in 1997 and since then activists have worked to reform
additional laws and policies pertaining to LGBT individuals and households.
Many debates concerning homosexuality, gender and the family have ‘gone
global’ (Buss and Herman 2003), further adding to the complexity of local or
national political processes.

-------------------------------------------------- Amy Lind and Christine Keating / Navigating The Left Turn 517
 In addition to a focus on ways LGBT struggles have fought for inclusion,
sexual self-determination and freedom from persecution, recent scholarship
has focused on ways that state and opposition leaders deploy issues of sexual
politics in pursuit of their agendas. Indeed, although still understudied, the
upsurge in the high-profile and often violent deployment of anti-LGBT rhetoric
and policy in several contexts across the globe has underscored the importance
of paying close attention to how particular state leaders activate and use homo-
phobia to advance their agendas. As discussed in the scholarship on comparative
political homophobias,3 state leaders deploy homophobic discourse they are tar-
geting LGBT activists specifically and political opponents more generally, as a
way to ‘maintain and defend . . . control of the masculinist state’ (Currier
2010: 111–2). Such forms of anti-LGBT rhetoric and policy are all too often
overlooked because homophobia, in the words of Mike Bosia, ‘is seen as
nothing more than a variable [or as a restraint] reflecting static religious
values and traditional attitudes about sexuality’. State-deployed homophobia
is an approach to contemporary statecraft that is being developed, shared and
replicated in states throughout the world (Weiss and Bosia forthcoming).
One particular way that political actors mobilize, consolidate and foment
homophobia is through the use of homosexuality as a ‘wedge issue’; that is,
an issue that political actors use to try to attract or disaffect a portion of an
opponent’s customary supporters. This practice, what we’ll call ‘pinkwedging’,
can be seen in many different political contexts. In US politics, for example,
conservative groups have tried to divide the base of the US Democratic
Party by mobilizing against same-sex marriage (Ford 2012). In Latin
America, right-wing groups have worked to mobilize opposition against
same-sex marriage in national referendums and elections by claiming that
LGBT rights are an imposition on national sovereignty and/or traditional
culture; likewise, in several African countries, state leaders have utilized
homophobic discourse, policy and law as part of their anti-colonial, anti-
western nationalist discourse, thereby mobilizing political support amongst
their constituents by appealing to their (purportedly heteronormative)
‘African’ cultural or ethnic values (Currier 2012).
In addition to political homophobia, contemporary politics is marked as well
by what might be called state ‘homoprotectionism’, an approach in which the
political actors harness the power of the state to protect LGBT people from per-
secution and domination. In the protectionist framework, the state works to
secure the allegiance of vulnerable groups by offering protection to these
groups from other groups within society. Indeed, whereas the homophobic
state secures heterosexist power and privilege, the homoprotectionist state
challenges it. This homoprotectionist approach can be used to justify the con-
solidation, extension and centralization of state authority. Although the focus
on LGBT groups is a relatively recent phenomenon, the state – and in particu-
lar the colonial state – has long used a discourse of paternalist protection in
pursuit of the consolidation of power, with earlier manifestations of this
approach often focused on women and minority groups. For example, colonial

518 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

discourse in Latin America often focused on ‘protecting’ women of criolla
descent as justification for anti-miscegenation and prostitution laws; and like-
wise, in other colonial contexts such as India, colonial discourse often focused
on ‘protecting women’ as justification for British rule (Keating 2011: 32).
Key to protectionist narratives is a version of state-society relations, in
which the state functions as an arbiter between groups working to ensure
that one group does not dominate or persecute the other. Indeed, homoprotec-
tionist narratives often pivot on an assumption that anti-gay bias and beliefs
are traditional or are grounded in group-based religious or ethnic identities
and that the state must intervene to protect LGBT individuals against such
bias. Such narratives obscure ways that it is often the state and other political
actors that have worked to foment and mobilize discriminatory actions, atti-
tudes or beliefs against people that either have or are perceived as having
non-heterosexual identities. Obscuring the workings of political homophobia
deflects attention away from the state (and on to religious or ethnic groups, for
example) as a locus of anti-LGBT discrimination and bias. In addition to facil-
itating a dependence of LGBT groups upon the state, which in the global South
carries the postcolonial legacy of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and class hier-
archies, such a deflection can serve to generate or to increase fragmentation
between LGBT groups and other marginalized groups.
Further, state homoprotectionist policies can also serve to consolidate
national identity and legitimate the centralization of authority. One of the
ways that political leaders put homoprotectionism to use in the service of
state power in contemporary politics is through what Jasbir Puar calls ‘homo-
nationalism’. Puar writes that contemporary projects of exceptionalism, ‘a
process whereby a national population comes to believe its own superiority
and its own singularity’ are ‘furthered by attaching themselves to, or being
attached by, non-heterosexual, “homo-normative" subjects’ (Puar 2008: 48).
In this formulation, ‘gay-friendly’ policies or discourses mark a nation as par-
ticularly ‘modern’, ‘civil’, ‘equitable’, ‘humane’ and/or ‘democratic’. Analyzing
what has come to be known as ‘pinkwashing’, Puar and other scholars and
activists have highlighted ways that state officials seek to create a more posi-
tive image of their government, nation, human rights record, economic policy
framework or foreign policy agenda (to name only a few) by promoting or
speaking about LGBT rights. Anti-occupation activists in Israeli occupied ter-
ritories were among the first to use the term to refer to LGBT issues: they have
claimed that as Israel promotes gay and lesbian equality as part of its national
agenda, it aims to create acceptance for its general human rights record in the
region, thus, ‘pinkwashing’ the human rights violations occurring in occupied
territories (Schulman 2011). Activists adopted this term from social move-
ments that target corporations for exploitative practices, such as companies
that sell unhealthy products and try to improve their image by supporting
breast cancer initiatives (the original use of the term ‘pinkwashing’ came
from this movement) or companies that sell unsustainable products and try
to improve their image by supporting environmental causes, what activists

-------------------------------------------------- Amy Lind and Christine Keating / Navigating The Left Turn 519
 call ‘greenwashing’. ‘Pinkwashing’ in the queer studies sense refers to a cri-
tique of states’ branding themselves as ‘clean’ by embracing LGBT rights
when, in fact, they are culpable with respect to other instances of human
rights, such as ethnic, racial, religious or class oppression.
At a regional level, many Latin American states have promoted a large
number of pro-LGBT policies and laws over the past decade, in both neoliberal
and post-neoliberal contexts. For example, Argentina was the first country in
the region to approve a same-sex marriage law in 2010 and national civil
union laws exist in distinct forms in Brazil (2004), Uruguay (2008), Ecuador
(2008), Colombia (2009) and in some jurisdictions in Mexico. Bolivia’s social-
ist-inspired 2009 Constitution also contains pro-LGBT provisions. Ecuador’s
2008 Constitution provides protection on the basis of gender identity in its
anti-discrimination clause. Colombia was the first country to provide explicit
protections for intersex individuals, following a Constitutional Court ruling in
2008. In June 2012, Argentina became the first country in the world to allow
transgender individuals to officially change their names and genders on paper
without first getting the approval of a judge or doctor. These advances are
important steps toward sexual justice for individuals who do not fit within
normative sexual and gender norms within their societies, yet, analyzed ‘on
the ground’, these reform processes are often embedded in and discursively
linked to broader forms of political mobilization. Indeed, the state’s pursuit
of LGBT rights has been used to promote, for example, a particular kind of
state modernization. LGBT rights in Latin America is often seen by political
leaders as a marker of progress toward a more democratic, industrialized or
advanced society in the case of neoliberal states, or toward a more sovereign
nation in the case of twenty-first-century socialism. As we will discuss in this
article, state homoprotectionist laws and policies have served to consolidate
Ecuador’s image as a revolutionary nation, despite its pursuit of capitalist
extraction policies and Correa’s ambivalent stance on gender and sexual
norms (Lind 2012).
Although seemingly opposed, these homophobic and homoprotectionist
approaches are closely linked and political authorities often rely on a
complex interplay of both approaches in order to mobilize consent. Teasing
out the interplay of homophobia and homoprotectionism help make sense of
the shifting justificatory logic and enabling collaborations upon which state
power and authority rests. A first link between them is that state homophobic
rhetoric and policy help shape the ‘traditionalist’ politics that are the object of
state homoprotectionist intervention. Second, although one approach or the
other might be rhetorically dominant, both approaches are often concurrently
pursued. Finally, both approaches help foster alliances that help to bolster state
power. While homophobic rhetoric and policy is geared towards engendering
the collaboration of dominant groups, the homoprotectionist approach works
to build support among those who hope to put the state in the service of
reform. In the sections that follow, we will examine the interplay of both

520 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

political homophobia and homoprotectionism in Ecuador and the ways that
Ecuadorian activists have resisted and challenged this interplay.

THE ECUADORIAN STATE AND STRUGGLES FOR SEXUAL JUSTICE

Struggles for sexual justice have become prominent in contemporary Ecuador-

ian politics, particularly since the late 1990s. In 1997, homosexuality was
decriminalized in Ecuador. Importantly, this followed a series of events that
gained national attention and changed the hearts and minds of many Ecuador-
ians. Prior to 1997, homosexuality was rarely discussed in popular culture or in
politics, except in derogatory terms. Queer activists rarely, if ever, spoke pub-
licly; the few that dedicated their lives and careers to LGBT activism at that
time worked primarily in NGOs focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and/or
worked clandestinely. This changed beginning in 1997, when a group of
cross-dressing men was attacked in Cuenca, Ecuador’s third largest city.
Following the attack, the cross-dressers, rather than the perpetrators of the
violence, were jailed. During that time, some of these individuals were
re-victimized by the police, including through rape. The difference between
this story and many others before it is that it made national news. People
from across the country who may have been homophobic and/or transphobic
identified with the idea that, regardless of their personal beliefs, no human
being should be raped or tortured. In part because of the wide-scale attention
to this incident, lawmakers agreed to decriminalize homosexuality. Their
primary argument was not that homosexuality is acceptable; their argument
was that homosexuality is a mental health issue, not a legal issue, and, thus,
should remain outside the domain of law (Paez 2009).
This background story sets the stage for the 1998 Constitution. The 1998
Constitution came into effect during a politically unstable period, following
the ousting of then President Abdalá Bucaram (September 1997 – February
1998) through a historically unprecedented protest, in which more than two
million Ecuadorians (out of a population of thirteen million) of all social
classes and regions took to the streets. Bucaram’s ousting occurred due to
his inability to hold true to his promise to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy,
renegotiate the foreign debt and improve the economy. The country had also
entered a deep financial crisis which led to the closure of more than twenty of
Ecuador’s largest banks and the freezing of many people’s assets. This situation
caused numerous sectors of the state and civil society to push for a national
assembly with the specific goal of redrafting the constitution as a way to
reconstruct failed political and legal institutions and develop a wider base of
representation, a trend already underway in other countries (e.g. Argentina,
Bolivia and Brazil). The 1998 Constitution, then, was meant to bring both
economic and political stability to Ecuador. The framework developed by
the Constituent Assembly emphasized social rights in addition to market-led
development, characteristic of the more socially inclusive and aware variant

-------------------------------------------------- Amy Lind and Christine Keating / Navigating The Left Turn 521
 of neoliberalism that tended to mark the second generation of structural
reforms in the region.4 One of the important features of the 1998 Constitution
was an anti-discrimination clause on the basis of sexual orientation, the first
country in the region to include such a measure. The anti-discrimination
clause passed relatively easily with proponents of the bill arguing for the pro-
tection of individuals on the basis of sexual orientation (opción sexual) was
necessary to ensure the human rights of LBG individuals and for the advance-
ment of the nation itself (Paez 2009).
While an important step for LGBT groups, the above approach to sexual
justice can be understood as a particularly neoliberal approach to state homo-
protectionism, in which social rights are expanded but political and economic
structures are not necessarily challenged. At the time, for example, activists
pointed out that an anti-discrimination clause is one of the easiest pro-LGBT
measures to pass in that such legislation does not necessarily involve an
expense to the state, particularly in a context such as Ecuador where the judi-
cial system is not well established and where it would be very difficult with the
state’s limited resources to reform and educate state agencies on this issue. It
easily became a form of legislation that mostly remained on paper.
However, LGBT people were at least symbolically addressed in this legislation
and it provided an important political opportunity for activists to develop
innovative strategies to address homophobia and transphobia in Ecuador.
The 2008 Constitution drew from and expanded upon the 1998 Constitution
with respect to LGBT rights. In 2007, socialist Rafael Correa was elected Presi-
dent with a mandate to lead the country in a new, expressly postneoliberal
direction. President Correa and his Alianza PAÍS coalition government
worked quickly to redraft the constitution and national development plan, a
strategy utilized by other new Left populist leaders as well, such as Venezuela’s
Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales in their efforts to address the after-
math of the region’s neoliberal legacy.
From November 2007 through July 2008 an elected constituent assembly,
with an Alianza PAÍS majority, convened in Montecristi, Manabı́, and in Sep-
tember 2008 the new Constitution was successfully voted in through a national
referendum. This new constitution contains several innovations across a wide
variety of issues: it affirms the country as a plurinational state – one that
respects and affirms the identities of the multiple ethnic and cultural groups
within it, for example and recognizes legally enforceable ecosystem rights –
the first constitution in the world to do so. With respect to LGBT rights, it
forbids discrimination based on gender identity, a move that includes trans-
gender rights in the polity for the first time. Second, the Constitution revises
the legal definition of ‘the family’ from one based on blood kinship to one
based on a notion of the familia diversa, recognizing and affirming various
configurations of family life (Vásquez 2008).
The push for this redefinition of the family emerged from some of the
more radical organizations and networks, especially lesbian and trans
groups, who embraced a ‘transfeminist’ perspective on legal and policy

522 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

reform that involved a rethinking of marriage as an institution and of ‘gay
and lesbian rights’ agendas. This perspective converged with activists from
other movements, particularly the migrants’ rights movement, who worked
toward redefining the family to extend citizen rights to a broader range
of families and households including those living abroad (Herrera 2011).
What emerged from the assembly discussions was a definition of familias
diversas that significantly redrew the legal parameters of the family as
understood in Ecuadorian law and policy. In Article 67 of the Constitution,
‘the family’ is recognized ‘in its diverse forms’; a clear departure from the
earlier constitutional definition of the family as ‘traditional’ and ‘nuclear’.
The familia diversa – a term now widely circulating in Ecuadorian
popular culture – is understood to represent same-sex couples but also
families such as transnational migrant households. The diverse family is
based not only on kinship but on ‘alternative logics’ (Vásquez 2008) that
draws from several sources, including indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian acti-
vist critiques of the racialization of the family, feminist critiques of the
patriarchal family and current demands made by the LGBT and migrants’
rights movements. If put into practice, many more households would have
access to Correa’s redistributive project, which is the center of his anti-neo-
liberal political agenda.
For LGBT people, the post-neoliberal emphasis in the 2008 Constitution and
in contemporary Ecuadorian politics means going beyond the largely rhetori-
cal state commitment to protection from discrimination, towards attention to
questions of the relationship between sexual justice and economic justice. For
example, drawing on the constitutional commitment to diverse families, acti-
vists have worked to press the state to grant same-sex couples the same
benefits received by heterosexual married couples. One important achieve-
ment in this realm was that in 2011, for the first time in Ecuador, a lesbian
widow was able to gain full pension and social security benefits upon the
death of her partner. If the promise of neoliberal homoprotectionism was
freedom from persecution and discrimination; postneoliberal homoprotection
goes beyond that to gesture towards redistribution and, as was evidenced by
Correa’s appointment of Carina Vance as health minister, more thoroughgoing
political inclusion.
Although activists were incredibly successful in getting the language of the
familia diversa into the constitution, protests from conservative Assembly
members prompted the party leadership to include language which limits mar-
riages to heterosexual couples and bars gay couples from adopting children.
Indeed, the redefinition of the family became one of the flashpoints of resist-
ance to the passage of the new Constitution, both within the Alianza PAÍS and
outside of it. Spearheading these protests was Assemblywoman Rosana Queir-
olo who argued that:

From any time in the past, you tell me, thousands of years, the family has been
always a natural institution, whose meaning should not be changed . . . We

-------------------------------------------------- Amy Lind and Christine Keating / Navigating The Left Turn 523
 cannot change the meaning of family in this new constitution, I don’t know any
Constitution in the world that might be committing this barbarity. (Hoffman
2008)

Tensions came to a head in late March 2008, when Queirolo and other conser-
vative Assembly members participated in street protests calling for the
inclusion of language referring to God in the new constitution and for the pro-
tection of the traditional family and of the right to life. In response, Correa and
other party leaders met with the members and conceded to their demands,
announcing after the meeting that ‘the state will strengthen the family as a
nuclear unit of society. Marriage will continue to be the union of a man and
a woman, recognizing free unions’ (Peralta 2008).
The campaign preceding the referendum vote was also marked by political
homophobia. The referendum prompted a massive national political campaign
and both the government and the opposition published and distributed
pamphlets and leaflets throughout the streets of Quito, the political capital,
Guayaquil, the industrial capital and through most urban and rural sectors
of the country. Supporters of the Correa government supported a ‘yes’ vote
on the Constitution and emphasized how the Constitution would support a
secular and plurinational state; access to employment, housing and health
care; reproductive freedom; and anti-discrimination mechanisms and alterna-
tive or diverse families, including single parent, migrant and same-sex house-
holds (Unidad por el Sı́ 2008). Opponents were grounded in the political right,
based primarily in Guayaquil, led by Guayaquil Mayor (2000 – present) and
former presidential candidate Jaime Nebot and supported a ‘no’ vote. This
opposition was a loosely defined network of religious and political organiz-
ations with various, often unrelated, goals which often included preserving
capitalism and the traditional family. Although LGBT organizations largely
avoided the topic of same-sex marriage, the Right claimed through its hun-
dreds of leaflets strewn around the streets of Quito that a ‘yes’ vote meant
that one was ‘supporting same sex marriage’. They also claimed that a ‘yes’
vote meant that one is supporting ‘socialism, the destruction of the traditional
family, a loss of municipal autonomy and the end of freedom of expression’
(Campaña por el No 2008). Tellingly, in the anti-Constitution pamphlets,
same-sex marriage was the first issue listed, before all other political, econ-
omic or social issues.
At the confluence of both political homophobic and homoprotectionist
discourse, then, the 2008 Constitution is a deeply contradictory one with
regard to LGBT rights. On the one hand, the redefinition of the family
and the recognition of transgender rights are extremely important inno-
vations, ones that hold the potential to reshape the polity in ways that
are both more inclusive of and more responsive to the lives, relationships
and needs of LGBT people. On the other hand, as a result of Correa’s con-
cession to conservative demands within the assembly and the ‘pinkwedging’
campaign during the referendum, the Constitution also states that marriage

524 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

exists only between a man and a woman and adoption can only take place
among ‘couples of the opposite sex’ (Art. 68). These two measures are set-
backs, putting in place restrictions not present in the 1998 Constitution
and serving to legitimate the marginalization of LGBT families, even in
this otherwise progressive legislative context. The Constitution thus can
be read as incorporating – though importantly, not reconciling – both
homoprotectionist and homophobic impulses. Thus, same-sex couples can
challenge discriminatory laws in court but judges are faced with ambiguous
constitutional laws; much of this will likely be played out through activism,
both in and out of the courts.

CHALLENGING POLITICAL HOMOPHOBIA

As is illustrated both in their approach to the formulation of the 2008 Consti-

tutional as well as in their efforts to address some of the contradictions and
ambiguities of the Constitution in the years since its passage, LGBT activists
in Ecuador are contesting political homophobia in several creative and inter-
linked ways. One strategy has been to point to the colonial history of hetero-
normative configurations of the family and its relationship to neoliberalism.
For example, in the struggle to redefine the family in the 2008 Constitution,
transfeminist groups highlighted the linkage between restrictive notions of
the family, the colonial history of miscegenation and anti-homosexuality
laws and the centrality of heterosexism in neoliberal framings of the polity.
As one activist in Quito phrased it: ‘transfeminism breaks with a (neo)
liberal logic, at least in the Ecuadorian context. We [. . .] are seeking a
broader proposal that goes beyond the neoliberal’. Rather than focusing on
being included in ‘the [traditional] family’, a kind of rhetoric prevalent in neo-
liberal policy circles (Bedford 2009), she argued for an alternative vision
altogether: ‘We say “no” to norms, to the dominant aesthetic, to the neoliberal
system . . . there are other ways of seeing the world’ (Rojas 2008). For Rojas and
others, redefining the family to include ‘diverse families’ was a move toward
an alternative logic to neoliberalism, but also to the patriarchal, racist, exclu-
sionary postcolonial state more generally.
Second, groups have contested political homophobia by mobilizing in ways
that disrupt or disarm ‘pinkwedging’ as a strategy. Indeed, research and acti-
vists’ testimonies indicate that generally LGBT rights organizations did not
push for same-sex marriage legislation, with only one, or possibly two,
NGOs voicing support for same-sex marriage during the campaign. Instead
of creating openings between groups that could be wedged, the activists
embrace of the concept of familias diversas linked together a range of move-
ments including feminist, indigenous, LGBT and migrant rights movements in
the effort to expand or transform the notion of the family in Ecuador. Indeed,
one of the advantages of the approach, as Casa Trans co-founder Elizabeth
Vásquez writes, is that:

-------------------------------------------------- Amy Lind and Christine Keating / Navigating The Left Turn 525
 The legalisation of the notion of family diversity does not conflict with the notion
of common law marriage, but includes it as one more manifestation of diversity.
In contrast, struggling only for common law marriages excludes struggles for
more broad conception of a diversity of families. (quoted in Viteri 2011)

Finally, since the passage of the 2008 Constitution, activists have continued to
work in creative ways to challenge the contradictions generated by the inter-
play of homophobic and homoprotectionist discourse, policy and law. One
strategy that activist groups have used to push against the contradictory
impulses embedded in the 2008 Constitution has been to create situations
that, in the words of Elizabeth Vásquez, ‘create a legal paradox’. In December
2010, several activist groups led primarily by Quito-based Casa Trans and UK-
based TransAction organized a very public wedding of two self-defined gay
men in front of the Municipality of Quito. Although same-sex marriages are
prohibited in the Constitution, because the wedding was between one legally
defined cisgender man and one transgender man, the groups could draw
upon the language in the Constitution that ensures non-discrimination on
the basis of gender identity to argue for the wedding. The ‘gay wedding’ was
thus planned both to challenge the anti-same-sex marriage clause in the Con-
stitution and to force the state to uphold the legal definition of diverse families.
Vásquez, a trained lawyer and self-defined ‘judicial activist’, explains that this
put the state in a bind, such that whether the state allowed or forbid the mar-
riage the outcome would yield a result that would affirm sexual diversity:

In order to maintain the historical legal denial of trans rights (that is, to officially
label a trans man as a ‘wife’) the judge has to make a progressive interpretation of
gay rights and allow this marriage between two masculine gender identities. And
conversely, in order to maintain the historical legal denial of gay rights (that is, to
prevent a homosexual marriage) the judge has to progressively interpret trans
rights and admit that a trans man is a man and that is precisely why he can’t
marry another man. Both legal interpretations are possible and what’s interesting
about this paradox is that in either case, there is a positive outcome for sexual
diversity. (quoted in Viteri 2011)

In other words, staging a cisgender/transgender ‘gay wedding’ forced the state

to address head-on the uneasy coalescence between homophobia and homo-
protectionism embedded in the Constitution. The ‘gay wedding’ between
British Joey Hateley and Ecuadorian Hugo Vera was officiated by then City
Councilmember Norman Wray (also a presidential candidate in the 2013 elec-
tion) in front of the cameras of Ecuador’s major news stations and journalists;
an ‘art-law’ collaboration designed to provoke public reaction and contempla-
tion. As a trans man, Hateley’s official documents listed him as an ‘F’, thus
when the Municipality was faced with providing a marriage license it necess-
arily had to due to their legal ‘heteronormative’ status as ‘man and woman’. In
this case, the Municipality of Quito supported the legal challenge from the

526 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

start, even promoting and hosting the public event as an example of the Muni-
cipality’s sexual diversity ordinance (Ordinance No. 240).
While this wedding did not change the ambivalent language of the 2008
Constitution, it has arguably opened new terrain for discussing the institution
of marriage, gender identity and same-sex desire in Ecuador. It embraced what
supporters of the event view as positive aspects of the 2008 Constitution – the
redefinition of family and kinship and support for civil unions – while also
challenging the Constitution’s exclusionary marriage clause. Vásquez explains
that ‘in the context of this cutting-edge constitutional conception of “family”
and gender, but also in the stressful context of a constitutional specification of
the heterosexuality of marriage which didn’t exist in the previous Constitution
(and which from a formal point of view could be considered a setback), we
arrive at our gay marriage’ (quoted in Viteri 2011).

‘IT IS EASIER NOW TO TALK ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY THAN ABOUT

WATER’: AGAINST HOMOPROTECTIONISM

In the contemporary political context, the Ecuadorian state is promoting a

positive image of itself, both within Ecuador and abroad, in part based on
its inclusion of queers in the Citizen Revolution. Although, these political
advances can be seen as a victory for LGBT rights, questions remain as to
the sustainability of this state-LGBT activist alliance, particularly in light of
ongoing clientelistic politics as well as growing divisions among and within
social movements throughout civil society.
One potentially disturbing trend is the state’s increased role as interlocutor
of the economy and of civil society; a key aspect of ‘revolutionising’ citizen-
ship. Movements or organizations that do not support the Citizen Revolution,
regardless of their identity, have been largely alienated from the Correa admin-
istration. Most notably, the organized indigenous movement (and especially its
most powerful umbrella organization, CONAIE) has been excluded from and
placed in direct confrontation with the Correa administration’s Citizen Revo-
lution, in part because indigenous activists have protested the continuation
of state-sponsored resource extractive policies despite the Correa’s adminis-
tration’s anti-capitalist, pro-plurinational, pro-buen vivir revolutionary rheto-
ric which claims to support and promote indigenous ways of life. The feminist
movement as well has become largely divided over the government’s unwill-
ingness to prioritize longstanding feminist demands including reproductive
rights and that thus far has dismantled the state’s women’s agency,
CONAMU (Consejo Nacional de las Mujeres, or National Women’s Council),
leaving only a temporary ‘transition commission’ in its place. As such, many
feminist leaders who have disagreed with Correa’s inaction on feminist
issues, including his dismantling of CONAMU, are becoming alienated from
the government. Some of these feminist leaders have become part of the oppo-
sition movement, despite their own socialist leanings.5

-------------------------------------------------- Amy Lind and Christine Keating / Navigating The Left Turn 527
 Against the backdrop of these divisions, it is important to pay close attention
to the politics of homoprotectionism. For example, one activist we interviewed
in Quito in February 2012 summarized the Ecuadorian context in a stark, yet
telling way. ‘In Ecuador’, she stated, ‘it is easier now to talk about homosexu-
ality than water’, referring to the fact that in national political discussions,
homosexuality is discursively equated with class and racial respectability –
a kind of homonormativity in the making – whereas water, which is a
central theme in a large national indigenous-led protest against the govern-
ment’s pro-extractive development policies, is discursively equated with a
racialized, lower class ‘other,’ much like someone who might have participated
in Ecuador’s M-8 protests in March 2012 (Coba 2012).6
Queries such as the one by the activist above, ones that open dialogue about
the question of why is it acceptable to talk about some issues but not about
others, exposes and thus short-circuits the politics of pinkwashing by highlight-
ing ways that the Correa administration might be using its support for LGBT acti-
vists and issues as progressive political cover for its exploitative and extractive
resource extraction policies. Another way that activists have challenged the poli-
tics of homoprotectionism is by refusing the fragmentation of LGBT issues from
indigenous rights or feminist issues. Indeed, some activists have leveraged the
current climate of state support of LGBT groups to create spaces for both coalition
and decolonial dialogue with indigenous groups and with feminist groups.
Working with indigenous communities, for example, Casa Trans initiated a
photography exhibit ‘Wankavilka Trans: Retratos de Enchaquirad@s de
Engabao’, which documents the lives of trans individuals in the coastal com-
munity of Engabao. One of the only gender and sexual non-conforming com-
munities documented to have roots that existed prior to Spanish colonization
and a community with strong non-western gender conforming practices
(Benavides 2006), the project reappropriates the term ‘enchaquirad@s’, his-
torically a pejorative term used in colonial chronicles of homoerotic and
non-gender conforming practices, to both reclaim and open up discussion
about decolonial gender/sexual identities in Ecuador. The photography
project has been widely promoted by the Correa administration, including
on its website.
Queer groups have also leveraged state support to enable collaboration with
feminist groups. For example, Casa Trans works closely with the Transition
Commission on women’s and gender rights, assisting the Commission in
expanding its definition of ‘gender’ to include gender non-conforming
women in its policy frameworks and projects (to date, the National Assembly
has rejected the usage of this definition of ‘gender’ in new laws). And it has
worked horizontally with women’s rights organizations in recent abortion
rights and anti-rape efforts, including in Quito’s successful Marcha de las
Putas (Slut Walk). These examples demonstrate how activists are inserting
themselves into the Citizen Revolution in ways that point in the direction of
an approach to sexual justice in which groups turn to each other in dialogue
in spaces that may be state-enabled, but are not state-centered.

528 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONCLUSION

Despite contradictions and constraints, the struggle for sexual justice in

Ecuador has generated exciting new definitions, models and legal frameworks
that have the potential to reverberate far beyond the region. There is, however,
reason to worry about the fragility of these gains, as the state is a notoriously
fickle and unstable partner when it comes to rights for marginalized groups.
The experience of former Alianza PAÍS assembly member Marı́a Paula
Romo, who left the majority coalition in March 2011 to join another self-
defined ‘new Left’ opposition movement, Movimiento Ruptura, underscores
the precarity of the state’s commitment to sexual diversity. When Romo
announced her departure from Alianza PAÍS, President Correa publicly stated:

Marı́a Paula Romo imposed her ideas, but she was not part of Alianza PAÍS . . .
you can’t tell me that abortion or gay marriage were Alianza PAÍS issues. No!
All of these issues were Marı́a Paula Romo’s, an absurd kind of anticlericalism.
(UniversoGay 2011: 1)

In contrast with the Correa administration’s largely pro-LGBT rights position

during the earlier constitutional referendum and election campaigns and in
complete contradiction with Correa’s later appointment of Vance as well as
support for LGBT groups after his election, in this instance he drew upon pol-
itically homophobic rhetoric to blame Romo for her departure from his gov-
erning coalition party and maintain support for his government. Perhaps
more so than holding an ideological position on LGBT rights, Correa and his
administration utilize contradictory strategies to maintain support for their
political hegemony and governmental agenda. Romo has been a vocal
opponent to the Correa administration’s new laws regulating the economy,
the judicial system and the media; Correa’s public attack on Romo can be
understood as an attempt to occlude her critique of his administration based
on her position on same-sex marriage and abortion.
Correa’s disavowal of the Citizen Revolution’s commitment to sexual justice
and recourse to homophobic pinkwedging as a strategy to deflect critique of
his administration underscores the importance of being clear-eyed about the
limits of state inclusion and paying close attention to the interplay between
strategies of state-sponsored homophobia and homoprotectionism. As we
have illustrated, in post-neoliberal Ecuador, sexual ‘rights’ have been discur-
sively integrated into the government’s notion of well-being and revolution-
ary citizenship, thus leading, perhaps, to a broader and more inclusive
notion of justice. Yet some LGBT demands continue to be marginalized and
sometimes rejected by the Citizen Revolution and both the government and
the opposition have deployed ‘pinkwedging’ strategies in ways that suggest
that Correa and his administration will abandon their rhetorical commitment
to sexual justice in order to maintain support for their political hegemony and
governmental agenda. Furthermore, in a homoprotectionist vein, the state has

-------------------------------------------------- Amy Lind and Christine Keating / Navigating The Left Turn 529
 used its (ambivalent) support for sexual justice as political cover for its neglect
or rejection of feminist and indigenous demands and struggles. Likewise, it has
supported the most conservative and ‘safest’ rights-based, homoprotectionist
demands, such as the right to be ‘protected’ in the face of discrimination,
with little indication of rethinking the normative boundaries of gender,
sexual, racial or class respectability within the politics and plans of the
Citizen Revolution.
Given the imbrication of both state homophobic and state homoprotection-
ist discourse and policy with inequitable power relations within and between
groups, it is critical to pay close attention to their interplay, rejecting political
homophobia while at the same time maneuvering state homoprotectionism in
ways that preserves policy gains (as even radical transfeminist groups such as
Casa Trans would argue) that enable LGBT people to live lives less marred by
persecution, marginalization and domination. This maneuvering, as struggles
for sexual justice within Ecuador’s Citizen Revolution highlights, necessitates
a deeply coalitional approach to politics, one that challenges intra and inter-
group hierarchies across a range of power relations and that fosters alterna-
tives to state-centered configurations of sexual justice.

Amy Lind
Mary Ellen Heintz Professor
Dept. of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
University of Cincinnati
PO Box 20164
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0164, USA
Email: amy.lind@uc.edu

Christine (Cricket) Keating

Associate Professor
Dept. of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
The Ohio State University
286 University Hall/230 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210, USA
Email: keating.60@osu.edu

Notes

1 Since then a more comprehensive study has been conducted which reveals a wide
range of institutions and individuals that implement ‘reparative practices’ in
Ecuador, suggesting that this terrain is more complex than initial human rights
reports suggest (Wilkinson 2012).
2 By ‘post-neoliberal’ we are not implying that neoliberal policies no longer exist, but
rather that they have lost their ‘quasi-hegemonic position’ as new forms of collec-

530 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 tive action and articulations of economic and social policy have gained salience
(Grimson and Kessler 2005). Since the late 1990s, over two-thirds of Latin American
nations have elected leaders with anti-neoliberal platforms. These leaders have
drafted new policies and laws that purportedly shift their countries away from
free-market development and ideologies, toward a stronger form of decolonial
sovereignty which includes broader citizen participation including that of LGBT
individuals.
3 See Boellstorff (2004), Murray (2007), Currier (2010, 2012) and Weiss and Bosia
(forthcoming).
4 See Bedford (2009) for a discussion of why and how such a more inclusive neoliber-
alism – a seemingly kinder, gentler version of the approach – nonetheless serves
the aims of global capital.
5 Interestingly, the Health Ministry announced in March 2013 that birth control,
including the ‘morning after’ pill, will now be offered and available for free to
women and adolescents through the state’s healthcare system, a definitive
advance for reproductive justice (La República 2013).
6 The so-called M-8 protests began on 9 March 2012 and were focused on the
Correa administration’s pro-extractive development policies in indigenous
territories. Led by indigenous leaders, they included many other political
sectors as well. On the same day, the Correa administration organized a large
8 March International Women’s Day event in Quito as a way to support his
government.

Acknowledgements

We thank Ashley Currier and the anonymous reviewers for comments on

earlier drafts of this article.

Notes on contributors

Amy Lind is an interdisciplinary social scientist and political economist. Her

recent work focuses on sexual politics, decolonial justice, and the shift to
the Left in Ecuador and Latin America. She is the author of Gendered Para-
doxes: Women’s Movements, State Restructuring and Global Development in
Ecuador (Penn State Press, 2005) and editor of Development, Sexual Rights
and Global Governance (Routledge, 2010).

Christine (Cricket) Keating’s work is in the areas of feminist political theory,

global and transnational feminisms, democratic theory, postcolonial and criti-
cal race theory and queer theory. She is the author of Decolonizing Democracy:
Transforming the Social Contract in India (Penn State Press, 2011) and has
published articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Art and Culture, Hypatia,
and additional journals.

-------------------------------------------------- Amy Lind and Christine Keating / Navigating The Left Turn 531
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