ABSTRACT
In the past three decades, a range of women’s organizations and movements have emerged throughout Latin America. Many urban neighborhood women’s organizations have developed political strategies which are derived in part from their gendered roles in, and identification with, processes of local reproduction and consumption. Some have argued that these types of organizations position themselves as “clients,” “recipients,” or “consumers” vis-à-vis the state – and increasingly, vis-à-vis the international development apparatus – in order to demand state services, push for legal reforms, collectivize consumption (as in the well-documented case of Lima’s communal kitchens), and protest the economic changes which affect their daily lives and households (Barrig 1994, 1996; Alvarez 1996; Schild 1998). In so doing, these movements are constructing new consumer-based political identities which, most concretely, address the daily impacts of economic crisis and political reform, and symbolically, reflect their gendered subject positions in processes of modernity and modernization in Latin America (Olea 1995; Lind 1995).
