ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author picks up on the ‘post-development’ debate that has taken place in recent years around the Indigenous concept of Buen Vivir or Vivir Bien (Sumak Kawsay, in Quechua), which has been incorporated into the political constitution of a plurinational and multiethnic state promulgated by the governments of Ecuador and Bolivia. Drawing on a discourse analysis of a series of interviews with Indigenous and peasant women leaders, the author provides a decolonial feminist critique of Sumak Kawsay, highlighting how its conceptualisation has been constructed without a serious questioning or deep understanding of the lives of subaltern women—a matter of class and gender-based inequalities and oppression. Given the relatively few encounters between the feminist and Indigenous movements and Sumak Kawsay, the author argues the need to reconstruct the concept from an intersectional perspective that takes into account the voices of subaltern women and challenges the power matrix of male domination.
