Seeking rights from the left ; gender, sexuality, and the Latin American pink tide / Elisabeth Jay Friedman, editor.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: contesting the pink tide / Elisabeth Jay Friedman and Constanza Tabbush -- Explaining advances and drawbacks in women's and LGBT rights in Uruguay: multi-sited pressures, political resistance, and structural inertias / Niki Johnson, Ana Laura Rodríguez Gustá, and Diego Sempol -- LGBT rights yes, abortion no: explaining uneven trajectories in Argentina under Kirchnerism (2003-15) / Constanza Tabbush, María Constanza Díaz, Catalina Trebisacce, and Victoria Keller -- Working within a gendered political consensus: uneven progress on gender and sexuality rights in Chile / Gwynn Thomas -- Gender and sexuality in Brazilian public policy: progress and regression in depatriarchalizing and deheteronormalizing the state / Marlise Matos -- De jure transformation, de facto stagnation: the status of women's and LGBT rights in Bolivia -- Shawnna Mullenax -- Toward feminist socialism?: gender, sexuality, popular power, and the state in Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution / Rachel Elfenbein -- Nicaragua and Ortega's "second" revolution: "restituting the rights" of women and sexual diversity? / Edurne Larracoechea Bohigas -- Ecuador's citizen revolution (2007-17): a lost decade for women's rights and gender equality / Annie Wilkinson -- Afterword: Maneuvering the "U-turn": comparative lessons from the pink tide and forward-looking strategies for feminist and queer activisms in the Americas / Sonia E. Alvarez.

Seeking Rights from the Left offers a unique comparative assessment of left-leaning Latin American governments by examining their engagement with feminist, women's, and LGBT movements and issues. Focusing on the “Pink Tide” in eight national cases—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela—the contributors evaluate how the Left addressed gender- and sexuality-based rights through the state. Most of these governments improved the basic conditions of poor women and their families. Many significantly advanced women's representation in national legislatures. Some legalized same-sex relationships and enabled their citizens to claim their own gender identity. They also opened opportunities for feminist and LGBT movements to press forward their demands. But at the same time, these governments have largely relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power, ignoring or rejecting the more challenging elements of a social agenda and engaging in strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights. Moreover, the comparative examination of such rights arenas reveals that the Left's more general political and economic projects have been profoundly, if at times unintentionally, informed by traditional understandings of gender and sexuality.