Through ethnographic cases and activists’ narratives, Contesting Publics analyses the challenges feminists face as they seek to engage with new spaces of participatory democracy in Latin America.

Lynne Phillips and Sally Cole analyse how new silences, exclusions and re-inscriptions of inequalities have emerged alongside these new spaces of participation. The book re-examines the relationship between public and private and speaks to a larger theoretical question: what is the meaning of 'the public' within democracy projects?

Contesting Publics considers current debates among feminists from different generations on the merits of a variety of strategies, goals and issues, drawing out vital lessons for students, researchers and activists in anthropology, gender studies and Latin American studies.

Preface: Contesting Publics, by Sally Cole and Lynne Phillips
1:Towards an Ethnography of Publics, by Sally Cole and Lynne Phillips
2: Autoconstructed Feminist Publics: Household Matters in Northeast Brazil, by Sally Cole
Activist Testimony: Mariza
3: Saving Women? Awkward Alliances in the Public Spaces of Sex Tourism, by Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan
Activist Testimony: Susana and Luísa
4: Feminism and “Post-Neoliberal” Publics: Working the Spaces of Ecuador’s Constitutional Reform, by Lynne Phillips
Activist Testimony: Cecilia
5: Gossip as Direct Action, by Erica Lagalisse
6: A Pedagogical Conversation: Public Scholars and Public Scholarship, by Sally Cole, Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan, Erica Lagalisse and Lynne Phillips
Notes
References
Index