The Formation and Consequences of Political Generations in Social Movements: Cases of Feminist Activism in Ecuador and Peru1,2

Abstract

Anchored in Mannheim's theory, the concept of political generations captures how new movement recruits respond to shifting political contexts and become agents of change within a social movement. A key challenge when using this concept in generational analyses is to link context with agency. In this article, I make this link by focusing on the interactions between political contexts and movement agency. My study among two generations of feminist activism in Ecuador and Peru found that both cohorts interacted with two sociopolitical conditions—prevailing gender relations and notions of political action—when they were initially mobilized. These interactions took different forms for each cohort, thereby shaping their distinct understandings and practices of feminist activism, and continuing to have consequences for movement goals, strategies, and relationships overtime. For the earlier generation, which became active between the late 1970s and early 1990s, consequences meant practicing militancy to achieve goals, deploying vanguardism to execute a comprehensive strategy, and exerting autonomy to manage the actions of the powerful. I theorize the interactions between movement agency and political contexts as a mesostructure, where process and structure meet, thereby providing a more comprehensive account of the mechanism of change bringing about political generations.