The ‘SONY NIGHTCLUB’: Rural Brothels, Gender Violence, and Development in Coastal Ecuador

ABSTRACT

In the Ecuadorian public imaginary, Manabí province is constructed as a lawless frontier. Manaba men are characterized for their aggressive masculinity, robust and primitive sexuality, and their proclivity towards resolving conflict with violence. This paper examines community debates about brothels and healthy sexuality in a rural coastal region where the state is expanding its reach into domestic life via the regulation of sexual intimacies and family violence. Local debates about healthy sexuality embody the historically contested and currently changing nature of state–community relationships in this previously marginalized region. While certain community factions invoke modernizing discourses of women's rights in their struggle to shut down brothels and mitigate family violence, others argue for unregulated sexuality as a way to diminish violence. Drawing from over 10 years of ethnographic research on gender, violence, and human rights in Ecuador, this paper reveals the co-construction of rural intimacies and the boundaries of state intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality
• intimacy
• prostitution
• violence
• development
• state
• Ecuador

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors and participants of this special issue and the organizers of the panel at the 2010 American Anthropological Association meeting from which this issue emerged. I am also grateful to the editors and reviewers for Ethnos for their helpful comments and suggested revisions. I also thank Brian Burke, Catherine Besteman, Britt Halvorson, William Hope, and Mary Beth Mills for their thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. This research was supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Anthropology Department at the University of Arizona, a PEO Women's Scholars Award and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Writing Fellowship.

Notes

1. In order to protect the privacy of my informants, I have used pseudonyms for all inhabitants, local organizations, and specific communities and regions. All translations from Spanish to English are my own.

2. The Sony Nihgtclub (sic) was the name most commonly utilized in conversation for the brothel-to-be, though this name was not explicitly used during the meeting with the Police Commissary. However, in the title of the paper and the remaining text of this article, I will use Sony Nightclub in its correct spelling to avoid confusion. In this region, the word Sony – in reference to the Japanese brand of electronics – has been added to the names of many business ventures that involve music and electronics. For example, a storefront that sells pirated DVDs has the name Sony scribbled on its cement post; the local disc-jockey, a man who happens to own the best sound-system with a microphone, refers to his suite of services as the Disco Móvil Sony Music; and the most rudimentary brothel that operated in the region (the one pictured in Figure 1) also had the word Sony painted in yellow on its outside wall, indicating that they played loud music. While the word literally signifies the presence or use of quality electronics in many cases, it has also become a marker for being modern in a transnational sense.

3. In fact, the province of Manabí’s political history (exemplified best by the Liberal Revolution) attests to the importance of autonomous development to Manabas, people from Manabí (Intriago Macías 2003; Zambrano Argandoña 2003; Hidrovo Quiñonez 2003). While Las Colinas is not in Manabí, most of its residents are migrants from that province, as detailed in endnote 4.

4. The large majority (approximately 75%) of Las Colinas inhabitants arrived from Manabí, a neighboring province. A smaller percentage (approximately 15%) of settlers came from the province in Loja, in southern Ecuador. Manabí and Loja are important origins of migrants; they make up a significant part of migrant populations in 7 of the 11 provinces because of recurring droughts and ‘crises in rural life’ (Chiriboga 2004). Manabí has the highest rates of out-migration in Ecuador. In the three most populated provinces in Ecuador, specifically Pichincha, Esmeraldas, and Guayas, the highest number of migrants are from Manabí (Chiriboga 2004; Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INEC) 2001).

5. Cultivatable land was becoming scarce in Manabí for a number of socio-political and climactic reasons. El Niño and La Niña events during the 1980s brought heavy rainfall, followed by strong droughts that negatively impacted agricultural production and discernibly augmented economic hardship on Ecuador's coast. Agrarian reform and the growth of cattle farming also contributed to the marginalization of small farmers in the region.

6. Las Colinas and the ecological reserve also comprise part of the Chocó-Darien-Western Ecuador Hotspot, one of ten ecological ‘hot spots’ worldwide designated in 2001 by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), a joint initiative of Conservation International, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Government of Japan, the MacArthur Foundation, and the World Bank. The corridor in which Las Colinas is designated as ‘one of the most critical and vulnerable priorities,’ prompting heightened interest in sustainable development of this region by various parties (CEPF 2001:39).

7. This is regardless of the persistence of claims that the state recognizes ‘plurinationalism’ or ‘multiculturalism’, claims which have become codified in the last two constitutions.

8. See Lind (2012) for a more in-depth discussion of these continuities (or ‘enduring contradictions’), specifically as they concern family norms and social reproduction during Correa's ‘post-neoliberal’ administration.

9. During the post-World War II period, Ecuador's state modernization efforts included industrialization, oil development, social welfare policies, and market-led development. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ecuador attracted significant foreign investment because it was considered safe and democratic (unlike Chile, Argentina, and most of Central America). Due to the plunge in oil prices in the 1980s, Ecuador began implementing structural adjustment measures (SAPs) in order to access loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), much like many other Latin American countries. The SAPs promised to increase economic growth through ‘foreign investment, trade liberalization, privatization, state retrenchment, and the redistribution of social welfare’ (Lind 2005: 2). ‘Low levels of social protest, geographic diversity, and relatively high political and economic stability,’ a small and manageable population, and the discovery of oil in the 1960s were all factors that converged to make Ecuador particularly attractive (Corkill et al. 1988; Lind 2005). However, they only led to increased unemployment and high inflation, thus paving the way for an emergent economic crisis in the 1990s.

10. In this context, the Janus-faced relationship between the municipal government and NGOs like La Fundación become more understandable. Both organizations need one another for their legitimacy (some might argue that the municipality needs La Fundación more than vice versa), but the municipal officials assert their independence, autonomy, and decision-making authority despite their reliance on funding and capacity-building.

11. In this case, local sexual politics both reflect and reinforce regimes of development truth and expertise, as discussed by Adams and Pigg (2005) in their examination of sexuality as ‘a node in the negotiation of class-stratified transnational relationships’ within the transnational frame of development (9).

12. At the time, I had already spent ten months living in the community while conducting research on women's rights and family violence in close collaboration with the Health Committee and La Fundación. This paper is based on ethnographic research and activist involvement in a rural region of northwestern Ecuador over a 12 year period, beginning in 2001. My broader research project research provides a historical and anthropological examination of intimate-partner violence and women's rights awareness among Manaba colonists living in Esmeraldas, Ecuador (Friederic 2011a, 2011b, 2013).

13. By this, she means that the region still has not gained formal legal and political status as a rural parroquía, or parish. It also indicates the importance of the formalized process of decentralization to La Comisaria and the municipal administration under which she serves.

14. Incidentally, the women who work at brothels within the region are always women from afuera–the outside, or the exterior (in this case, from the cities or Colombia)–and, as ‘foreign others,’ male and female community members do not pay much attention to their plight.

15. The most successful and sustained interventions have included women's and children's rights education, family-planning campaigns, workshops on family violence, maternal and child health programmes, and the establishment of a women’ s microcredit organization. Though many of these were implemented before the Presidency of Rafael Correa, this emphasis has only been strengthened in keeping with his administration's platform of ‘social inclusion’.

16. In one of the more poignant examples, two Las Colinas men began to argue because one believed that the other had dumped a load of garbage on his property. When Luis denied having done this, Felipe bypassed the local police commissioner and filed a report at the Commissary. Upon recounting this story to me, Luis exclaimed ‘que mujer! Felipe has become such a woman … .he went to the commissary and filed a denuncia rather than dealing with me directly.’ Elsewhere, I argue that the increasing visibility and utilization of the Law of Family Violence is reconfiguring and feminising ideas of citizenship (Friederic 2011a; 2011b, 2013).

17. For example, Stoler (2002) interrogates the connections between the management of sexuality and affective ties in colonies and the politics of colonial rule in metropoles, providing an interesting parallel with the management of sexuality through human rights-based development paradigms, as exemplified in Las Colinas (Adams and Pigg 2005).