The Rebel Potters: A Vision of Gender Relations, Female Oppression, and Patriarchy based within Ecuadorian Archaeology

Introduction. Some Perplexing Episodes of the Archaeological, the Academic, and the Personal

Incident 1: Between 2004 and 2006, I set myself an ambitious but not impossible task. Prompted by the stimuli of a study group at the Freie Universität Berlin, as my doctoral thesis, I decided to address the iconography of the Tolita/Tumaco culture. The elements of a clearly differentiable style, relatively delimitable in time, with a finite number of iconographic motifs, should not be impossible to systematize and analyze. Discipline and time invested made it possible to effectively classify the vast corpus into themes and sub-themes and thus place them in an order that would support a scientific approach. In other words, I “standardized the material” and felt the peace of mind one feels when there is order, the results of which I published in a book that, still today, serves as a comprehensive guide for those who are interested in the art of this pre-Hispanic society. But the peace of mind was not complete; several disturbing elements had appeared along the way and would not leave me in peace until today. Some of the anthropomorphic figures refused to be pigeonholed into what seemed to be a perfect binary system of gender classification, on the one hand, and on the other, an abysmal differentiation was evident in the ornamentation and paraphernalia between the characters clearly categorizable as feminine and masculine.

Incident 2: I have been a department director at the university where I work since 2014. Although at first, I received numerous private and public congratulations for being the first woman to assume that position (not much in terms of decision-making power, merely a “middle management” position within the university structure), after a few days the signs of discontent began to appear. For the secretary, it was disconcerting to have, for the first time, a boss that was both female and younger; a male colleague (the department bully) did not want to allow academic programming to be “imposed” on him by “foolish girls;” a female colleague began a fierce smear campaign against me for not having defended her in circumstances of dubious academic rectitude, appealing to a supposed gender solidarity that, in her opinion, should prevail over academic ethics. And little by little, I began to realize that, as I gain space and my choices are accepted, and as I assume a space of authority and decision making, I start, in the eyes of others, to become a man… but a strange man, a man who looks like a woman, and therefore causes bewilderment, discomfort, and even fear. What determines the way we are seen in terms of gender today and in the past; can gender imaginaries determine our social image more than identity self-determination, in my case, as a (cis)woman; in order to access and be respected in decision-making spaces, are we obliged to masculinize ourselves or die in the attempt?

Incident 3: during fieldwork related to the research project I have been pursuing since 2016, I asked several people, from different social spaces, what they think defines gender in the pre-Hispanic pieces I show them.¹ To my great surprise, and although some of the pieces clearly show biologically identifiable sexual organs, there is consensus that what makes them look like a male or female character is the face. In second place, they mention elements of the dress or paraphernalia with which the figures are adorned. The presence of breasts or penises is not mentioned as a determinant of gender. Thus, what is it that defines masculine or feminine in the representations that some people make of others?

The Materiality of Discourses and Archaeological Evidence of the Consolidation of Patriarchy in pre-Hispanic Ecuador

The unease I felt as I wrote my doctoral thesis led me, ten years later, to initiate a research project in the hope of obtaining a better response to those questions that had remained unanswered and that had led me to review literature normally foreign to an archaeologist, such as that related to the different dimensions of gender and the theoretical approaches to this type of studies. The research project, which I am conducting with a friend and colleague (Benavides 2017; Ugalde 2017; Ugalde and Benavides 2018), has been ongoing since 2016. Although its starting point is archaeological and iconographic (since these are the discipline and the types of sources I know best and in which I have been working professionally for more than a decade), its scope has been widening as the traditional tools of the archaeological exercise, in particular typological classification, fell short in approaching the increasingly complex question(s).

Some of the reflections related to the iconographic part of the research have already been partially discussed in previous contributions. I have presented the canons of representation according to gender in the Tolita/Tumaco society and I have emphasized the preponderance of male presence from the pre-Hispanic period in which this society existed, more than 2,000 years ago (Ugalde 2011, 2009). I have also pointed out doubts about the heteronormative interpretation of pre-Hispanic societies and proposed that there are iconographic indications that make it possible to postulate the existence —socially admitted— of sexual identities beyond the binary for the Tolita/Tumaco and Bahía cultures (Ugalde 2017; Ugalde and Benavides 2018), both developed on the Ecuadorian coast (Esmeraldas and Manabí areas, respectively) during the so-called Regional Development period.

In this paper, I intend to focus on the existing iconographic evidence on gender relations in that period in contrast to the previous period, its implications for the social structures of the time and its consequences to the present day. Although this is only one line of argument, I consider the approach to the subject to be important. This is because, despite the fact that on a global scale the gender approach in archaeology has brought previously denied or ignored issues about women and gender to the forefront and has included them in the research agenda (Wylie 2007), the discussion of female oppression has not been of interest to Ecuadorian archaeology so far. One of the fields of archaeology that has been most explored from a gender perspective is, precisely, that of iconography (Conkey 2003). The images produced by ancient societies are loaded with culturally contingent ideological content and gender, as a structural part of any social system, is by default, an integral part of such content. According to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010), images “offer us interpretations and social narratives that, since pre-colonial centuries, illuminate this social background and offer perspectives for a critical understanding of reality.”² (20).

The period of Regional Development on the coast of Ecuador (approx. 600 B.C.-A.D. 400) is when, as we have argued, a political power takes hold that entails a social hierarchy previously unknown in that form in the region, and which seems to have been accompanied by an important media apparatus of legitimization, its medium being iconography (present through clay, metal, and bone objects with a wide, but finite, repertoire of recurring motifs). Although this fact is true to a greater or lesser extent for all the societies settled on the coast at the time, judging by their iconography, it is in the case of the Tolita/Tumaco society that it developed the most, and crystallized in the emergence of elites of “powerful men” who justified their power —probably still unstable— by arguing that they were descendants of mythical ancestors (Ugalde 2018, 2011, 2009). What was observed in the iconography of Tolita/Tumaco is confirmed for those of the Bahia and Jama Coaque cultures, which occupied other areas of the Ecuadorian coast in a more or less similar time frame.

Thus, the iconographic repertoires of this period on the Ecuadorian coast are populated with anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and hybrid characters, and among the anthropomorphs a totally new phenomenon is observed in relation to the previous figurative art. That is, that of the Formative period. There, the great majority of the figures show characters easily identifiable as feminine because of their intentionally emphasized physical attributes. The characters are represented in hieratic form and with little or no clothing and ornaments (Figure 1). In contrast, the iconography of Regional Development presents men and women with fairly fixed and differentiated canons of representation. Women continue to be represented like their precursors: static, and mostly unadorned (Figure 2). When they are associated with some activity, it is almost exclusively shown to be related to pregnancy and motherhood, and breast-feeding scenes are frequent (Figure 3). They are also usually shown as part of a “couple portrait” (see discussion of this in Ugalde 2017; Ugalde and Benavides 2018) (Figure 4). Men, on the other hand, were depicted either in movement or in a reflective position; squandering vigor in some cases and reflecting a quiet sovereignty in others. They were shown to be empowered of the situation, which often seems to allude to interaction in non-domestic spaces or to collective activities (playing musical instruments, shooting spears, rowing, etc.) (Figure 5). Also frequent and striking, are the representations of what today we would call nuclear families (Figure 6). Thus, there seems to be an intentionality in this narrative, tending to highlight the diversity of male activities, while simplifying female ones, which are practically limited to motherhood.

It is with surprising force that these observations find their correlate in Engels’ social theory of the origin of patriarchy (Engels [1884] 1909; see also Leacock 1971; Sacks 1983). Although Engels’ evolutionary vision does not convince as a whole, because it is based on Morgan’s questioned sequence of savagery-barbarism-civilization, there are key elements in his analysis that are coherent and worthy of being revisited when rethinking gender relations in historical perspective. Indeed, they contribute to a less essentialist and monolithic approach to past societies, with the understanding that social relations (and gender relations among them) have changed over time and vary according to contexts and circumstances. Engels presents us, at the beginning of his work, with a simplified version of the history of the family, according to which:

The central proposition of Engels’ argument is that the institution of monogamous marriage, hand in hand with the establishment of private property, brought with it the end of an egalitarian tribal order and the establishment of the family as an economic unit. This led to women and their children to be dependent on a male individual, leading to an unequal relationship that would culminate in the oppression of women that persists to this day, undermining the value of their work and instrumentalizing them as social reproducers. A corollary of this situation would be the establishment of patrilineality as the prevailing system of descent (Engels [1884] 1909; Leacock 1971; Sacks 1983). According to this interpretation, before the imposition of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family, group families, in which polygamy and polyandry were the norm, were the prevailing form of organization. In these group families, children were the offspring of all and were raised together, and since there was no way of knowing who the father of a child was, and only the mother was known, the descendants could only be established through the maternal line (Engels [1884] 1909). In this type of organization, the domestic unit was managed communally and the division of labor between the sexes was reciprocal, with an economy that did not contemplate women’s and children’s dependence on a husband, since food was produced and shared among a group of families. By initiating —at some not precise point in prehistory— the accumulation of wealth, men abolished female filiation and the maternal hereditary right, which is considered by Engels ([1884] 1909) (recognizing here and in several other points the influence of Bachoffen and Marx for the formulation of certain ideas) a true revolution, which would result in the passage to patriarchy. In his words:

Thus, for Engels, the family is not a natural entity but an economic one, and is a product of the triumph of private property over primitive common property. The subjugation of the female sex, according to this approach, is based on the transformation of her socially necessary labor into a private service, as the family was separated from the clan (Leacock 1971). In this way, women went “from free and equal productive members of society to subordinate and dependent wives and wards” (Sacks 1983, 386). It is particularly important to explore these arguments in greater depth, since they allow us to establish a starting point for social structures based on patriarchy, which demystifies its naturality.

Comparing the iconography of Ecuadorian coastal societies in pre-Hispanic times of the Formative period with that of the Regional Development brings to light graphic indications of possible historical changes such as those outlined by Engels. Here, we want to highlight the key points of the discussion we started earlier. In the Regional Development (Tolita/Tumaco, Bahia and Jama Coaque cultures), when men appear alone, they are frequently shown immersed in some activity or accompanied by what could be symbols of power (seated on stools, dressed with striking paraphernalia). Women, by contrast, when depicted alone, are always in a hieratic, passive form.³ The non-verbal message seems to be intended to emphasize this active-passive difference, which at the same time would be related to the public/domestic spheres. Such is the difference in the conception of representation that the female images appear almost two-dimensional, while the male images, given their implicit movement, often provide a more plastic impression. Furthermore, the representation of the male characters is much more individualized in that there is a clear intention to emphasize the importance of individuals. This cannot be said of the female figures, for which uniformity is the main characteristic —a frequent resource of authoritarian governments to date—, in which the legal obligation for women to always wear certain clothes in public, with the consequent image of uniformity, becomes a symbol of authority and power (Ziga 2009).

When women appear accompanied, it is in the context of representations of couples or what appear to be nuclear families. In the representations of couples, men are presented with more attire than women revealing a narrative that seems to convey the idea of women’s subordination and dependence on men. Motherhood is the only activity that stands out in the case of the female characters, and its significance seems to be so important that this type of representation was frequently elaborated in series, using molds, as were some of the couple figures. Even in technological terms, the difference is notorious; most of the male characters were modeled while the female ones were mostly produced using molds, highlighting the individuality/uniformity dichotomy. Symptomatic of this process is the presence and greater frequency of male figures, but also the suspicious, almost total, disappearance of the vagina in the graphic imagery of these cultures. Especially considering that in Formative iconography, and particularly in Valdivia, the vagina —or, to be more precise, the female pelvic region— is emphasized and even oversized, often appearing in great detail, for example in the representation of pubic hair. In tandem with this, not only does the penis appear, but it becomes the superstar. Not all men were depicted showing their penis, as many are clothed, but sometimes, the penis is shown as an iconic sign that seems to reinforce the message of power (Figure 7). In fact, the penis began to be associated not only with human beings, but also with powerful animals. The jaguar, undoubtedly the main deity of the Tolita pantheon, is always masculine in his representations, and frequently displays an enormous and erect penis, combined with other symbols of power and violence, such as oversized fangs and claws, and a threatening demeanor (Figure 8). Its presence is so frequent that it even exists as an isolated element, with no apparent function, or is associated with utilitarian objects (Figure 9). The penis, then, becomes a metonymic element of power.

The above speaks in favor of observations in graphic iconography, what Irigaray (1992) calls exclusively male genealogical systems, crystallized in society through the “establishment of different, supposedly universal, values, which, however, manifest themselves as one part of humanity’s domination over the other; in this case, of the world of men over that of women” (14).

It is worth noting that there are representations of couples where both members are clearly women, and that these representations are present in the figurative repertoire of the Tolita/Tumaco culture and that of the Bahía. How should we understand these representations? We have suggested in previous contributions (Ugalde 2017; Ugalde and Benavides 2018) that this may be one indication, among others we have detected across the iconographic repertoire, that these societies did not necessarily understand gender in binary terms or maintain a heteronormative view of sexual preferences.

This hypothesis need not be contradictory to the above statement regarding female oppression, since this is not exclusive to a binary conception of gender, but could also be related to social complexity and the accumulation of wealth. If we understand, as we have argued, that the discourse materialized in the Regional Development figurines is intended to link the right to political power with the male sex, then could the women represented by the canons usually associated with men be those who do not fulfill the roles that are expected? Could those who exceptionally reached spaces of power, have been “seen,” and therefore represented, as men, as we have said we believe women who develop in these spaces are seen today? Is the masculinization to which many women are subjected or forced to undergo today a process that also took place at certain times in the pre-Hispanic era? Or, perhaps, are they women represented by women who resist the reproduction of the imposed ideological discourse? In this context, it is also important to consider the question of who and for whom this narrative that tends to naturalize asymmetrical power relations is being formulated and disseminated.

In an interesting essay on the exhibition “Women,” which included paintings by Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann and Willem de Koonig, Siri Hustvedt draws attention to the misogynistic essence of the work and ideas of these famous artists. She also emphasizes the asexuality of a work of art and ponders the feminine fantasies of the artists who represent these “women” and how these are perceived by the viewer (Hustvedt 2017). In fact, what we see in the paintings of these painters, or in the ceramic figurines, are not real people, but the idea or perception of the artists who captured the images in different mediums. Who did it, in the case of the cultures of the Regional Development of the Ecuadorian coast, and why?

There is a widespread view of pottery production as a female activity. Indeed, in many contemporary societies, it is women who make pots, and there are numerous ethnographic examples that support the association between ceramics and the feminine. But these studies usually refer to the manufacture of utilitarian ceramics and not to the creation of figurative sculptures.

We will probably never know whether the people who made the ceramic figures of the cultures we are analyzing were men or women, or whether they were people whose gender identity did not even fit into such binary classifications. However, in light of what has been expressed in this contribution, a possible reading would be that “art” (understood as the plastic arts of the pre-Hispanic cultures we are talking about) was a field that, after the Regional Development, was monopolized by the emerging male elite, as part of the naturalization of power agenda mentioned above. The images we see today are those that represent women as men see them (sensu Hustvedt 2017), or as they want them to be seen and as they hope that, through the distribution of the massifying message, they will ultimately see themselves as well. This type of message appears in contemporary material culture, for example, in the famous Barbie doll (Pearson and Mullins 1999). In this regard, analyses have been conducted on how domesticity is permanently related to the representation of this ideal woman, but is negotiated according to the political moment and consumer subjectivity. And it is also the message that has been hidden in many of the traditional interpretations of androcentric archaeology, which portrays men as strong, aggressive, dominant, and active, as opposed to weak, passive, and dependent women. As Slocum ironically argued as early as the 1970s, in relation to the interpretations of gender roles at the dawn of humanity:

The Barbie doll represents only a selection of the female roles and images of the time, in what the authors have called a distorted reflection of society, the product of a complex interweaving of dominant ideologies and resistance symbolism (Pearson and Mullins 1999). What if, for a moment, we imagine the Tolita/Tumaco and Bahía pairs of women as the materialization of such ideological confrontations in the Regional Development of the Ecuadorian coast; what if we imagine these figurines as a way for rebel women potters, dissatisfied with the official discourse to manifest their resistance to ideological imposition?

Discussion. The History of Power and the Power of History

The history of Ecuador —as probably that of most of the nation-states of our planet— is crisscrossed by implicit moralizing that defends a specific perspective in relation to something —in this case, gender imaginaries— and becomes a political agenda through some medium. I would like to offer here one example, among many possible examples, of an important medium: literature. If you ask any Ecuadorian today what the first Ecuadorian novel was, most would probably answer that it was Cumandá, the novel published by Juan León Mera in 1877. Almost no one will say that it is La emancipada, by Miguel Riofrío, published in 1863, that is, in fact, before Cumandá.

Indeed, while Cumandá is compulsory reading in schools, virtually no one has read La emancipada. In this context, I consider it far from unimportant that Cumandá, the heroine of the famous book by Mera (composer, by the way, of Ecuador’s national anthem) fulfills to a great extent the expected role. In spite of being a white woman among Indians, and of being a brave fighter, she is a “one-man woman,” faithful to this monogamous principle until the end (not at all flattering, by the way, since it is finally discovered that she and her beloved are siblings, and she dies tragically and with the knowledge of this fact). Although her end is tragic, in the official discourse Cumandá is worthy of admiration for her behavior; she is a national heroine. On the other hand, Rosaura, the protagonist of Riofrío’s book (an aristocrat from Loja, but from Loja nonetheless; that is, from the extreme south of the country, and without epic hymns to his credit), defies her father and abandons her husband to dedicate herself to a “disorderly and incorrect” life; she becomes a “stray.” Like Cumandá, she too comes to a tragic end, as she commits suicide. But her fate as a literary character makes her end doubly tragic, as she has fallen into oblivion despite being the earliest known novel published in Ecuador. Both authors —men— sanction their protagonists, punish them, trashify them, basically for the fact that they are women. And the official discourse punishes Rosaura twofold by hiding her existence from Ecuadorian readers.

There are other of our national mythical heroines that reproduce the patriarchal discourse, which exalts certain female characters, but only because of their subordinate position. This is the case in the tragic story of Guayas and Quil, a couple of Huancavilca heroes. According to the legend, considered to be of great importance in Guayaquil, Guayas, the main warrior, preferred to commit suicide before surrendering to the Spanish conquerors, killing Quil as well, thus showing the man’s right to decide even over his wife’s life. Less dramatic, but not more flattering, is the role of Quilago. According to legend, this leader of Cochasquí (one of the main monumental sites of the highlands of Ecuador, ascribed to the pre-Inca Caranqui culture) is credited with seducing Huayna Capac through erotic dances, intending to assassinate him, which she failed to do and for which she was sentenced to death. Like Cumandá and Rosaura, Quil and Quilago paid with their lives for having been audacious women (to the supposed pride of Ecuadorians, according to what they teach us in schools…). And, thus, the discourses of patriarchal power become historical power and take root in people’s minds.

To this day, the social sanction for the “emancipated” —understood here in the broadest sense, as those who do not conform to the gender role socially attributed to them— is still very much in place. There is no official limitation for women who try to reach, or indeed arrive at, positions of power, authority, or influence, but the path for them is much rockier than it is for men. The most recent report issued by the World Economic Forum (WEC 2018), which calculates the Global Gender Gap Index, shows that for the year 2018, the gender gap was, on global average, still 32 %. Particularly striking in relation to the discussion of this article is the Political Empowerment sub-index, where the gap is 77.1 % (WEC 2018).

Academia is no exception to this reality. A study recently conducted involving women researchers in the social sciences in Ecuador (FARO 2019) has revealed that the main barrier —both in academic training and in working life— is that of the care economy and unpaid work. Childcare and other family care responsibilities are left almost exclusively to women, regardless of whether they work in the formal labor force (FARO 2019).

As posed by Irigaray, in a 1987 interview, when asked about the role of women who are now immersed in academia, and whether this “new situation” would help them enter the canon of the twentieth century, she replied: “not many women in our time are in institutions. And when they are, they often remain trapped at certain levels of their careers […]” (1992, 51). This is probably due to the fact that, in the popular imagination, these women are occupying positions that are considered typically masculine and, therefore, do not correspond to them. And, for doing so, they are punished on several fronts, with a strategy of symbolic trashification (sensu Silva 2008). With this concept, Silva alludes to the social possibility of using the “disgust factor” as a strategy to discard that which does not allow the system’s fluidity, through the construction of functional alterities. In her words, “trashification as a strategy implies the need for a center as a reference and a periphery that serves as a dumping ground for the ‘symbolic central garbage’” (155). The center, in our case, is the traditional conception of gender roles, from a heteronormative perspective and with an agenda related to what Gero (1985) called the woman-at-home-ideology. The periphery would correspond to what is outside that norm and endangers the system, and therefore has to be neutralized through trashification. The lives of emancipated women then become unviable (sensu Butler 2006).

Indeed, in the 1980s, Gero already raised the problems to which women active in archaeology were exposed, and emphasized several difficulties determined by a socio-political background tending to reproduce —in the practice of the discipline— a sexist ideology biased towards crediting men with the ability to successfully perform activities more related to fieldwork and women with certain activities specific to the analysis of cultural materials. This type of work distribution would be reproducing the stereotypes that are also assumed for prehistory (Gero 1985; Slocum 1975). All this within a patriarchal system with gender relations geared to its service, thus guaranteeing its smooth functioning. But, as Gero and Scattolin (2002) have also pointed out, gender relations are not static phenomena that societies “own,” but rather constructs imbued with cultural and historical institutions and ideologies; they are processes that individuals carry out in different ways throughout their lives and in different contexts.

Given all that has been said, as academics and as individuals,⁴ we must situate ourselves, based on our gendered experiences, which, as valuable contributions from other latitudes have already shown, have led to significant changes in the discipline in terms of how women are represented, destabilizing some well-established assumptions about their roles and capabilities (Wylie 2007). They have also led to changes in the meaning and social value of the activities performed mostly by women in society (see, for example, Brumfiel 1991; Hastorf 1991; Slocum 1975), the effects of which were paramount in relation to processes whose stimulus is usually attributed to male activities. And, in situating ourselves, it would make sense to do so as a pack, as Despentes and Preciado (2009) suggest in the prologue to Itziar Ziga’s Becoming a Bitch, for: “when femininity is constructed in a pack, it becomes a subversive femininity. A bitch alone is a dead bitch, a pack of bitches is a political operative” (10).

Final Reflections. Neither Man nor “non-Man” or the Rejection of Heterosexual Thinking as a Repressive Policy

Just as Alexander von Humboldt— because he was so interested in foreign cultures and so different from the European one— “ceased to be German” according to Hegel —to whom this caused great regret (Ette 2004)—, it seems then that a woman who, even today, adopts a social role that implies some degree of power and decision making “ceases to be a woman” and becomes a strange, disconcerting entity that must be neutralized or trasherized. Does it have to be this way; do we have to continue defining ourselves not by ourselves but as non-men, making them a point of reference (sensu Irigaray 1992), or masculinize ourselves to a greater or lesser extent in order to have agency in spheres external to the domestic space? Or, worse still, resign ourselves to the unfeasibility of emancipated life? Or do we have to, again following Irigaray’s (1992) line of argument, renounce our feminine subjectivity because we do not want to submit to the norms of the sexual framework and enter the intermasculine cultural world, with the consequent cultural impoverishment, which makes culture “reduced to a single pole of sexual identity?” (19).

How can archaeology contribute to reducing this serious cultural impoverishment and to allowing the women of the present to define themselves according to their own identity feelings —regardless of their sexual preference— and not from the denial of the masculine that turns them into neutral entities? The postcolonial vision of the interpretation of archaeological data, especially in Latin America, must include an emancipatory look at gender imaginaries and address established and implicit stigmas. To do so, we need to return to the archaeological material and approach it with eyes unburdened by patriarchal and normative blindfolds (Weismantel 2013). Denaturalizing implicit beliefs about a unique and eternal, patriarchal and macho, binary and heteronormative past, might make it easier to deal with inequalities and seek actions of alternative. On this path, besides scientific rigor, we can adopt an openness to multivocality (Gnecco 1999), which allows us to listen to other voices coming from beyond academia and does not restrict us to the typological tyranny (Gnecco and Langebaek 2006) that, in the eagerness to pigeonhole all artifacts in a taxonomic order, forces us to ignore irregularities or ambiguities that may well be of great semantic relevance. On this path, it is worth revisiting Engels’ postulates of over a century ago, because beyond the historical errors they may contain and the evolutionist straitjacket easy to reject, “[show] that women’s social position has not always, everywhere, or in most respects been subordinate to that of men” (Sacks 1983, 385).

As Wittig (1993) has pointed out, one of the main elements of feminism from its materialist approach is the abolition of the idea that women constitute a “natural” group, and therefore the recognition that the division of humanity between men and women is arbitrary and mythological. This mythology entails the notion of heterosexuality as a structuring principle of the social order (Wittig 2006, 1993). In this sense, it is also pertinent to consider why we have to restrict ourselves to a binary understanding of sex and pigeonhole ourselves within the social role that supposedly corresponds to us in such a conception? What is understood as sex, we agree with Laqueur (1990), depends on the situation in which it is being addressed, and can only be explained in the context of the battles around gender and power.

Such battles, as we have tried to demonstrate above, have been waged for millennia, and are accompanied by mechanisms of legitimization whose means vary over time, but whose effectiveness depends on their capacity to convince through the mass distribution of their message. The current message, prevalent in contemporary politics, uses the strategy of concealment, stating that today conditions would be identical for people of either sex, that there would be no differences in access to opportunities in any field, and gives as examples the exceptions (the cases of the few women who occupy high positions in governments or institutions, who, in fact, are perceived as “men” in the above sense).

To my mind, the problem raised by Gero (1985) is not limited to inequality of opportunities and unfair treatment in terms of the spaces of power that women can occupy in society. Those are indicators of the conflict, rooted in the acceptance, by men and women, of roles determined by false biological assumptions (see, for example, Butler 1990; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Laqueur 1990; Preciado 2016; Wittig 1993). This is an implicit acceptance that is still very widespread in Latin America, and which bears no small responsibility for the pervasive gender violence that is perceived and experienced daily in every field, including academia. Let us recall the ironic phrase of Itziar Ziga (2009): “There are miniskirts that are too short rather than men who are too violent” (56).

We do not know whether societies prior to the Regional Development of the Ecuadorian coast were organized under a matriarchal principle, nor is that the goal we want to achieve, since it would simply reverse the order of a structure in which there would continue to be an oppressive group (Wittig 1993, 104). What seems more decisive is that, in the Regional Development, iconography begins to become an effective means of transmitting an ideal of what would be feminine and to endow it with a sort of set of prescribed behavior that places women in relation to and in function of men, in a way not seen before in the millennia of figurative imagery that endured in the Formative. It was probably at this point that the idea of the feminine was naturalized, in the sense proposed by Wittig, and that this made it possible to justify oppressive behaviors on the part of the emerging male elite.

These reflections are not even intended to offer an overview of the current or historical situation of women in Ecuador. Rather, they should be understood as great leaps between specific episodes that we propose be re-read from a decolonial (sensu Lugones 2010) and counter-sexual (sensu Preciado 2016) standpoint, as these perspectives not only tend to unmask the underlying patriarchal discourse in the social structures of different historical moments, but they also offer tools for resistance and liberation in the face of these. I therefore want to think of the female couples in the Regional Development (Figure 10) as a representation of pre-Hispanic, rebellious and irreverent emancipated women, regardless of their sexual preference. If we need national heroines, let it be them and not the victimized Quil and company. More than half a century after The Second Sex, it would not be wrong to pay homage to Simone de Beauvoir with a self-reflection that ends in agency, not even of women, but simply of free and self-determined people.