Stereotypes of Hypersexuality and the Embodiment of Blackness: Some Narratives of Female Sexuality in Quito, Ecuador

Abstract

In this chapter, I focus on the way sexuality—a fundamental aspect of identities—has been negotiated and renegotiated by Afro-Ecuadorian women within what I call the Ecuadorian “racial-spatial order” from the perspective of the particular local context of Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, at the end of the 1990s and during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The premise here is that identities are multiple, multifaceted, and nonessential; they are performed and performed anew within evolving socio-economic and political situations, following personal or individual preferences and decisions. This requires us to view blackness in terms of personal, social, cultural, political, and economic processes embedded in particular time-space contexts, which are constituted within local, regional, national, and transnational dimensions.

A version of this chapter appeared in another outlet (Rahier 2003). Many thanks to the Afro-Ecuadorian women who confided in me and encouraged me to write this essay.