The vulgarity of democracy. Political pornography, masculinity and politics in Ecuador. X. Andrade. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes

The book by the anthropologist X. Andrade (2019) shows us, by way of an ethnographic approach, the 1980s Ecuadorian populist movement through the archive of underground political commentary magazines written mostly by the independent journalist Pancho Jaime (1946–1989). By using chauvinistic language and grotesque visual representations, these magazines present obscene and sexist cartoons, in which the intimate and sexual life of the Ecuadorian elite is depicted. In this book, Andrade studies the production, circulation, and consumption of these materials in a specific historical context, their role in the visual and textual representations of power and politics, the social life of these documents, and how this is linked to restrictive notions of citizenship and democracy. X. Andrade understands these magazines as “material culture” using the definition of the Marxist anthropologist William Roseberry (1994) and as “minor literatures” (Deleuze and Guattari 1975) due to their illegal, underground, and marginal character in the public sphere. The author uses the concept of “political pornographies” to describe these magazines, a genre associated with grotesque and sexualized representations of the elite that are used to by the masses to deconstruct the elite public image and to provide a weapon of protest. Andrade also chooses the concept of “vulgarity” to describe the visual and textual representations of power as strategies for establishing a common ground between the elite and the masses based on everyday understandings of politics in general. This visual and textual representation forms a narrative composed of rumors, gossip, jokes, and insults in the local slang, while also constructing a visual compilation of illustrated naked bodies featuring exaggerated images of the intimate life of politicians, including their genitalia and sexual manners. The methodology used in this research was ethnographic in nature because the author was interested in understanding the production, circulation, and consumption of the magazine from the perspective of the people. The ethnographic work took place during the late 1990s, with supplementary research conducted in the 2000s. As part of this work, Andrade became involved with local intellectuals, as well as people directly involved in the production and consumption of the magazines, including other magazine contributors, readers, fans, and even Pancho Jaime's personal assistant. The readers that Andrade interacted with came from different social classes, political ideologies, and genres. He conducted focus groups with them where collective readings of the material were given. As a result, he was able to see how the material affected people, gaining insight into their perceptions during the actual act of reading. The book is divided into three sections: “History and Cultural Materials” (Chapters One and Two); “Texts and Images” (Chapters Three and Four); and “Machismo and Everyday Life” (Chapters Five and Six). The first chapter, “On Regionalism and Political Culture,” presents the historical, political, and social context of Ecuador in the 1980s where the magazines emerged and describes how the populist movement appeared during this period. The second chapter, “Pancho Jaime and His Gonzo Journalism,” presents central aspects of his biography and how the political thought that he adopts creates a critique of the elite and political establishment represented in his grotesque graphics, understood as political pornographies. Chapter Three, “Seeing Politics,” analyzes different testimonies from communities of readers regarding how they perceive the images of Pancho Jaime. The author focuses on the analysis of gender and masculinity and the reach of the populist phenomenon. In Chapter Four, “On Political Pornography, Cartoons, and Defacement,” the author analyzes Pancho Jaime's visual language, focusing on the cartoon as a graphic situated in a specific historical context and its effect on social circulation and consumption in the political sphere. Here, Andrade analyzes the cartoon forms, their political content, and the critiques that they make of the elite. In Chapter Five, “On Carnivalesque and Everyday Life,” and Chapter Six, “Masculinity and Politics of Everyday Life,” the author analyzes the discourses and performances of the genre that are carried out in both social interactions and the political sphere. Andrade focuses on daily uses of the hegemonic discourse of masculinity seen in Pancho Jaime's magazine, which has an impact on daily public performances. The author's ability to use his ethnographic and other collected data to account for the political and social changes in Guayaquil and Ecuador in the last 20 years brings a unique richness to this research on politics, citizenship, democracy, and masculinity. X. Andrade's book shows us a new way to understand politics and democracy beyond the traditional sociological and political science-focused proposals to understand “political culture,” which usually has an emphasis on electoral events, historical leaders, and political parties, among others. Through the analysis of these “obscene” visual and textual representations of the Ecuadorian elite, its social life as cultural material, and their impact on society, the reader can understand the different power dynamics that exist in a certain historical and cultural context in Ecuador. Andrade also proposes a complex analysis that goes beyond domination versus submission or idealizing the “resistance” in the masses. In fact, these cultural materials show us an ambiguous reality: Although they use mockery to resist and deconstruct political leaders, at the same time, they show a conservative understanding of ethnicity, gender, citizenship, democracy, and, most of all, masculinity. From an emic perspective, he also chooses to use and understand “populism” as a native category, since he tries to capture the complex relationship between political leaders and followers, where the latter are seen as independent thinkers who do not necessarily follow the ideology of their leaders exactly. Populism is understood as a social relationship, a territory where the history of democracy and class struggle takes place. This book provides useful material for classrooms for various reasons: a solid example of an ethnography from visual anthropology, and it can serve students and future researchers as a guide for how to cultivate an emic perspective, where different voices involved in the production and consumption of materials in a specific context are recovered and presented. Also, it provides a good starting point for finding similar examples of “political pornographies” in different countries, thus enabling an analysis of their visual and textual narratives—which reveal the particular complexities of the individual historical and cultural contexts in which they are studied.