FIRST CIRCULAR - IIº INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE -Territorios de la Memoria WOMEN'S FIGHT, REPRESSIVE MEASURES AND RESISTANCE. WALKING TOWARDS EQUALITY (original) (raw)
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Womens Organizing Global Context
What has been called the lost decade for Latin American development, has also witnessed some positive effects in terms of social mobilization. One example is the case of impoverished women. In Brazil, the context of social turbulence and mobilization is twofold: economical and socio-political. On the economic side, the blossoming of the Brazilian economy under the premise of neo-liberal economic policies can be summarized as the expansion of the free market and the shrinking of the welfare state, where some have benefited and many have suffered as a result. On the socio-political side, social actors have moved away from seeking power within the political in formal politics, and instead have diversified their strategies and goals. Both edges have had an effect on women and it is in this context of a global economy and democratic transition that I situate my study. I investigate the characteristics of women's participation in grassroots organizations, that is women's activism in the shantytowns of Salvador, Brazil, and how their positions in terms of race, class and gender relate to their activism. I demonstrate how activism impacts the gender and racial identities of poor women. I selected the City of Salvador, in the Northeastern region of Brazil, as the site of my study because a large percent of Afro-Brazilians live there. I examine the relations between the many activisms of women and the interrelations of oppressions as females, poor and blacks. I suggest that the activism of poor black women who live in the shantytowns of Salvador has specific features: motherly activism, apolitical, feminist, antiracist, among others. It takes place in a free space or neighborhood association where women feel liberated, empowered and undergo a life changing iii experience in terms of personal growth. iv I dedicate this dissertation to my beloved father, Francisco Padilla. Papi, I wish you were still here. Also, to my mother, Ana, and to my husband, Pedro. v Acknowledgments The process of writing this dissertation has not been easy. It is the last step of a long process, one could say the tip of the iceberg, that started in childhood even before any formal education. Thus, my appreciation goes back to my childhood, first to my parents who always encouraged me to do more and be better and to professors throughout my academic years in Mendoza, Argentina, Austin and Urbana. They not only helped me, but they believed in me. Both my family and my professors have made possible the completion of this process, so my many thanks to all of them. Special mention goes to Charis Thompson, Winnie Poster, Bill Martin and Gale Summerfield who guided me throughout the dissertation process. Within my family, I thank my parents, my sisters and brothers, and my husband with whom I am starting my new and own family.
The new cycle of women’s mobilizations between Latin America and Europe
Critical Geopolitics and Regional (Re)Configurations, 2019
This chapter addresses interregionalism by drawing on the experience of the Latin American-European feminist actions from 2014 to the global strike in 2018. We understand the region “where political engagement is increasingly transcending traditional territorial sites like city hall and parliamentary government and, instead, being choreographed through trans-territorial, topological connections, virtual public spheres, and rhizomatic traces of association” (MacLeod and Jones, 2007: 1179). The spatial perspective on transnationalism and regionalism analyse representations of space and its social implications from a feminist geopolitical perspective (Sharp, 1999; Hyndman, 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman, 2004). We understand the spatial representations as both gendered and embodied (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2004; Cabezas, 2012) because spatial representations and geographic imaginaries are also built from power relations, in which the representations and the “everyday geographies” are connected (Sharp, 2005: 37). To analyse the #NiUnaMenos and the 8M women’s strike in regional terms, we considered regionalization as a “political, fluid and diffuse process” (Cabezas, 2014: 208). We begin from the Argentinian #NiUnaMenos movement, a feminist collective action that has modified the narratives around identities and geographical representations of Argentina over a number of years. In doing so, women from Latin America, but European countries too, contributed to changing the geopolitical imaginaries of the movement. Here, we will focus on the Spanish case, where the 8M strikes were very significant from 2016 to 2018. However, this is our first approach to a recent phenomenon and there is scarce data available (Pates, Logroño and Medina, 2017; Alamo et al., 2018; Laudano et al., 2018; Riley, 2018). Nonetheless, we focus on two Euro-Latin American Networks: the Federica Montseny Network (2014) and the Latin American Women’s Network in Spain (2012) to address the interplay between online and offline feminist spaces in order to understand informal interregionalism developing nowadays.
2021
This document is a part of a collective work based on transnational solidarity with the Awa people from Colombia. It is an awareness-raising and dissemination material in which Awa women and the Awa People’s Indigenous Unit (UNIPA | Unidad Indígena del Pueblo Awá) tell their story, their worldview, their wat usan (‘sweet living’ or ‘good living’) and their resistance to the penetration of logics based on accumulation through dispossession, which leaves bare the ancestral lands and generates disharmony and violence. Violence against those residing in Katsa Su and finding themselves in the crossfire of armed actors, drug traffickers, armies, and multinational and extractivism-related interests. This violence is expressed on women’s bodies and transgresses against their daily lives and their dream to freely move about Katsa Su through aggressive masculinity. This proposal is a part of the project Peacekeepers: a strategy for prevention and protection against gender-based violence on Inkal Awa girls and women in Nariño, Colombia, funded by the Catalan Agency for Cooperation to the Development (ACCD | Agència Catalana de Co-operació al Desenvolupament) and carried out by the Movement for Peace, Disarmament and Freedom (MPDL | Movimiento por la Paz, el Desarme y la Libertad ) and the Observatory for Indigenous People’s Autonomy and Rights in Colombia (OADPI | Observatorio por la Autonomía y los Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas de Colombia). Its content was elaborated jointly by the team of UNIPA’s Department of Women and Family in Colombia and OADPI in Barcelona. Thus, the information was provided thanks to the knowledge and research work led by the Depart¬ment of Women and Family and the other sections of UNIPA. This contribution with Awa’s own knowledge combines with charts and illustrations made by Laia Motta and interviews with Awa female leaders conducted by OADPI’s team.
History 363R: Women's Movements in Latin America
If significations of gender and power construct one another, how do things change? The answer is that change may be initiated in many places… political history has, in a sense, been enacted on the field of gender."
Women's Studies International Forum
2018
In this paper, we explore how the spatial ordering of sex-work in southern Mexico naturalizes the presence of migrant women in designated "tolerance zones". Drawing on a feminist approach to ethnographic research in the city of Dominguez, Chiapas, we critically analyze the symbolic powers concealed and enacted through the official discourse of "tolerance" in public health regulations on commercial sex and embodied everyday life of migrant women from Central America. We engage with feminist debates regarding geographies of sex work and oppression to illustrate how tolerance zones mediate and maintain the marginal status of female sex workers who, despite their irregular migration status, are constructed (and view themselves) as bodies in "need of tolerance". Our analysis of spatial practices that govern tolerance zones illustrates how the discourse of tolerance becomes a vehicle for symbolic violence, naturalizing unequal social relations of power in the lives of migrant Central American women.