Temas de nuestra américa Vol. 32, N.° 59 ISSN 0259-2339 Páginas de la 159 a la 160 del documento impreso

Olivera Bustamante, Mercedes; Bermudez Urbina, Flor Marina; Arellano Nucamendi, Mauricio (2014). Subordinaciones estructurales de género. Las mujeres marginales de Chiapas frente a la crisis. [Structural Subordination of Gender. Marginalized Women of Chiapas against the Crisis]. Mexico: Center for Women’s Rights in Chiapas, Center for Higher Studies of Mexico and Central America

From a transdisciplinary viewpoint, two anthropologists and an educator launch into an investigation of the structural subordination of women in Chiapas. This investigation, based on the concepts of identity and gender, is positioned epistemologically and politically.

The text analyzes the many types of violence that devastate Oaxaca and, specifically, women. Such violence, produced, accelerated, and heightened by world-wide neoliberalism, is responded to and resisted by Latin American feminist movements.

Latin American feminisms, which are both diverse and complex, as well as the so-called third-world feminisms, have consistently criticized mainstream feminism, that is to say the white, westernized, capitalist and hegemonic-centered feminism, claiming that, in its effort to defend the woman condition in singular, it positioned on only one class, one race, and one hetero-sexual orientation. Therefore, mainstream feminism has neglected or failed to sufficiently analyze the gender conditions of other feminism groups. Additionally, they point out and denounce how these conditions affect women around world in such a markedly different way. It would be impossible to explain these marks and restrictions from a cultural viewpoint or moreover to group them into a single gender category. Hence the importance of the concept of “intersectionality” in analyzing the dynamics and polarizing discourses that are both exclusive and colonizing of the world-wide capitalist system and sex/gender system.

This work offers a critique of hegemonic feminisms and includes the very scientific analysis that originated it. It is classified as a research/action project and is located geographically in Chiapas and chronologically in the period from 2009-2011. The project, which not only sought, as stated by the authors themselves, to know the reality, but to change it, was developed across nine regions of Oaxaca.

The work assumes a decolonial perspective and that of Latin American feminisms, against neocolonial plunder and control over human beings and nature. With objectives and goals that can be divided into three categories: epistemological, feminist, and educational, it describes a comprehensive strategy for transforming world-wide capitalist processes and the transnationalization of capital, markets, and political and cultural aspects.

The investigation delves into the problems faced by women in general, female farmers, and indigenous women from the nine regions studied and concludes: “We find in our investigation that official discourses on gender “equality” structured around the slogan of an alleged “empowerment” of women have failed to significantly impact the condition or the participation of the poorest women of Chiapas” (p. 21).

The work gives an account of partnership, as it assumes a commitment based on participatory investigative action, to achieve joint ownership by the women of Chiapas of plots in ejidos, that is of communal lands-- in the regions involved.

From a position of critical interculturality, this work contributes to this respectful, mutually impacting encounter of decolonial feminist epistemic construction, not only in practice but in theory, based on the mutual understandings reached between indigenous and non-indigenous women in terms of horizontality, pluriversality, and solidarity.

Marybel Soto-Ramírez

Costa Rica

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivar 4.0 Internacional.