Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Nash, June and Helen Icken Safa. Introduction and Chapter 1: "A Critique of Social Science Roles in Latin America". Pp. x- 24. In Sex and Class in Latin America. Praeger Publishers: New York, 1976. In the introduction the editors acknowledge the conflicts that erupted in the 1975 UN sponsored conference in Mexico between women delegations from industrialized countries and from the "Third World": the first insisted in an agenda of exclusively women's issues, while the second refused to abandon issues of global unequal development and political issues for the analysis, arguing that in their contexts, class inequalities take priority over sexual inequality (xi). For instance, the fact that cheap and unprotected female labor is needed for First World production and consumption of goods. In the first chapter, Nash seems to be in dialogue (and take issue) with dependency theory and Marxist analyses that have blatantly ignored women's activities or seen them acriti...

Bunster, Ximena. “Surviving Beyond Fear: Women and Torture in Latin America”, pp. 297-325. In Women and Change in Latin America. Edited by June Nash and Helen Icken Safa. Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1986. Bunster looks at the gender specific forms of institutional violence under Pinochet's dictatorship, which operated as a punishment for women's involvement in political activity: in the Southern cone this kind of punishment was administered in a systematic, methodical (scientifically) and bureaucratic ways and under discourses of "security". [Pero se me cayó doña Ximena, por qué usa Kathleen Barry, una feminista anti-prostitución, como marco teórico? :(] Bunster departs from the idea of a universal patriarchal oppression, and of Machismo/Marianismo as a local expression of a global schema. Under this cultural paradigm, women are recognized and valued only as mothers, and they themselves have internalized this pattern. The torture of female political prisoners...