Maria Jose Ventura discusses throughout her article how Women’s collective action in Mexico has gained greater media exposure since 2016, specifically focusing on the rise in violence against women and femicide across Mexican states. Alfaro points out that Mexican Women’s Collective Action has been influenced by the women’s movements across Latin America and the US. Specifically, she mentions the impact of movements in Argentina, Chile, and the US. #metoo mobilizations in the US in 2019 struck deeply in the minds of young Mexican women. It led to hundreds of thousands of women reporting sexual harassment, domestic violence, rape, kidnapping, and trafficking cases. In her article, she examines Mexican women’s collective action via a prefiguration framework, based on feminist and new social movement literature. To analyze the cultural outcomes of women’s movements, she engages Icaza’s (2019) body-mind-spirit framework and Ahmed’s (2004) cultural politics of emotion. She argues that we can better understand the complex emotions inside women’s movements if we look at emotions as cultural practices, rather than psychological states. Similarly, she asserts that through the body-mind-spirit framework, direct action can be analyzed in a way that breaks down the body/mind distinction, instead understanding the body as the primary territory of healing, reimagining, and rebuilding. Her argument is that indigenous and grassroots feminists possess radical emancipatory power, which can eventually result in radical change. Women’s collectives build alternatives to the present, not by adopting new policies or reforming the system. Instead, they rebuild social dynamics within communities to break down hegemonic violence. By analyzing the Mexican feminist movement, she argues that Women’s Collective Action in Mexico is part of a new wave of hope movements creating alternate, anti-patriarchal worlds. She notes that rather than an organized front with a list of political goals, this movement lives by the desire to create a new world.
Ventura Alfaro, M. J. (2022). Women’s movements against VAW and feminicide: How community-based feminisms build worlds otherwise from the periphery of mexico city. Partecipazione e Conflitto, 15(1), 240-256. doi:https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v15i1p240