¡Ni Una Más! Women Weaving Solidarity Networks Against and Beyond State Violence and Feminicide in Contemporary Mexico (2010-2020)

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisPhD

Abstract

The world is experiencing an unprecedented surge in violence against women (VAW) and feminicide. This tendency occurs amidst a crisis of civilisation fuelled by violent hegemonies under modernity/coloniality. In this thesis, I explore the nature of these forms of violence and focus on women's collective actions (WCA) to investigate how their prefigurative struggles embody a form of feminised resistance that challenges the violent processes of global capital accumulation and rehearse alternative practices in the present. My empirical research is guided by decolonial, feminist epistemologies and theory to examine how the WCA in Mexico City resists, challenges, and builds alternatives. Using an analytical framework that combines the study of autonomous movements (Dinerstein 2015) and struggles as a decolonising process (Tuhawai-Smith 1999), named the “process of creation of alternatives”, I examine how the WCA in Mexico organises Hope. (1) By negating the present through mobilising, using collective memories as resisting, decolonial praxis. (2) By affirming new relationships through collective healing and affective strategies which embrace horizontality and weave solidarity. (3) Navigating contradictions between collectives; within, against, and beyond the state; as well as communities and outsiders to the collectives, implementing collective and community-driven dialogue and action. And finally, (4) in this praxis, transform the present by producing a surplus or excess that cannot be named with the words that oppress us but require that we transcend the “parameters of legibility” demarcated by the state (Dinerstein 2015) and create an alternative understanding of the struggle itself. My aim is to learn from their disruptions to violent hegemonic logic and develop a co-produced understanding of feminised resistance's potential for radical change. I argue that Women’s Collectives in Mexico City are engaging in a solidary and community-driven counter-collective action that disrupts and exceeds global capitalist hegemonies. The conclusion suggests that by engaging with decolonial feminist epistemologies to analyse VAW and the struggle against this violence, we can open an infinite of possibilities to resist and transform the violent structures that reproduce feminicide.
Date of Award16 Nov 2022
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • University of Bath
SupervisorAna Cecilia Dinerstein (Supervisor) & Severine Deneulin (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Decolonial
  • Feminism
  • VAW
  • Feminicide
  • Mexico
  • Women's movements
  • Prefiguration

Cite this

'