Interdisciplinary perspectives on gendered violence and resistance in Latin America

Abstract

Latin America has been the backdrop of colonial extraction, military dictatorships and armed conflicts, while it has also been characterised by its strong social movements, political organising and solidarity. Although these phenomena are gendered, diverse and intersectional gendered experiences have been insufficiently recognised in academic research. This article introduces a collection that questions mainstream understandings of how gendered violence against cisgender women and other feminised bodies, including people with diverse gender identities, expressions and sexual orientations in Latin America can be understood, and what we can learn from resistance against gendered violence.

Keywords:

• Latin America
• gender-based violence
• resistance
• agency
• LGBTQI rights

Latin America is a region where conflict and resistance have historically been intertwined. While it has been the backdrop for colonial extraction, military dictatorships and armed conflicts, it has also been characterised by its strong social movements, political organising and solidarity. Although most armed conflicts in the region have now formally been resolved, violence continues to be widespread. In Guatemala, for instance, political violence and criminal violence have become intertwined, characterised by the surge of criminal gangs and deep-rooted corruption, while powerful elites are dismantling the rule of law. Drug-trafficking, paramilitary and guerrilla groups continue to cause insecurity in Colombia. Large numbers of migrants try to escape extreme poverty, political instability and criminal violence, especially in Central America and Venezuela. Large-scale agro-industrial projects have caused environmental devastation and social conflicts throughout the continent. All these forms of violence affect the development and security of entire communities. However, they have a differentiated impact on people depending on intertwined power relations defined by gender, ethnicity, class, age and sexuality (Viveros 2016).

International portrayals of the region have long paid insufficient attention to how gendered power relations, intersecting with structural inequalities defined by class, sexuality or ethnicity, materialise as part of the causes and impacts of violence. A more complex, intersectional lens is needed to understand the full experience of violence of diverse groups of cisgender heterosexual women and people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, or asexual (LGBTQIA+) (Kappler and Lemay-Hébert 2019). Yet beyond merely depicting and understanding violence, it is also important to understand the ways in which people endure and resist it, or even create paths to thrive. Recognising forms of individual and collective agency can help to devise ways to overcome and transform gendered violence. Together, the collection of articles in this volume question mainstream understandings of gendered violence and what violence against cisgender women and other feminised bodies, including people with diverse gender identities, expressions and sexual orientations, in Latin America entails, while also shedding light on different forms of resistance against such violence.

For cisgender heterosexual women and LGBTQIA+ persons, who already face exclusion and marginalisation within patriarchal structures of oppression, armed, political and ecological violence exacerbate the conditions that jeopardise their well-being and lives. As part of these entanglements, cisgender women and people with diverse gender identities, expressions and sexual orientations are targeted with specific forms of violence. Sexual violence, for instance, has systematically been used against diverse groups of women in armed conflicts like those in Guatemala and Colombia, while the present-day phenomenon of feminicide in countries like Mexico is also often accompanied by sexual violence (Koos 2017). This evidences a continuum of violence against them, referring to how violence flows across public and private spaces, from peace to conflict, and through social, economic and political arenas (Cockburn 2004). An example of such a continuum is evident on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, where conflict and non-conflict violence intersect with mass migration, causing dire socio-economic consequences for both migrants and receiving communities. This produces specific forms of violence and insecurity (Zulver and Idler 2020).

Analyses of gender-based violence, however, tend to be limited to violence against cisgender heterosexual women, and are too often based on a limited understanding of their identities, addressing women as a homogeneous group without analysing the different ways in which diverse groups of women experience violence. Intersectional and queer analyses of experiences of violence and how these are addressed by international policies are still largely missing (Hagen 2016; Kappler and Lemay-Hébert 2019). This prevents a more nuanced analysis of the diverse gendered experiences of violence. Particularly, it fails to recognise the roles of women and LGBTQIA+ persons as socio-economic and political actors, their strategies of survival and resistance and their capacity for choice, dissent and disruption before, during and after political and armed violence.

In addition to the tendency to equate gender with cisgender heterosexual women, this supposedly homogeneous group is often portrayed mainly as victims of violence, reinforcing their representations as a homogeneous passive group in need of protection, and neglecting their diverse stories of resistance and agency (Kapur 2002). Although it is increasingly recognised that women are important actors in peacebuilding, for example through the United Nations’ ‘Women, Peace and Security Agenda’, such arguments are often based on ‘protective stereotypes’ of vulnerable women or on essentialisms about their inherent peacefulness, associated with their role as mothers with natural caring and nurturing capacities (Cockburn 2001; Otto 2010). Women are often represented as either ‘victims or heroines’, stereotypical representations or ‘gender myths’ that fail to do justice to reality and are therefore of little use when striving for the transformation of gender inequality (Cornwall and Rivas 2015). Beyond victims and heroines, women can also be active participants in or complicit to violence. Nevertheless, female combatants are also often seen in stereotypical ways, either as victims of violence within armed groups, or as deviant women who are not peaceful and therefore no longer ‘real women’. The more complex story of how structural gendered violence affects their positions is often not recognised (Weber 2021), while it is the structures of gendered and other inequalities that need addressing to actually prevent gendered violence.

A final limitation of much of the current research on gendered violence, especially in the so-called ‘Global South’, is that the majority of publications are produced by scholars from the ‘Global North’. This is evidenced by the under-representation of South-based feminist scholars in international journals on women, gender and politics (Medie and Kang 2018). The centralisation of knowledge production on gender and violence in centres of research in the Global North, although undoubtedly motivated by goals of emancipation and social justice, risks reinforcing global hierarchies in which Western scholars speak about experiences of ‘others’ who are geographically and culturally far away (Haastrup and Hagen 2021). On the other hand, when scholars from the Global South publish on social justice issues in international journals, they do not necessarily apply a gender perspective or consider the experiences of women and people with diverse gender identities, expressions and sexual orientations. This is even the case with recent research published in this journal, where an excellent article on Latin America’s emancipatory movements (De Conti and Villen 2023) does not analyse the region’s very active feminist movement. Inequalities, both global and gendered, remain present in much academic research on violence and gender in and from Latin America.

To compensate for these limitations and inequalities in knowledge production on gendered violence in Latin America, in March 2022 we organised a British Academy-funded writing workshop entitled ‘Decolonising the Research Agenda on the Continuum of Violence against Women in Latin America: Network of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies’. This workshop enabled early career researchers (ECRs) from or based in Latin America to build international academic networks with scholars based in the UK, Colombia and the USA. The workshop aimed to support them to publish in high-impact journals in the humanities and social sciences, allowing them to influence and decolonise research agendas on gender, peacebuilding and security. In the workshop, the ECRs participated in discussions and trainings on publishing, and received individual mentoring from established academics from the UK and Latin America. We are proud to present the result of the hard work undertaken during this workshop in this collection, which presents a rich and complex picture of the important interdisciplinary work that ECRs in Latin America are undertaking in the area of gendered violence. It provides a counterweight to essentialist and limited understandings of women’s experiences, and instead understands gender as broader than cisgender women only, considers people’s diverse roles in violence, and applies intersectional and reflexive lenses to research.

In her article about feminist intersectional activism within the Colombian Truth, Peaceful Coexistence and Non-Repetition Commission (CEV), Juliana González Villamizar addresses intersectionality as a political project and critical praxis. She shows the limitations that transitional justice mechanisms face as they aim to achieve justice without seeking to transform historically intersecting inequalities (González Villamizar 2024). Drawing on her collaborative work with CEV’s researchers in the Colombian Caribbean, González Villamizar argues that by focusing on gender as a single marker of inequality, transitional justice mechanisms are missing their more transformative potential. Despite facing multiple methodological, conceptual and political obstacles within the institution, the CEV researchers advanced the construction of counter-hegemonic truth narratives of the armed conflict in the Colombian Caribbean. To achieve this, González Villamizar shows that they embraced feminist strategies, which consisted of ‘carefully crafting alliances and synergies between actions on the ground that transformed the historically vertical relation between the state and racialised communities’. The author argues for the need to operationalise intersectionality in its political and structural dimensions, and she identifies paths through which intersectionality can contribute to decolonise not only transitional justice mechanisms but also public policy endeavours that aim to truly achieve social justice.

Regarding justice in contexts of conflict and post-peace agreement, Aisling Walsh’s article is situated within the landscape of feminist research-activism in Guatemala. Drawing on her extensive and close collaboration with the Centre for Training, Healing and Transpersonal Research – Q’anil in Guatemala, she works with the concept of cuerpo-territorio to contest colonial, heteropatriarchal and anthropocentric approaches to healing (Walsh 2024). In her article, Walsh explores the political power of recovering and reimagining our own pleasure, sexuality and eroticism as embodied justice. The author shows that such reimagining entails working on our ability to connect with other-than-human life worlds and with our human and non-human ancestry. By understanding and assuming sexuality and the erotic as central to our life force, the author invites us to think about our own sexual freedom as part of the ecosystems of which we are part. ‘In making this imaginative leap’, Walsh proposes, ‘it may be possible to situate our own work of healing the body within a planetary struggle for partial healing of deeply wounded territories’.

Gendered agency in contexts of armed conflict is central in the work of Kiran Stallone. In her article about the strategic use of intimacy in war contexts, she focuses on understanding how women who live in conflict-affected parts of Colombia make strategic use of their performance of emotions and physicality to obtain a certain level of protection for themselves and others (Stallone 2024). At the same time, she shows that such strategic intimacy also becomes a form of gendered micro-governance, as those ‘intimate relationships shape local armed actor governance and social order’. Strategic intimacy, Stallone argues, is a ‘patriarchal bargain’ that women in the context of the Colombian armed conflict have resorted to, as a result of ‘the limited possibilities for agency that were available to them’.

In her article about the gendered dynamics of Central American straight migrant families in their transit through Mexico, Alejandra Díaz de León explores how cisgendered men and women who travel as a family navigate the violence and uncertainty that they encounter in their journeys. The author shows how the gendered production of roles, networks and space plays a significant part in migrant families’ possibilities to survive and mitigate the various dangers they face throughout their journey (Díaz de León 2024). Along the way, undocumented migrants lose the ability to move and inhabit the public space, which tends to be hostile towards them and pushes them to create different strategies to make themselves invisible. For both men and women this represents a loss of control and power. However, the ways in which they deal with such loss entail different negotiations of their patriarchal gender roles. Díaz de León shows that men tend to resent this and try to create an ‘invisible’ domestic sphere where they can enforce new forms of control within their families. This means that women are exposed not only to the same forms of gender-based violence they endured at home, this time without their support networks, but also to new ones such as sexual violence on the road. However, in her article, Díaz de León shows us that women are not passive recipients of abuse; they use their perceived vulnerability to obtain help from strangers, and they create ‘ties of solidarity with other women that allowed them to share information, care and resources’.

Not only is violence perpetrated in differentiated ways, the manner in which it is portrayed also tells stories of oppression, embodiment, and resistance on its own. In his article about media coverage of anti-LGBT violence, Samuel Ritholtz questions what the media’s spectacle of this violence, with its overt brutality on display, means in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. By focusing on the horrific acts of violence, presented in very explicit detail by the pioneer of the tabloid format in the country, the author compels the reader to consider political and ethical questions about what these displays of brutality can reveal about those who have suffered them, as well as about ourselves (Ritholtz 2024). Ritholtz contends that the coverage of this ‘brutality on display served as a mechanism through which prejudice and violence reinforced the subordination of queer and trans people’. That spectacle of brutality, encompassing distressing images, the brutal mutilation of bodies, and the stigmatising narratives framing the images, was possible because it fed on existing prejudice towards queer and trans people. However, the author shows that in the context of a country that continues to endure an armed conflict, those images and narratives have combined with the logics of war ‘to depoliticise violence and subordinate those who are different’.

Acknowledgements

We thank first and foremost the participants of the workshop, who made it an incredible learning experience for all involved. In addition we thank Mo Hume, Leigh Payne, Natália Félix de Souza, Diana Ojeda, Marysia Zalewski, Nadje Al-Ali, Lina Céspedes-Baez and Angela Santamaria for their generosity in sharing their time and knowledge to make a very fruitful and inspiring workshop possible. The workshop and this volume would not have been possible without the generous support of the British Academy. We also express our gratitude to the administrative team of the Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Culturales Pensar at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) and its director, Oscar Hernandez, without whose invaluable logistical support the workshop would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy under Grant number WW20200303.

Notes on contributors

Tatiana Sanchez Parra

Tatiana Sanchez Parra is currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is situated at the intersection of feminist studies, socio-legal studies and Latin American studies. She works on issues related to feminist peacebuilding, reproductive justice and reproductive violence in contexts of war and political transitions. Her first book, Born of War in Colombia: Reproductive Violence and Memories of Absence, will be published by Rutgers University Press in the spring of 2024.

Sanne Weber

Sanne Weber is Assistant Professor in peace and conflict studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Her research explores how conflict intersects with structural inequalities such as gender and age. She uses ethnographic, participatory and creative research methods to understand whether and how transitional justice mechanisms are capable of transforming gendered and other structural inequalities. She has worked primarily in Latin America, particularly in Colombia and Guatemala. In the past, she has worked as a researcher and team coordinator on gender programmes for human rights and development organisations in Guatemala.