Complex gendered agency in Mexico: how women negotiate hierarchies of fear to search for the disappeared

Journal article

Abstract:: Fear and agency are complex, interrelated and gendered phenomena for the madres buscadoras, the women searching for the disappeared in Mexico. These women operate in a context of unrelenting, multisided violence. At the same time, they choose to engage in activism that puts them at heightened risk of violence at the nexus of criminal organisations, state corruption and insecurity. This article investigates how the madres navigate contexts of gendered violence in Veracruz, Mexico, to engage in expressions of complex gendered agency. It makes the argument that we can understand why the fear of violence does not necessarily lead to demobilisation or inaction when we locate their activism within a hierarchy of fears. By recognising that the fear of never knowing about their missing loved ones outweighs the fears of violence that they are exposed to on a day-to-day basis, we gain insight into why they choose ‘fight’, rather than ‘flight’.

Files:: Zulver_2023_Complex_gendered_agency.pdf

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Language:: English
Keywords:: disappearances

multisided violence

Mexico

high-risk collective action

complex gendered agency
Pubs id:: 1325421
Local pid:: pubs:1325421
Deposit date:: 2023-01-27

Copyright holder:: European Conference on Politics and Gender and Bristol University Press
Rights statement:: © European Conference on Politics and Gender and Bristol University Press 2023. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits adaptation, alteration, reproduction and distribution without further permission provided the original work is attributed. The derivative works do not need to be licensed on the same terms.

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