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No description available.

In Latin America, women's ability to participate in the paid workforce on equal terms as men is constrained by many cultural and political obstacles, and this reinforces women's unequal citizenship status. Even though unions have rarely supported women's rights historically, and are currently losing political power in the neoliberal economic context, I argue that union women have a crucial role to play in the social struggle to expand women's labor rights. Building on theories about the social construction of citizenship, I develop an original theoretical framework suggesting that civil society acts on three levels to expand citizenship rights: the individual level (working with individuals to make them more rights-conscious), within social institutions (working to ensure that policies within social institutions actually reflect the rights of individuals), and at the level of the state, where civil society contributes to the construction of new citizenship discourses. / The framework is then applied to the Mexican case. Examining the rise of working class feminism in the context of the debt crisis and transition to economic liberalism in the 1980s, and the subsequent democratic transition in 2000, I show how these contexts led union women to participate in civil associations active at each of these three levels of citizenship construction. More specifically, this participation has been important in raising awareness of women's labor rights among women workers, challenging patriarchal union structures, and bringing the issue of women's labor rights into the debate over reform of Mexico's Federal Labor Law. I ultimately conclude that in the absence of support from a broad women's labor movement, the chances that women's labor rights will be supported by the Mexican government and Mexican unions will be low.

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The sudden and steady increase in the involvement of women in the Mexican labour force beginning in the 1980s, signifies a major shift in gender roles and activities. It is a little studied outcome of Mexico's combination of economic crisis (which served to increase the supply of female labour) and subsequent adoption of neoliberal economic policies (which stimulated the demand for female labour). In fact, what is not known, are the implications of this employment for the Mexican women themselves. The dissertation moves beyond the existing literature on the gendered consequences of employment and economic development, by bringing in the citizenship literature to help define women's status. Specifically, the dissertation proposes a way of determining these consequences by examining three dimensions of women's status, two of which refer to women's roles and capabilities in the public sphere---political and economic---and one which refers to women's status in the private sphere---the household. By disaggregating the status variable, the dissertation highlights the significant improvements in women's status while identifying the remaining obstacles to gender equality. The dissertation develops a number of measures of women's multidimensional status, and assesses the differences between employed and non-employed women using data obtained from a survey of women in Mexico City. In the economic sphere, the findings indicate that employment improves women's status by enhancing women's independence. Employment provides women with the economic resources that enable them to lessen their dependence on men. At the same time, women continue to face inequality in the labour market, signifying the continuing subordination of women. In terms of women's household status, the findings show that women retain the primary responsibility for childcare, and for the maintenance of the home. This inequality is significant, and serves to limit further improvements in

This cross-cultural inquiry focuses on the involvement of mothers in their children's education and the ways in which motherhood impacts the personal identities of mothers. The Second-wave feminism started thirty years ago and questioned the role and position of mothers in society. The objective of this movement was to free women from the exclusive responsibility of childcare. However, three decades later women are still the primary caregivers for their children. The study involves 36 middle-class mothers, 12 each from Canada, India and Mexico. Irrespective of their cultural backgrounds, these mothers participated actively in the domestic work related to childcare and in their children's schoolwork. Participants in this study expressed their views about intensive mothering and how they sought their personal identities from the work of mothering. The majority regarded motherhood as a unique and rewarding role, and wished to continue mothering despite the frustrations and stresses they experienced. The findings concerning the childcare strategies of mothers from Canada, India and Mexico highlight some cultural differences. These cultural differences also had an impact on how these mothers perceived their roles and identities.

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No description available.

This dissertation focuses in the phenomenon of partner violence in Mexico. It examines the causes of partner violence at multiple levels of analysis. At the micro level it examines characteristics of individual victims, the family and the relationship. At the macro level the focus is on the legal and social structures that define domestic violence and the State's response. Throughout the analysis, the State plays a central role as the set of institutional arrangements that define the rules of the game and that determine the possibilities for change and the potential roles and effectiveness of key players including the feminist movement. Throughout the analysis I examine the confluence of forces that influence the State's attempts to reduce individual women's risk of partner violence through its legislative, judicial and police powers in a historically defined situation characterized by pervasive structural patriarchy. A major objective is to asses the influence of the pervasive patriarchy in the system on individual women's risk of partner violence. The approach adopted in this dissertation is based on the assumption that patriarchy is a social system that permeates social institutions and that becomes internalized and part of the normative everyday reality that structures individual's interpretations and motivations. This research demonstrates that, on average, the structural gender inequality between Mexican men and women is high. This inequality is revealed through qualitative and quantitative analyses that demonstrate empirically the influence of the patriarchal system both on individual experiences of partner violence, and on the State's response. Adopting a feminist post-structuralist approach to the analysis of the State's role, the research reveals inconsistencies between the discourses and practices of the Mexican State regarding partner violence. By analyzing administrative family violence legislation, I determine whether the Mexican State has in fact made substantively meaningful attempts to challenge patriarchy and to end violence against women in the family realm. The family violence legislation has two often inherently contradictory purposes. On the one hand the objective is to protect the family as a core social institution. The second, which is often in conflict with the first objective, is to protect women from abuse by their partners. This dissertation demonstrates that these conflicting objectives and the embededness of patriarchy throughout the social help explain why certain branches of the Mexican State tend to strengthen patriarchy and reify women's subordinate position in the family. The way in which the State interprets and implements family violence legislation reveals the inability and/or unwillingness of the State to protect women's rights and highlights the patriarchal assumptions pervading the State's actions. Finally, this research looks at feminist and women's movements and NGOs to determine whether they have been effective in influencing the State to adopt measures to guarantee women a life free of violence. I looked not only for their influence on the legislative level, but also surveyed the role they continue to play in implementing antiviolence laws. / text

Grounded in the geographies of Chiapas, Mexico, the dissertation maps a cartography of Zapatista indigenous resistance practices and charts the production of decolonial political subjectivities in an era of neoliberal governance and low intensity conflict. It analyzes the relationship between local cultural political expressions of indigenous autonomy, global capitalist interests and neoliberal rationalities of government after more than decade of Zapatista struggle. Since 1996, Zapatista indigenous Mayan communities have engaged in the creation of alternative education, health, agricultural production, justice, and governing bodies as part of the daily practices of autonomy. The dissertation demonstrates that the practices of Zapatista indigenous autonomy reflect current shifts in neoliberal state governing logics, yet it is in this very terrain where key ruptures and destabilizing practices emerge. The dissertation focuses on the recolonization aspects of neoliberal rationalities of government in their particular Latin American post Cold War, post populist manifestations. I argue that in Mexico's indigenous regions, the shift towards the privatization of state social services, the decentralization of state governing techniques and the transformation of state social programs towards an emphasis on greater self-management occurs in a complex relationship to mechanisms of low intensity conflict. Their multiple articulations effect the reproduction of social and biological life in sites, which are themselves terrains of bio-political contention: racialized women's bodies and feminized domestic reproductive and care taking roles; the relationship between governing bodies and that governed; land reform as linked to governability and democracy; and the production of the indigenous subject in a multicultural era. In each of these arenas, the dissertation charts a decolonial cartography drawn by the following cultural political practices: the construction of genealogies of social memories of struggle, a governing relationship established through mandar obedeciendo, land redistribution through zapatista agrarian reform, pedagogical collective selfreflection in women’s collective work, and the formation of political identities of transformation. Finally, the dissertation discusses the possibilities and challenges for engaging in feminist decolonizing dialogic research, specifically by analyzing how Zapatista members critiqued the politics of fieldwork and adopted the genres of the testimony and the popular education inspired workshop as potential decolonizing methodologies. / text