Sugarcane cultivation is expanding throughout the Pacific coast of Guatemala, with political and ecological consequences for subsistence communities. The majority of sugar production occurs in the departments of Santa Rosa, Escuintla, Suchitepequéz and Retalhuleu on the Pacific coast. As sugarcane expands into fincas (large plantations owned by an agricultural elite), the amount of land available for rent to landless or land-poor farmers is reduced. Sugarcane expansion provokes various forms of environmental degradation, including deforestation, air pollution, water contamination, and draining of rivers and wetlands. Sugarcane cultivation also provokes health problems for workers and those who live near these sites, including kidney failure, dehydration, and respiratory and skin problems. As sugarcane expands, subsistence communities in the surrounding area are subject to these detrimental effects of sugarcane cultivation. Building academic knowledge on the impacts of sugarcane expansion is necessary in order to be better equipped to be in solidarity with, or support subsistence communities facing this expansion. It is crucial to meaningfully involve subsistence communities in this process of knowledge production since it is the inhabitants of these places, not researchers, who are the experts on these issues. In this thesis, I describe a feminist community-based research project in the community of La Montaña, Guatemala, on the impacts of sugarcane in their community. The key goals of this research were to 1) collaboratively identify with participants specific areas of interest regarding sugarcane impacts, and investigate these areas; 2) analyse data with an awareness of gender and 3) share research findings with the community to facilitate the possibility of action or critical reflection. I used public group discussions, semi-structured interviews, participant observation and drop-in sessions to collect data. Through this process, the issues of political inaction (as a response to sugarcane) and deforestation (driven by sugarcane) emerged as two key areas of interest which I explore in this thesis. The main finding of my research was that sugarcane cultivation is a divisive force in La Montaña: while community members agree on the negative aspects of sugarcane cultivation, they disagree about how to address this issue. As I find, these divisions occur along the axes of gender and age. These divisions also constitute an obstacle to a collective political platform to address sugarcane expansion, and a potential site for intracommunity violence as sugarcane continues to expand. These findings were presented to the community in a public presentation in February 2015, to provide a space for critical discussion of these issues. Overall, this research identifies a key difficulty that subsistence communities face in the context of agroindustrial expansion: as the importance of collective action grows, so too do intra-community divisions. This research highlights the need for long-term solidarity-building work in communities on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, in order to be able to achieve the changes that community members feel powerless to enact alone. / Graduate

This dissertation is an ethnography of communication, situated in the context of a feminist utopian community, that examines members' use of communication and communicative embodiment to counter what they consider to be oppressive United States gender practices. By integrating speech codes theory and cultural discourse analysis with theories of the body and gender, I develop analyses of spoken and written language, normative language- and body-based communicative practices, and sensual experiences of the body. I argue that there are three key ways communication and communicative practices are used to counter gender oppression: the use of gender-neutral words, the "desensationalization" of the body, and egalitarian nudity practices. Additionally, I argue that "calm" communication, as a normative style of communicating on the farm, underprivileges both male and female members of color and of the working class. From the perspective of members, gender was understood to be a category distinct from sex and analyses demonstrated that sex as an identity was a factor in interpretations of gender performances. Sex identities were also necessary for community feminist practice. Communication practices in the community articulated with feminist, health, environmental, and egalitarian discourses to normalize forms of embodiment such as female shirtlessness and public urination to counter dominant U.S. forms. It was found that making sense of normative communication practices required a cultural understanding of how both spaces and bodies were constituted as public and private. Community spaces were understood by members to be either relatively public or private with the public spaces being the more regulated spaces. Members contested the meanings of bodies as public (and therefore able to be regulated) or private (and therefore not able to be regulated). Normative communication practices in the community indicated that members work to preserve boundaries between private bodies in public spaces by developing rules for privacy, confidentiality, and non-communication. Community feminist communicative practices were understood to be liberatory because (1) the small size of the community allowed members to co-create feminist discourses that resignified body parts and gendered identites and (2) the community provided a space in which women could embody feminist discourses as everyday, sensual performances. This study has implications for the theorizing of embodied verbal and nonverbal gender-based cultural communication practices and for understanding community-based counter discourses as well as sex and gender as cultural identities.

Cette thèse s’intéresse aux manières dont se déploie le militantisme féministe au Togo, en interrogeant plus précisément la structure de l’espace de la cause des femmes, les stratégies employées par les militantes de différentes générations, leurs expériences du militantisme et leurs perceptions du féminisme dans un contexte ouest-africain où le féminisme est souvent connoté péjorativement. À partir d’une collecte de données ayant combiné des entretiens semi-dirigés, des observations participantes et une veille des réseaux sociaux, elle dresse un portrait des « féminismes », des « féministes », de leur militantisme et de l’espace dans lequel ces « féministes » militent au Togo. Cette recherche doctorale a permis de montrer un espace togolais de la cause des femmes foisonnant, marqué par la passion et l’intensité de l’engagement des militantes principalement issues d’une élite privilégiée. Même si l’émergence d’un discours féministe plus affirmé et plus globalisé a été discernée, le militantisme féministe, chez toutes les générations, est généralement exprimé en termes de promotion des droits des femmes et de l’égalité des genres, et est axé autour du principe de la négociation et de modalités d’action collective peu contestataires. La jeune génération de féministes se distingue surtout par la place importante qu’elle accorde aux plateformes digitales comme canal de communication. Les analyses ont montré que les militantes de l’espace togolais et ouest-africain de la cause des femmes adoptent une pluralité d’identités féministes qui sont néanmoins traversées par des expériences communes et une volonté partagée de défendre les droits des femmes, en tant que femmes. En adoptant une interprétation plus souple du militantisme et du féminisme en contexte ouest-africain, cette thèse permet de rendre compte des expériences particulières des militantes togolaises, mais aussi des tendances historiques et transnationales plus larges dans lesquelles elles s’inscrivent. / This thesis examines the ways in which feminist activism unfolds in Togo, focusing specifically on the structure of the women's rights movement, the strategies employed by activists from different generations, their experiences with activism, and their perceptions of feminism in a West African context where feminism is often negatively connoted. Through a combination of semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and social media monitoring, it paints a picture of "feminisms", "feminists", their activism, and the environment in which they operate in Togo. The research shows a thriving Togolese women's rights movement marked by the passion and intensity of the engagement of activists, mostly from a privileged elite. While the emergence of a more assertive and globalized feminist discourse has been discerned, feminist activism, across all generations, is generally expressed in terms of promoting women's rights and gender equality, and is centered around the principle of negotiation and non-subversive collective action. The younger generation of feminists is distinguished by the significant importance they assign to digital platforms as a communication channel. The analysis showed that women's rights activists in Togo and West Africa adopt a plurality of feminist identities that are informed by common experiences and a shared commitment to defending women's rights as women. By adopting a more flexible interpretation of feminism and activism in the West African context, this thesis sheds light on the specific experiences of Togolese activists as well as broader historical and transnational trends in which they are embedded.