The main objective of the thesis is to investigate the complex and, sometimes, contradictory relationship between women's activism, feminism and the deployment of feminine identities. I did so by examining the actions, strategies, and discourses of an innovative rural women's movement that emerged in Argentina in the mid nineties: the Movimiento de Mujeres Agropecuarias en Lucha (MML). This thesis looks at the changes and transformations that participation in the MML caused in MML women's lives. First, I seek to understand how, and to what extent, the participation in the movement politicized MML women's everyday lives. Secondly, I examine the effects of women's participation in the MML on the socially constructed representations of "feminine roles" and on the social relations of gender in rural Argentina. Lastly, I focus on how it would be appropriate to position the MML, a women's movement, vis-a-vis feminism.
By analyzing secondary data and ten in-depth interviews with leaders of the MML, I conclude that their participation in the MML has politicized MML women's everyday lives; it has challenged and, to some extent, changed their socially constructed representations of feminine roles (as being solely those of mothers or wives) and social relations of gender (that exclude women from public policy making). While MML leaders rejected any connection with feminism, they highlighted that, by participating in the MML women understood many issues related to gender, and said that the MML is fully integrated with the Argentinian women's movement. In light of these findings I suggest that in order to be able to capture the ambiguities of the relationship between women's movements of this type, and feminism, we need to adopt an approach that recognizes the dynamic nature of this relationship.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/28284 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Paulos, Leticia Anabel |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 182 p., application/pdf |
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