MEXICAN WOMEN AND POLITICAL CULTURE: GENDER, STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND EMPOWERMENT
Mexican women, rural women, muralist women, women artists, Nahua women, women with visual disabilities. From different perspectives—such as the intersections between the dual-technical education model for urban women, the hierarchization of knowledge, and social stigma—these constitute a crucial field of discussion when incorporating a gender perspective, where notions of prestige tend to be tied to traditional roles of the feminine and the masculine. Likewise, there are barriers to access, retention, and completion of upper-secondary education among rural women in the southeastern region of Coahuila. Continuing on, lost in history, is the invisibilization of women muralists and other twentieth-century Mexican artists. Aurora Reyes Flores—Mexico’s first woman muralist—Elena Huerta Múzquiz, María Dolores Velázquez Rivas, and María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca—a precursor of twentieth-century Mexican feminism—built prolific artistic careers despite conditions of structural inequality: biased criticism, occupational gender segregation, biographical subordination to male colleagues and spouses, and political and cultural censorship. For its part, violence in obstetrics constitutes a public health problem reflecting the persistence of unequal power relations in childbirth care, where the biomedical model and patriarchal structures limit women’s autonomy and favor practices of control over gestating bodies—where patriarchy influences the acceleration of labor as a mechanism of control, from the perspective of obstetricians at a public health institution. Likewise, the relationship between communication, gender and mental health is analyzed through a study of media coverage of suicide. In turn, the experiences of indigenous women hold current relevance within gender studies, given the need to understand how different forms of inequality intersect. Nahua women of the Sierra Norte de Puebla face realities marked by the convergence of factors associated with gender, ethnic belonging, and the historical inequalities that have affected indigenous peoples. In Mexico, the growth of legal frameworks combating violence against women has been accompanied by persistent challenges in ensuring meaningful access to justice for women, revealing a paradox in relation to gender-based institutional violence. The case studies comprising this Symposium adopt a qualitative, phenomenological, ethnographic field approach, applying in-depth interviews and life histories. Some of the authors self-identify as belonging to indigenous peoples and rural backgrounds; others work in medicine, others in education, and others in legal practice. Constitutional scholars and experts in jurisprudential analysis and legal argumentation, from Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela.
