Rebel and revolutionary women: contributions to feminist anthropology (1970-1992)

Abstract

Feminist anthropology has built a field of knowledge within the discipline from a gender perspective. Currently, there are few works on the development of local feminist anthropologies. For that reason, in this work, I am interested in recovering the life and work of some important thinkers for feminist anthropology which I refer as rebels and revolutionaries. I focus on the development of this subfield in Chiapas and Central America, between the 1970s and 1990s (20th century), a period marked by political conflicts, repression, and counterinsurgency policies, which strongly affected students and teachers of the time, some of them organized in the Central American revolutionary movements. I focus specifically on the contributions of Alaíde Foppa, Stella Quan, Walda Barrios, and Marta Casaús and I analyze not only their anthropological and socio-scientific work about Marxist and socialist feminist critiques of traditional notions of class, the influences of Gramscian thought, the anti-colonial questions that marked their thinking, but also their political experiences in social and revolutionary movements, as well as some of their personal experiences.

Keywords:
Marxist feminism; socialism; Gramscian thought; anti-colonialism; feminist anthropology