Narrating a Psychology of Resistance Voices of the Compañeras in Nicaragua

by Grabe, Shelly

• ISBN13: 9780190649760
• ISBN10: 0190649763
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2016-12-05
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Movimiento Aut?nomo de Mujeres (Women's Autonomous Movement) in Nicaragua - birthed in part from the Sandinista Revolution of the 1980s - represents one of the largest, most diverse, and most autonomous women's movements in all of Latin America.

While it's true that scholars across a wide range of disciplines have written invariably about this social movement (and have been instrumental in arguing that these women are not mere victims, but individuals who have worked hard to resist oppression and fight injustice for decades) what remains missing from this body of work is scholarship aimed at understanding, specifically, the psychology of resistance; in other words, what are the psychological mechanisms and methodologies that emerge from the margins that determine the kind of social action that revolutionizes societies?

Investigating the psychosocial processes behind resistance is critical to understanding a commitment to justice and the development of subjectivity necessary for enacting the political activity required for social transformation. Psychology, in particular, as author Shelly Grabe argues, is positioned to engage in a systematic exploration of the links between social and political conditions that determine how, why, and under what circumstances resistance emerges.

Narrating a Psychology of Resistance documents the first-hand accounts of the Nicaraguan women's Movimiento: a coordinated mobilization of women that has weathered unremitting power differentials characterized by patriarchy and capitalism. In this collection of testimonios, Grabe gives voice to these extraordinary women and closely examines how psychological processes that emerge in response to sociopolitical oppression can lead to gendered justice and the revolutionizing of societies at large.

Author Biography

Shelly Grabe is an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works in partnership with grassroots women's organizations in Nicaragua and Tanzania to champion the activism and voices of marginalized women in the pursuit of women's human rights. She uses a multimethod approach from within psychology to provide the currently missing - but necessary - links between transnational feminism, the discourse on women's human rights and globalization, as well as the international attention given to women's "empowerment" to help support strategies and interventions undertaken by local women aimed at social change.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Bridging Activism and Academic Research: My Position
Introduction: Transnational Feminist Liberation Psychology and Feminists' Stories of Social Justice in the Movimiento Aut?nomo de Mujeres of Nicaragua

Section One - Citizen Democracy and Knowledge: Leveling the Playing Field by Creating Participatory Spaces

1: Problematizing the Struggle for Freedom Through Contraction:
"Freedom should be wide enough so that every person can decide what to participate in and what to build towards or construct."
Testimonio from Juanita Jim?nez

2: Resisting Exclusion with Oppositional Participation:
"I was excluded from hearing what the males in the house were talking about; particularly if they were talking about politics because that was not, you know, ladies' business."
Testimonio from Sof?a Montenegro

3: The Role of Education and Knowledge in the Building of Citizen Subjectivity
"As long as you keep people in the dark, not knowing anything, of course you will be able to do what you wish with them and manipulate them. Ignorance is the best friend of abusive people's manipulation."
Testimonio from Yamileth Mej?a

4: Elevating Voices by Resisting Universalism
"If we could just reach where we could have really strong women, strong character and enough knowledge, because knowledge is important too-to start doing things, you know, from a women's point of view, from our cultures."
Testimonio from Matilde Lindo

Section Two - Intersectional Ideology: Legislation and Women's Human Rights

5: Linking Lived Experience of Violence and Transformative Feminist Action
"We had a feminist vision and we were a very politicized social movement. We demanded changes in legislation. We don't just take care of victims."
Testimonio from Violeta Delgado

6: Subjectivation in Response to Patriarchal and Neoliberal Rule:
"We have taken feminist philosophy as a way of making change in this patriarchal structure that oppresses us and keeps us sunken in poverty. For both neoliberalism and the patriarchal system are responsible, both of them together, for continuing to oppress women, to oppress more than fifty-plus percent of the world's population."
Testimonio from Sandra Ramos

7: Legislating From a Feminist Standpoint:
"We questioned the power that the patriarchs had, that politicians had; we claimed that politicians were the main abusers of women, that the congressmen did not legislate in the best interest of women."
Testimonio from Bertha In?s Cabrales

Section Three - Agriculture: Feminist Rural Organizing

8: Deideologizing the Material and Social Conditions of Inequity:
"...the poor and women cross the same paths. We must have programs of greater significance or scope, since we women are the ones who drive the world economy."
Testimonio from Martha Heriberta Valle

9: Deideologizing Land Ownership: Structures that Interrupt Male Dominance:
"We began linking the purchase of land with feminist thinking, becoming aware of our identity, of how women have been constructed, to deconstruct the model that was the obstacle to leaving the kitchen, and work in the field."
Testimonio from Diana Martinez


Conclusion: How a Feminist Fight for Justice from the Majority World Informs Liberatory Knowledge