CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Franco Garibay, Kassel |
|---|---|
| Title | (Un)Friendly Boundaries: Shared Injury & Collective Healing in Mexican Feminisms |
| Summary | Amidst rising levels of sexual and gender-based violence in Mexico, feminist movements have been influenced by the reality of living with overflowing pain, fear, and outrage. The affective temporality (Lamas, 2021) in Mexico City and the rise of anti-gender and trans-exclusionary movements have contributed to theory and praxis built around shared injuries that violently demarcate feminist boundaries of in/exclusion. In Mexico, sisterhood as a feminist value is being used to validate the exclusion of trans and non-binary people from the movement, essentializing feminism’s political agendas around cis women. Grounded in María Lugones’s conceptualization of pluralistic friendship (Lugones and Spelman, 1983; Lugones, 1995), this thesis proposes friendship as a political alternative to sisterhood, compañerismo, and solidarity. Through an analysis of feminist virtual practices of knowledge-sharing and activists’ understandings of sisterhood and friendship, this thesis shows how terms of affinity frame and are framed by social movements. Sisterhood’s automatic nature is contested by the intentionality of friendship — a demanding feminist ideal. Thus, this thesis utilizes a new metodología disidente guided by an ethics of friendship to reflect on interdisciplinary feminist and queer approaches to theory and praxis and how they showcase the possibility of resisting hatred, even hatred for injustice (Pérez and Saavedra, 2020). In Mexican social movements, the strong presence of the vocabulary of friendship suggests there is already an interest in pushing the boundaries of solidarity into something more meaningful and intentional. This thesis proposes Mexico City as a case study on how friendship can be a driving force for feminism, creating movements that can be an inspiration across the world. Based on pláticas and chisme with Mexican people resisting violence, this thesis proposes a new feminist theory of friendship that draws on friendly values — commitment to care, respectful acknowledgment of differences, accountability, and a joyful withnessing of each other — to build bridges towards collective healing. Keywords: friendship, feminist theory, transfeminism, queer theory, Mexico City, feminist methodologies, SGBV, feminicide, solidarity, sisterhood. Trigger warnings: death and mourning, sexual and gender-based violence, sexism, transphobia, violence against LGBTQIA+ people, racism, feminicide, and colonial violence. For a wider discussion on trigger warnings in this thesis refer to page 5 in the Literature Review. |
| Supervisor | Loney, Hannah |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/franco_kassel.pdf |
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