Gender Futures:
Law, Critique and the Struggle for Something More  

3-4 April 2009 @ Westminster University, London

Rosemary Hennessy, Associate Professor of English, RICE University, Houston, USA

"Autonomy, Community, and the State: Grassroots Women’s Leadership in Mexico"

In Latin America popular movements and grassroots organizations are re-orienting long-standing feminist debates over whether women’s movement should maintain autonomy from the state and its laws. I will speak about the implications of these developments for thinking about “gender futures” by way of a historic series of encounters in Mexico between grassroots groups in the south and north that have been bringing together indigenous and worker-based struggles that join needs-based initiatives and gender-equality issues. Since 2006 indigenous communities from the southern state of Chiapas and members of a shanty town on the outskirts of the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo have been meeting to exchange and strategize. In this north-south model of organizing among the poorest of the poor, women’s leadership is soliciting fragile new models of gender politics and community life aimed at developing non-capitalist sustainable projects and new relations to the nation-state.