Building feminist solidarities: the case study of Mujeres Creando

Abstract

The case study of Bolivian radical feminist group Mujeres Creando is aimed at exploring both the micro and macropolitical challenges to and strategies for building feminist solidarities within the broader context of globalised neoliberal capitalism. The main research question orienting this study is: What would feminist activism look like if it addressed both macro and micropolitical factors in a way that led to the formation of anti-capitalist subjectivities and sustainable environments? The anticipated outcome of this research project is the achievement of a better understanding of how the feminist notion that the personal is political is the basis for the formulation of alternative forms of theory and praxis leading to emancipatory social change and the emergence of egalitarian and sustainable democratic realities. Feminist insights on subjectivity formation and coalition-building offer valuable conceptual material with the potential for innovation from which to re-imagine and re-construct the social realities of women and, by extension, of all members of society. The methodological framework for this study is qualitative discourse analysis. The aim of this research is not to impose predetermined concepts for testing, but rather to provide a framework for an iterative process, comprising the dual movements of exploration and interpretation, where theory and hypotheses are developed in the course of the study in contribution to existing dialogues on the subject of feminist solidarity building. As the type of data studied is not amenable to quantitative analysis, a qualitative design is better suited to the subjective nature of the matter and my need to access unquantifiable aspect about the members of Mujeres Creando, such as the effects of discursive colonisation on the lives and struggles of marginalised women, how they make sense of their socio-political context and engage with dominant discursive practices on a daily basis. All the data for this thesis was gathered exclusively by means of qualitative discourse analysis.