This book reconsiders a reliance on the criminal justice system for solving women’s struggles with domestic violence: acknowledge how militarism subjects women to extreme levels of violence perpetrated from within, and without, their communities: recognize how the medical establishment inflicts violence—such as involuntary sterilization and inadequate health care—on women of color: devise new strategies for cross-cultural dialogue, theorizing and alliance building. .INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence was born in 2000, when more than two thousand activists from diverse communities came together to end the war being waged on women of color in the US and around the world. Now the largest multiracial, grassroots, feminist organization in the United States, INCITE! boasts chapters in more than 20 cities.
This collection examines how women’s movements have responded to the political, economic, and social changes of the last twenty years. The essays focus on the various strategies women’s movements have adopted and assess their successes and failures. The book is organized around three broad topics. The first, women’s access to political power at the national level, is addressed by essays on the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile, gender quotas in Argentina and Brazil, and the responses of the women’s movement to the “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. The second topic, the use of legal strategies, is taken up in essays on women’s rights across the board in Argentina, violence against women in Brazil, and gender in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. Finally, the international impact of Latin American feminists is explored through an account of their participation in the World Social Forum, an assessment of a Chilean-led project carried out by women’s organizations in several countries to hold governments to the promises they made at international conferences in Cairo and Beijing, and an account of cross-border organizing to address femicides and domestic abuse in the Juárez-El Paso border region. Jane S. Jaquette provides the historical and political context of women’s movement activism in her introduction, and concludes the volume by engaging contemporary debates about feminism, civil society, and democracy.