Week 2 Post

Mala Thun’s “Political Inclusion and Representation of Afrodescendent Women in Latin America” fits well with Julia Zaldívar’s piece from last week about the Colectiva Matamba and the mobilization of Afro-Colombian women. Thun accurately states that, “To the extent that women have interests in common, it is by virtue of a shared social position, not a common identity.” As a result of women having experienced life in a variety of social positions, there can emerge drastically different analysis of what demands should be made of the state and society in order to improve the condition of women. The Afro-Colombian women written about in the piece by Zaldívar had no use for the mainstream (white) feminists’ appeals of having been limited to domestic spaces and wanting to participate in the labor market, by contrast having spent several centuries as slaves and subject to a entirely different set of socioeconomic conditions. Those Afrodescendent women that get elected to positions of political office in Latin American states are challenged with the multifronted effort of representing the diverse communities and constituencies which typically consists of securing material benefits from the state in order to develop infrastructure and economic opportunities as well as fighting to change a political arena where Afrodescendent women are grossly underrepresented. Despite this being accurately represented as a dual front for Afrodescendent women in electoral politics, an argument can be made for an overlap of the two fronts, for if work is being done to ensure that Afrodescendent women, a significantly marginalized sector of Latin American societies, is being actively represented in the political arena and having their needs fought for, than one could presume that the hegemonic groups of society’s right to competent government representation would be reinforced not undermined. The work done by Afrodescendent women involved in both grassroots political organizations and electoral politics serves to continue to shift the norms of whom is considered in the state’s policies and in discourses about women or Afrodescendent populations, ensuring that both are not centered around white women or Afrodescendent men, as has often the case.