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191 Based primarily on women’s experiential narratives, this book suggests that social policy, economic systems, cultural ideologies, and political resistance are also fleshly matters, and that in order to create more equitable, just, and humane societies, we need to take into account the bodily worlds of marginalized populations . Leading transnational feminist theorist Chandra Mohanty (2003b, 231) argues that an “experiential and analytic anchor in the lives of marginalized communities of women provides the most inclusive paradigm for thinking about social justice” in the age of globalization. In this work, I situated the excluded bodies of women in a Global South country, Argentina, at the center of the analysis. While Argentina has traditionally been relatively affluent compared to other countries in the South, it is still a peripheral nation in the world order and a paradigmatic case of rapid impoverishment associated with neoliberal economic policies. The bodily worlds of women in Argentina, especially the most marginalized, are thus not only important in their own right; they also offer a productive entry point for understanding a host of social relations with global ramifications. As this volume shows, a focus on the varied, distinct, and overlapping embodied experiences of different groups of women in Argentina tell us much about the workings of converging flows of power, including those based on class, gender, race-ethnicity, sexuality, and nation in a globally unequal world. Women’s narratives yielded significant insights on five substantive fields of power inequality that shaped their embodied experiences. Their stories exposed the scars of a globalized neoliberal economic model that treats the bodies of increasing numbers of people as disposable. They also revealed how cultural scripts of femininity and beauty, grounded in a racialized and classed transnational imaginary, inscribe the bodies of diverse women in Argentina. In the field of reproductive politics, women’s experiences with clandestine, illegal, and unsafe abortions show how the social enforcement of motherhood through the Conclusion embodiment, glocalities, and resistance c h a p t e r 7 z criminalization of abortion undermines women’s bodily self-determination and integrity. Accounts about interpersonal gendered violence were common among the women in this study, highlighting connections between seemingly private events and more overtly political, economic, and social forms of violence. Finally, the context of heightened political protest, and particularly the practices of activist women, helped to illuminate the embodied character of political activism and how different women in Argentina have turned their bodies into sources and vehicles of resistance. The growing field of body studies includes a great deal of feminist literature on key aspects of women’s embodiment in Europe and the United States. What theoretical and empirical insights does a focus on women’s embodiment in Latin American contexts yield? Animated by multidisciplinary feminist theories and by critical perspectives in sociology, I intended to address this question by focusing on the case of Argentina at a historical moment of profound social upheaval. Through the lens of multiple female bodies, this volume explores signi ficant aspects of exclusion and resistance in Argentina at the same time that it extends feminist scholarship on women’s embodied experiences. In the following sections, I first chart the conceptual trajectories that marked my study of women’s bodily worlds, underscoring the importance of politically embedded academic analyses. Then I highlight three substantive directions for scholarly inquiry based on the lessons from this study: the need to situate women’s studies scholarship on the body in the context of glocal political developments; the need to generate more embodied analyses of the economy, including those of neoliberal globalization; and the need to pay greater attention to the bodily dimensions of political resistance. Studying Women’s Bodily Worlds: Conceptual Trajectories By drawing on intersectional and transnational feminist frameworks, this volume encourages reflection on the specific inequality configurations that occur in Latin America as lived through the body. This is a region in which the contours of embodied class locations are often defined in interaction with neocolonial capitalist processes (e.g., through the effects of structural adjustment or free trade agreements); where state terrorist regimes have tortured dissident bodies making use of cultural repertoires of contempt toward gendered, sexual, and ethnoracial Others; or where the racialization of gendered and classed bodies has been obscured by dominant narratives of mestizaje (e.g., Mexico), racial democracy (e.g., Brazil), or whitened notions of ethnic mixing (e.g., Argentina). As I examined women’s bodily worlds in Argentina, I...

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