Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas (review)

This is a well written and conceived, overdue anthology about feminist, women's, leftist, and cultural politics in Chiapas, Mexico. The book is divided into three sections: Key women's documents; Indigenous women's organizing in Chiapas and Mexico; and, Rights and gender in ethnographic context. The chapters serve as both stand alone essays but also implicitly and explicitly speak to each other and overall themes in the book, including autonomous women's/feminist organizing; conflicts and cooperation between women's groups and leftist/indigenous organizations; the meaning of citizenship; the place of political economy in spawning social movements; the role of Liberation Theology in popular mobilization; and feminist/cross-national research.

Collectively, Dissident Women is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and in many cases first hand experience with the organizations discussed. The collection also relies on archival data, namely key Zapatista (EZLN) documents. Including these documents in the book serves several historical, methodological, and political points. First, an underlying goal of much Women's Studies scholarship in this area is to write women into the revolutionary archives. Including these documents is perhaps the most concrete move towards that goal. From a methodological point of view providing the reader with such texts allows one access to primary documents that are central to the history yet not readily accessible. Finally, the documents, particularly their placement in the first section of the book, even before the Introduction, set the tone that Mexican women's words are primary.

The book will appeal to students and established scholars alike. It is an exemplary model of cross-national collaboration with respect to editors and contributors. It also does a wonderful job of weaving together theory and praxis, giving neither priority. Moreover, this is an illustrative example of the place of academia in activism and vice versa. The editors do this both through their choice of essays as well as self-conscious feminist methodology. As a result, this book would add much to feminist methods as well as traditional anthropology and sociology field methods courses. In such classes it would serve more of an example of the types of scholarship feminist methodology can produce rather than a "how to" template, given that each chapter does not include its own methods discussion.

Despite my aforementioned observation that putting the archival documents in the beginning of the book served a political point, of which I am extremely supportive, the resulting organization was nevertheless frustrating. The reader does not read the detailed theoretical, historical, or methodological overview until after reading the primary documents, which prevents non-experts of Chiapas from absorbing some of the key reasons the editors chose to include these specific documents in the first place. Additionally, it was extremely frustrating that the editors did not include an "about the authors" section, either before or after the chapters or within the individual chapters. The reader gets a sense of the contributors through methodological discussions, however the absence of biographical information was fundamentally at odds with the collaborative, cross-national, feminist commitment of the editors. This frustration was exacerbated by the fact that not all contributors include a detailed methods discussion, even though that was often the place where clues about the contributors were shared. A final critique is that many chapters lent themselves to making connections between women's and feminist organizing in Chiapas and the rest of Latin America. There were also similar patterns between indigenous women's movements elsewhere in Latin America, for example the Mapuche in Chile, where obvious theoretical connections might have been made but were not. These critiques aside, the book is still to be recommended.

The editors conclude their Preface as follows: "This book is dedicated to their [dissident Mexican women] spirit, leadership, and inspiring visions of how to build a better and more just world" (pg xviii). Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics...