CFR Book launch: Beyond Repair?: Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm

The Centre for Feminist Research Book Launch:
Beyond Repair?: Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm
(Rutgers University Press 2019)
By Dr. Alison Crosby (York University) and Dr. M. Brinton Lykes (Boston College)
Discussant: Dr. Carlota McAllister (York University)
Chair: Dr. Viviana Patroni (York University)
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Date: Friday, May 10, 2019
Time: 1.15-2.45pm
Location: 305 Founders College, York University
Accessibility: Open to all. Accessible space. Founders College is wheelchair-accessible. Gender-neutral bathroom on 1st floor. Single-stall, accessible bathroom on 3rd floor. Wayfinding signs will be posted. RSVP to juliapyr@yorku.ca.
Click here for directions to York University.
Copies of the book available for purchase!
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In Beyond repair? Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes explore a group of Mayan women’s collective struggle for justice in the aftermath of harm suffered during the height of Guatemala’s genocidal violence in the early 1980s, a harm these protagonists contend is irreparable yet must be redressed. Drawing on eight years of feminist participatory action research (PAR), the book examines how Mayan women’s protagonism has been shaped through dialogic interactions with intermediaries, including Mayan, ladina, mestiza and transnational activists, feminists, lawyers, psychologists, interpreters, and the authors as researchers.
Crosby and Lykes trace how intermediaries accompanied Mayan protagonists in the performance of a “community of women” outside of their local geographic communities, as a space from which to enact actions for redress and engage in knowledge co-construction. In analyzing protagonists’ engagement with a Tribunal of Conscience, a paradigmatic legal case of sexual violence as a crime against humanity and a state-sponsored National Reparations Program–actions framed as “transitional justice”–as well as the authors’ PAR process, the book addresses a central tension between indigenous struggles to redress social suffering rooted in structural colonial violence and dispossession, and the tendency of Western rights-based regimes to individuate acts of harm and generate racialized gendered spectacles of pain and suffering, accentuated in cases of sexual harm. Crosby and Lykes consider the challenges and possibilities of decolonial feminist research praxis within such terrain.
Co-sponsors: CERLAC, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, the Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall Law School and Founders College.
Organized in conjunction with the 2019 Canadian Association of Latin American and the Caribbean Studies (CALACS) annual conference.