Desde las grietas del poder: experiencias de gestión/acción de empoderamiento de mujeres. Aportes para una teología feminista de resistencia, ciudadanía y transformación

Abstract

This investigation explains the path realized in an interdis ciplinary study of the interface between feminist theology, gender studies, cultural studies and colonial and post- colonial studies. The thesis of this investigation maintains that, in the face of a globalizing system that excludes, oppresse s, controls and marginalizes, women create alternative diversified spaces of resistance and transformation through openings of power for the formulation of rights and access to material and symbolic resources. The objective is to systematiz e the experience of action /mana gement of empowerment of women leaders of churches and social organizations in Lima, Peru. Empowerment is identified as the positive powers of women who gained self-confidence, autonomy, emancipation and resiliency. In this research the memory of exceptional women are recovered based on the histories of their family life, on the beginnings of their leadership in the confrontation with situations of domestic, cultural and economic violence and their interaction in the churches and popular women's movements. These spaces permit them to break out of the traditional roles and become protagonists of their rights. In their personal trajectory and their encounter with social and feminist movements and in dialog with these one is able to articulate other discussions and create other agendas of structural change. The research is composed of four chapters. The first chapter deals with an analysis of the situation: the social, political and cultural situation of the Peruvian society limited to the decade of the 1990's with the worsening of the violence experienced by the Peruvian society and the struggles of the women's organizations in the last decades. But this situation does not appear from nowhere. There are historical antecedents of colonial women and their written and spoken discussions that struggled against the gender violence in the country. The second chapter is the theoretical framework and the interdisciplinary intersections between Latin American feminist theology and social sciences about empowerment based on the word, corporeality and spaces of power. The third chapter narrates the life history of the subjects of the research and the researcher, converting them into protagonists of and within the text. The discursive practice of the exceptional women is placed in dialog with the academic world in a systematic manner as agents of knowledge. The fourth chapter is a production of narrative theology based on the testimon ies of the women. The challeng e is to show that the experiences of suffering and emancipation criticize and demand the promotion of human dignity. These are the experiences that give sustenance to a theology of daily living and a theology of spaces for revelation. The spaces of enunciation are the most unusual because they break with the private and public, the sacred and the profane, the traditional and the modern that surge forth in networks of sociability for the human social and eco logical sustainability.