High-risk feminism in El Salvador: women's mobilisation in violent times

Zulver, Julia

Author(s)

Zulver, Julia

Editor(s)

Sweetman, Caroline

Publication date

2016-07-20

Document type

Journal article

Language

English

Description

Violence against women in El Salvador – a country made fragile by a vicious Civil War and the subsequent burgeoning of murderous youth gangs – has been described as lying on the knife’s edge between public and private (Hume 2009). Women’s experiences of violence are often invalidated by wider society for violating a normalised culture of ‘patriarchal privacy’. Yet despite widespread violence, Salvadoran women have created opportunities and avenues for mobilisation in defence of their safety and well-being. This article showcases these efforts, with an eye towards the various forms of agency that women adopt, create, modify, and employ to counteract fragility in their daily lives. It will introduce high-risk feminism – an original framework that applies a gendered lens to a composite of social movement theories – in order to highlight the uniquely gendered dimensions of women’s mobilisation in El Salvador. This article is hosted by our co-publisher Taylor & Francis. For the full table of contents for this and previous issues of this journal, please visit the <a href="http://www.genderanddevelopment.org">Gender and Development</a> website.

ISSN

1355-2074

EISSN

1364-9221

Collections

Journal articles