Gendered violences and resistances to development: body, land, territory, and violences against women in postwar Guatemala

Abstract

This article explores the relationships between violences against women (VAW) and rural development in the context of postwar Guatemala’s Northern Transversal Strip region (FTN). How might we understand the relationships between postwar development, its gendered implications, and VAW in this context? What are the implications of these entanglements for feminist activism? The article explores this question in a twofold way. First, drawing on decolonial and feminist political economic critiques, it broadens the understanding of VAW in relation to development, informed by decolonial, communitarian, and territorial perspectives of bodies, land, and territory. Second, in contending that colonial and neocolonial dispossessions linked to development are linked with VAW, it suggests that these relationships shape women’s defence of land and territories as well as the strategies women community leaders pursue in resisting VAW. Focusing on the impacts of palm oil cultivation in Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in the FTN, it highlights the overlapping interests and strategies for feminist activism, highlighting the webbed interconnections between struggles for land and territory and struggles for justice and an end to VAW as they manifested empirically through the research.