Mujeres Creando Comunidad: Feminizating Communty

Abstract

This work is a critical examination of the very foundations that gave rise to the thought-provoking alternative community proposed by Mujeres Creando Comunidad. I show that the special feature of this project is the fact that it arises from within a feminist social movement that is predominatly indigenous. This allows the movement to take the Andean ethical principle of human coexistance (the “being-as-one-with-the-Other”) to its limits, to successfully transcend patriarchal paradigms underlying both indigenous and Western societies, and to postulate a possible space of coexistance where relations between men and women are symmetrical. I emphasize the fact that it is the connection of this project to ancestral anti-patriarchal wars that prevents it (as distinct from other feminist currents), from becoming a futile inversion of energies in its efforts to create of a balance between the male and the female poles. This is because at no time does Mujeres Creando Comunidad lose sight that gender asymmetries respond to a structural and systemic problem.