Structural Violence and Scientific Activism in Mexico: A Feminist Agenda

Abstract

In 2009, Sandra Harding observed that the boundaries of feminist science studies (FSS) were mostly established in the North at the expense of intercultural dialog with the South, and that much of the feminist conversation around science has often been conducted separately from postcolonial interrogations of Eurocentrism. More recently, Angela Wiley argued that contemporary theoretical trends in FSS, such as “new materialisms,” are at risk of reasserting Eurocentric and disciplinary ways of knowing as well as “the historic whiteness of feminism” by largely ignoring the epistemological insights that foreground power and accountability in knowledge construction and that were foundational to the Northern feminist critique of science (Rose). While postcolonial feminism and decolonial discourses are currently performing much needed interventions in FSS as well as in related fields such as science and technology studies (STS) (Lyons et al.; Pollock and Subramanian), the purpose of this article goes beyond expanding the scope of established academic fields such as FSS and STS, and stops short of “decolonizing” FSS if such a gesture would demand a radical break from the whole of feminism’s intellectual history. Moreover, and taking heed of Tania Pérez Bustos’s caution against any homogenizing appropriation of decolonial thinking from Latin America, I set out instead to prepare the ground for a situated—hence necessarily partial—critique of “science” narratives in Mexico. My overall argument is that such a critique has the potential to contribute not just to the academic questioning of knowledge production in Mexico but also to pushing the boundaries of what feminist critique can do in a context wherein feminism and science studies appear to be unrelated. If FSS is to have a future in Mexico as an academic practice of “situated knowledges” in Donna Haraway’s sense, the first task is to articulate feminism with science studies, and to do so attending to the specific histories of each in the Mexican context. In the first section I provide a historical overview of structural violence, science studies, and feminism in Mexico. Structural violence appears first as