Abstract
Crosby, Lykes, and Doiron explore the formation of multiple strategic emotional communities through the Sepur Zarco trial, where two former members of the Guatemalan military were found guilty of crimes against humanity, including sexual violence and domestic and sexual slavery committed against 15 Maya Q’eqchi’ women during the genocidal violence of the 1980s. Drawing on eight years of feminist participatory action research with Mayan women survivors, the chapter critically engages with multiple mediations and (dis)ruptions of relationality that occur within judicialized space, through which judges, lawyers, expert witnesses, multiple audiences, and researchers continually (re)interpret and (re)present indigenous women’s experiences of violence. It concludes with a reflection on Anzaldúa’s concept of nos-otras, to think through relations of empathetic engagement within—not outside—colonized time and space.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the concept of protagonism “to deconstruct dominant psychological discourses of women as ‘victims,’ ‘survivors,’ ‘selves,’ ‘individuals,’ and/or “subjects.” Mayan women are actively engaged in constructivist and discursive performances through which they are narrating new, mobile meanings of ‘Mayan woman,’ repositioning themselves at the interstices of multiple communities. The term represents person-in-context, invoking the Greek chorus within theater or the ‘call-response’ within African American church contexts, that is, situating Mayan women dialectically vis-à-vis accompaniers and/or women’s community whose empathy is dialogically constitutive of them, that is, of the protagonist ” (Lykes and Crosby 2015, 147).
- 2.
This research project was initially approved by York University’s Ethics Review Board (May 6, 2009) and the Boston College Institutional Review Board (May 15, 2009), and renewed every year thereafter through 2017. The research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University, and an Anonymous Grant to the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College.
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Crosby, A., Brinton Lykes, M., Doiron, F. (2018). Affective Contestations: Engaging Emotion Through the Sepur Zarco Trial. In: Macleod, M., De Marinis, N. (eds) Resisting Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66317-3_8
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