What Is Community Feminism? A Contribution to Ending Violence against Women

In this Faculty of Social Work lecture at UNAM, Julieta Paredes Carvajal asks what community feminism means when violence against women cannot be separated from the everyday organization of life. The question does not lead to a definition that can be exported unchanged. Paredes speaks from an Aymara political trajectory and from debates rooted in Bolivia and Abya Yala. She shifts feminism away from the image of individual emancipation and toward the work of transforming relations that run through bodies, communities and territories.

A central thread is her account of patriarchy as a structure of exploitation, domination and control—not a collection of private prejudices or a natural opposition between women and men. At this scale, violence does not begin and end with a visible incident. It is sustained by unequal distributions of labor, authority and resources, and by practices that rank whose body and territory can be governed. Paredes argues that these relations also affect men and nature; political change therefore cannot stop at replacing one group of decision-makers with another. It must alter the relations that make domination possible.

“Community” needs critical attention too. It is neither a pure space free of hierarchy nor a tradition to preserve untouched. Communities contain conflict and inequality; romanticizing them can make women’s experiences harder to hear. In Paredes’s account, the communal is better understood as a political horizon and a practice of relation: rebuilding common life while asking who performs the work, who makes decisions and who bears its costs. That tension allows the lecture to challenge both liberal individualism and essentialist accounts of Indigenous identity.

The talk’s importance for FemRes also lies in where theory is being made. An Aymara thinker is not presented as a “local case” to which a universal feminist framework is applied; her experience helps produce political concepts. That does not make one speaker representative of all Indigenous peoples, or community feminism a single formula. Listen instead for the relations and scales Paredes proposes, then ask how they meet—or conflict with—other histories of colonialism, land and organizing. The UNAM event page locates the lecture in its institutional context. Pair it with the regional report on Indigenous women in Latin America and the collection Feminisms in Movement to keep the region’s many feminist traditions in view.

Lecture and context

• Recording from UNAM’s Faculty of Social Work
• UNAM Coordination for Gender Equality event page