The revolution will come home: gendered violence and transformative organizing from the Philippines to the U.S.

2017-05-14“The Revolution Will Come Home” explores how urban poor women in Metro Manila are challenging interpersonal gendered violence—such as domestic abuse or sexual assault—within the communities they organize, while building a broader movement against neoliberal capitalism and U.S. empire. GABRIELA, the largest women’s federation in the Philippines, fights for ‘home’ on multiple scales—offering a case study of a ‘social movements approach’ to gendered violence that draws on and adapts grassroots traditions, local and transnational feminisms, as well as Third World nationalist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organizing legacies. As U.S. empire and neoliberal restructuring enact gendered violence, often under the guise of ‘humanitarian aid’ and ‘gender-responsive’ development, GABRIELA challenges a ‘neoliberal imperial’ feminist order, reconfiguring its logics. ❧ Using oral history, survey, and archival methods, this dissertation considers how addressing interpersonal gendered violence can support, rather than hinder, movement-building, grassroots leadership, and the transformation of participants. Instead of writing off trauma as drama, local organizers treat processes of interpersonal and societal change as interdependent. Collectives offer spaces of healing and constrained accountability for intimate partner and sexual violence, while organizers adapt an ethic of ‘serving the people’ to provide survivor-centered support that tides over cycles of violence. A ‘social movements approach’ towards interpersonal gendered violence and trauma not only can provide more accessible and transformative assistance to those affected—but moreover, has societal transformation as its goal, treating survivors as potential organizers in a movement for collective change, rather than as passive service recipients. I place strategies of this Third World women’s organization in conversation with U.S. women of color feminist critiques of carceral responses to gendered violence—and with their calls for ‘transformative organizing,’ ‘community accountability’ tactics that do not rely on state structures, and decolonization, as alternatives