Structural Violence and Scientific Activism in Mexico: A Feminist Agenda

In the first section I provide a historical overview of structural violence, science studies, and feminism in Mexico. Structural violence appears first as the immediate context in which some Mexican scientists and academics have recently intensified their struggles to articulate “science” with social justice. Yet I offer a deeper account of how several decades of structural violence have shaped the agendas of both science studies and feminism in the Latin American region, including their failure to converge as an interdisciplinary formation such as FSS. Against this backdrop, questions emerge as to how feminism, as a site for the generation of situated knowledges, can today relate to science studies in a Mexico. As a way of bridging the gap, widened by structural violence, between academic “science studies” and the political work of feminism, in the second section I look at the recent institutionalization of a “gender and science” discourse in Mexican science policy as an instance of so-called neoliberal feminism, and I contrast its cultural and political effects with the project of a socially concerned “science.” As a more promising starting point for a situated practice of FSS, in the third section I turn my attention to recent collaborations between STS scholars concerned about forced disappearances, people searching for missing relatives, and forensic anthropologists. In addition to providing counterpoints to the “women and science” narrative, the ethical issues emerging from these collaborations help me to identify the feminist core of a future agenda for science studies in Mexico. Through my reading of a debate resulting from one such collaboration, I articulate a kind of feminist critique that I think is relevant in Mexican scientific and technological debates today