Liberal vs. Liberating Empowerment: A Latin American Feminist Perspective on Conceptualising Women’s Empowerment

Since the early 1980s, feminists in Latin America have engaged in a range of programmes and activities aimed at promoting women’s empowerment, but have yet to produce frameworks to analyse this process at work. Tracing and reflecting upon the impressive advancements of feminist activism throughout the region has been a major focus for feminist analysis (Sternbach et al. 1992; Lavrin 1998). However, little thinking has gone into depicting how the flow of power/empowerment travels between individuals, groups and institutions, and thus towards linking gains at the macroinstitutional level with real changes in the everyday lives of women in different social contexts. Feminist thinking in the region still lacks concerted analysis of the linkages and discontinuities between individual agency, collective action and structural transformation, and how they operate in the process of women’s empowerment and the eradication of patriarchal domination

Liberal vs. Liberating Empowerment: A Latin American Feminist Perspective on Conceptualising Women's Empowerment

Paper prepared for presentation to the Conference: Reclaiming Feminism – Gender and Neo-Liberalism, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton, UK, 9-10 July 2007. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium Inception Workshop, Luxor, Egypt, September 2006.The term ‘women’s empowerment’ is viewed with a certain amount of distrust by feminists in Latin America. There has been some ambiguity surrounding the term in the region and in some cases it has been appropriated to legitimise actions that may not actually empower. This paper reflects on feminist conceptualisations of empowerment and how the process is believed to unfold. It outlines two basic approaches to conceptualising empowerment: ‘liberal’ and ‘liberating’ empowerment. It argues that ‘liberal’ empowerment depoliticises the process by taking the ‘power’ out of the equation, whilst ‘liberating’ empowerment keeps power as the central issue. The latter approach is consistent with the Latin American tradition of collective action and, in conclusion, the paper contends that empowerment in its ‘liberating’ form has been at work in the region since at least the late 1970s