The Indigenous Woman as Victim of Her Culture in Neoliberal Mexico

Abstract

This article examines the appearance of an indigenous woman victim subject at the intersection of global and national rights discourses in Mexico. In the case of the rape of three indigenous women by the Mexican Army, in World Bank policy recommendations in which culture and gender are cast as 'impediments to development', and in everyday explanations for poverty, culture is cast as harmful to indigenous women. Structural violence and indigenous women's agency are obscured. This victim subject emerges to contest recent destabilizations of the meanings of gender and culture in the wake of indigenous women's militancy in the 1994 Zapatista uprising.