“Gender Justice in Guatemala: Advances and Challenges,” with Erin Beck and Lynn Stephen

January 19, 2017
3:30 pmto5:00 pm

Erb Memorial Union (EMU)
Room 119
UO campus

UO professors Erin Beck and Lynn Stephen will discuss their research in a CLLAS Faculty Collaborative Research talk titled “Gender Justice in Guatemala: Advances and Challenges.” The talk will take place in Room 119 in the Erb Memorial Union on January 19, 2017, at 3:30 p.m.

Presentation Focus
“In Guatemala, a woman is killed every twelve hours and her killer is likely to go unpunished. Feminicide—the killing of women based on their gender in the face of a negligent or complicit state—is the extremity of gendered violence, which includes sexual assault, gender-specific forms of torture, and economic and psychological violence towards women. Our project explores the accomplishments and challenges of Guatemala’s new feminicide law and specialized gender violence courts. We use in-depth ethnographic and qualitative analysis of the participants: judges, social workers, advocates in women’s organizations, those who train judges and advocates about gendered violence and its prevention, and survivors of gendered violence. This presentation will focus on the history of the feminicide courts and use the case study of indigenous Mam women from Todos Santos Cuchamatan, Huehuetenango to explore what the obstacles to women’s access to gendered justice are: including monolingualism, isolation and poverty, regional cultures of competing generational masculinities, and local justice systems that encourage women to reconcile with aggressors.”

Researcher Lynn Stephen speaks at a seminar in Guatemala in 2015.

Researcher Lynn Stephen speaks at a seminar in Guatemala in 2015.

Erin Beck is an assistant professor, UO Department of Political Science. Lynn Stephen is a Distinguished Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, UO Department of Anthropology.

Their CLLAS-funded project is the first phase of a long-term collaborative project which explores Guatemalan women’s transborder experiences of violence and search for justice by examining women’s access to Guatemala’s femicide courts and to gendered asylum in Oregon. Professors Beck and Stephen are interested in how these two relatively new systems of gender justice affect women who attempt to engage with them, and how sharing women’s experiences might impact perceptions of, and policies related to, gendered violence, indigenous populations and transborder immigration. This research is also being supported by CSWS through an innovation grant to the Américas Research Interest Group.