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Abstract

Within a post-colonial framework, this paper explores the possibilities and difficulties of feminist alliances among feminist groups in the Basque Country. In particular, it focuses on a close reading of one metaphor that emerged in the joint meetings between the groups: “the metaphor of the mountain”. Using Nayak's (2014) methodology of the ‘political activism of close reading practice”, it examines the implications of the metaphor in the creation of political alliances. This is an active metaphor that exemplifies the dialectic between the universality of the patriarchal subjugation of women and the recognition of the specificity and diversity of women's lived experiences. The metaphor locates feminist groups in different positions depending on the level of “feminist development” and calls for a decolonization of feminism that involves not only the processes of cultural alienation of women at the margins, but the uncovering of the superiority of mainstream Western feminism. The paper suggests that the construction of feminist alliances within a postcolonial context should take into account the inequalities, positions of power and privileges that women occupy while, at the same time, building politics of intimacies and encounters that encourage ethical dialogue.

Author Biography

Itziar Goikoetxea is a Ph.D. student in Social Psychology in the Doctoral Program in Person and Society in the Contemporary World, in the Social Psychology Department in Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona where she is doing a thesis research about the possibilities, limits and tensions in the fabric of feminist alliances between autochthonous feminist and migrant women organizations in the Basque Country. She is also a member of FIC: Fractalities in Critical Research group and an Instructor in the Faculty of Psychology and Education (FICE) at the University of Deusto in Bilbao. She is an activist in the feminist movement and migrant women groups in the Basque Country. Her research topics are postcolonial feminisms, current migration studies, feminist activist research and critical epistemologies.

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