From Personal Loss to Political Power: Gender Consciousness and Empowered Narratives in 20th Century and Contemporary Activism

Teresa Rodriguez Sotelo

Between the Personal and the Political: Women’s Mobilization through the Unión Nacional de Mujeres

My paper examines the Unión Nacional de Mujeres Mexicanas (UNMM) as a key, though often overlooked, organization in the political mobilization of women in Mexico during the 1960s. Rooted in the activism of leftist women in the 1950s, the UNMM created a distinctive form of gender activism that challenged the boundaries between domestic life and political participation. The UNMM promoted participation and enabled its members to access political spaces within an authoritarian and anti-communist regime. UNMM members did not entirely reject gender roles, but rather strategically mobilized discourses on motherhood, family well-being, and peace to legitimize their political participation.

Historiographically, this paper contributes to studies of the “global 1960s” by challenging narratives that center on the political activism of students, unions, and male-dominated leftist organizations. This paper proposes that gender roles, such as motherhood, were not apolitical but rather constituted a crucial form of political action that influenced opposition to the authoritarian regime. By highlighting women’s organizational practices, the paper reconsiders how women’s political participation has been defined in Mexican historiography and argues for gender as a constitutive category of political analysis.

Based on UNMM bulletins and correspondence, as well as documents from the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, I show how the UNMM operated under constant state surveillance, while simultaneously framing its demands in seemingly innocuous humanitarian and maternal terms that nevertheless allowed for critiques of inequality, imperialism, and political repression. The organization brought together women from diverse social classes, regions, and generations, uniting their struggles around shared concerns. This platform opened space for their participation in the 1968 student movement, as increasing repression transformed demands centered on motherhood and family into a form of explicit political resistance.

Teresa Rodriguez Sotelo’s website

Rebecca Anderson

Reifying Queer Consciousness

In this article review, it is shown that Queer methodology and Queer consciousness align with forms of consciousness that aren’t as well known or supported by academia, which raises many questions. This research is a literature review on peer reviewed studies involving Queer consciousness as well as concepts of consciousness from the field of psychology. Through Queer labeling and methodology there is a possible comparison to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s work on consciousness. In using “unpopular” concepts of consciousness, a guise of capitalist hierarchy is lifted and revealed as the negative resource that it is. Concepts of “Higher Order Thought” (HOT) condone the expression of complexity only after checking a previous “box” of conceptual “understanding.” HOT is something where those with disorganized speech, or a child, do not qualify as using consciousness. Through this hierarchy of expression found in HOT there is a hierarchy of only a possibility of expression. Yet through Sheets-Johnstone’s work and similar there is a recognition that things are not hierarchies that are deserving of worth, there are understandings using a whole body of experience as a method to consciousness.

Using Queer methodology to recognize that the boundaries of words and expression are more fluid than strict boxes or HOT, there is discovery of one’s own method of understanding. There is a realization of a method of understanding that can encompass the words and unique minds of the neurodivergent, minorities, Queer folks, and even allies. The structure of HOT seems to condone the use of systematic alienation of minority groups from their very existence. Habitual disinclusion is a profound character flaw. Words and constructs of thought processes from minority groups are powerful creations that should be considered valuable to even the majority population. Through acceptance found in Queer consciousness we can better understand ourselves as well as others.

Maryam Tadayon

Re-signifying Grief: Maternal Mourning as Gendered Resistance in Contemporary Iran

In contemporary Iran, mothers whose children, husbands, or brothers have been killed by the state have transformed mourning from a private act of sorrow into a public practice of political resistance. This paper examines how maternal grief, traditionally framed within nationalist and patriarchal discourses as sacred, apolitical, and domesticated, becomes re-signified as a disruptive, embodied challenge to authoritarian sovereignty. Drawing on feminist political theory and affect studies, particularly the work of Judith Butler on grievability and public assembly and Sara Ahmed on affective circulation, I argue that these mourning mothers convert culturally legible maternal suffering into a gendered political technology.

Through public cemetery gatherings, testimonial speech, visual iconography (including the display of portraits of the dead), and the refusal of state-imposed narratives of martyrdom, maternal mourning emerges as a counter-sovereign practice. These mothers expose and contest the state’s power to regulate which lives are publicly grievable and how death is narratively contained. By insisting on naming the dead and refusing silence, they transform grief into collective affect, generating networks of solidarity that destabilize the boundary between private loss and public dissent.

Situating this movement within gender and sexuality studies, this paper conceptualizes mourning not merely as emotional expression but as a feminist reconfiguration of embodiment, public space, and memory. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on affective resistance, authoritarian governance, and the politics of maternal identity, offering a theoretical framework for understanding how grief can become insurgent under conditions of repression.