Women in solidarity: Women's community work, the welfare state, and the politics of narrative identity in Mexico

Abstract

Scholars from various disciplines have turned their attention to the study of narratives as the means to understand sociopolitical processes and the construction of the self. One line of inquiry argues that institutions such as medicine and the welfare state are constituted through narratives. Doctors, public health professionals, and state officials tell about their work through narratives. In doing so they construct subject identities such as citizen, client, and woman. The power of these institutions rests on their ability to construct subject identities through the dissemination of their narratives while negating others' narratives. Similarly, critical feminist theory argues that the welfare state promotes normative female identities. The objective of this paper is to integrate the study of narratives and critical feminist theory to analyze the construction of female identities in welfare state community health programs. The author presents and analyzes narratives about women's work as community health workers in Mexico's welfare program ‘Solidarity’. These stories appeared regularly in publications of Solidarity between 1989 and 1994. It is argued that Solidarity's narratives constitute an institutional pattern of interpretation that colonizes women's experiences and subjectivity. Activities such as unpaid community work and family health care are made into women's work and women's solidarity with the nation. Implications for feminist theory are discussed.