Liberal vs. Liberating Empowerment: A Latin American Feminist Perspective on Conceptualising Women’s Empowerment

Since the early 1980s, feminists in Latin America have engaged in a range of programmes and activities aimed at promoting women’s empowerment, but have yet to produce frameworks to analyse this process at work. Tracing and reflecting upon the impressive advancements of feminist activism throughout the region has been a major focus for feminist analysis (Sternbach et al. 1992; Lavrin 1998). However, little thinking has gone into depicting how the flow of power/empowerment travels between individuals, groups and institutions, and thus towards linking gains at the macroinstitutional level with real changes in the everyday lives of women in different social contexts. Feminist thinking in the region still lacks concerted analysis of the linkages and discontinuities between individual agency, collective action and structural transformation, and how they operate in the process of women’s empowerment and the eradication of patriarchal domination.