Librería Portfolio

Beyond Repair? explores Mayan women´s agency in the search for redress for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state in the early 1980s at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict. The book draws on eight years of feminist participatory action research conducted with fifty-four Q´eqchi´, Kaqchikel, Chuj, and Mam women who are seeking truth, justice, and reparation for the violence they experienced during the war, and the women´s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who have accompanied them as intermediaries for over a decade. Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes use the concept of ´protagonism´ to deconstruct dominant psychological discursive constructions of women as ´victims,´ ´survivors,´ ´selves,´ ´individuals,´ and/or ´subjects.´ They argue that at different moments Mayan women have been actively engaged as protagonists in constructivist and discursive performances through which they have narrated new, mobile meanings of ´Mayan woman,´ repositioning themselves at the interstices of multiple communities and in their pursuit of redress for harm suffered.