09/29/2026
Our latest publication, CLACLS “Notes from the Field,” brings together research by our CLACLS Summer Fellows.
Among them is Maricarmen Canales-Moreno’s “Gendered Resistance: Women’s Strategies Against Military Dictatorships, Argentina and Chile.”
In her research, she examines how women in Argentina and Chile transformed their identities as mothers, wives, and daughters into deliberate political tools. Her study explores how maternal imagery, public mourning, and the transformation of private grief into collective defiance became central strategies in the human rights movements that challenged both military regimes.
Here is an excerpt:
“Perhaps the most enduring legacy is harder to measure. These women showed what it looked like when the personal became political in the most literal sense: when the grief of a mother, a wife, a daughter was carried into public space and transformed into a demand for justice that the state could not permanently silence. They demonstrated that the traditional roles societies assigned to women, roles so often used to limit and dismiss them, could be mobilized as a form of power that authoritarian states found genuinely difficult to counter. Their example has resonated across borders and generations. From Central America to Eastern Europe, the model of maternal resistance that Las Madres and the AFDD developed has been drawn upon, adapted, and reinvented by communities facing their own encounters with state violence.”
Read the full paper, along with the other contributions to Notes from the Field, through the link in our bio.
