Feminism, Power and Public Opinion in Mexico

Feminism, Power and Public Opinion in Mexico

Fighting for Civil Repair

von Luz Angela Cardona Acuña

This book shows how four feminist mobilizations in the early 2020s in Mexico expressed widespread rejection of harassment, sexual violence, and femicide. It discusses the cultural environment in Mexico that has allowed violence and femicides to be interpreted as a serious situation, to the point that it questions the authority of presidential power and mobilizes public opinion for and against it. It also talks about how feminist mobilizations are viewed positively or negatively within the same cultural environment provided by civil discourse. This analysis of disputes is essential because it allows readers to appreciate how the binary civil/anti-civil system attributed to presidential power and feminist mobilizations, and reproduced in public opinion, is translated into referents assumed as universal for action. The book examines women’s movements and their relationship with presidential power and public opinion as a meaning-making process in which civil society discourse translates and also blocks exceptions of civil reparation: a process interpreted and signified in the light of historical sedimentations. This work complements feminist literature, studies on power and discourse, and social movements and is of interest to scholars and studients working in these fields.

Highlights

• Covers women's movements in Mexico in the 21st century Discusses how a leftist government in Latin America confronted feminist movements Uses civil society theory to analyze feminist mobilizations in Latin America

Über den Autor

Luz Angela Cardona Acuña earned her Ph.D. in Social Science Research from FLACSO Mexico. She is a professor at the Autonomous University of Guerrero. Her most recent research includes the book Sexual Diversities: The Thousand Faces of Recognition in Peru and Ecuador (FLACSO, 2023). In this book, she analyzes legal changes over the last forty years, considering social actors, their interactions, and the procedural elements of social life. As the lead researcher on the frontier science project „A Processual Interactionist View of Legal Change,“ she spearheaded the publication of an article on this theoretical perspective in Revista Mexicana de Sociología (2024) and its application in the text Legal Change on Cannabis in Mexico: Interactions, Processes, and Moral Disputes (Espiral, 2025). Her research interests include processual interactionism and legal change, the cultural sociology of feminist movements, gender studies and sexual diversity, and digital mobilization and the civil sphere. In her paper „A Cultural Perspective for the Study of Vulnerable Populations in Urban Contexts“ (Desacatos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 2026), she reflects on the analytical potential of incorporating a cultural perspective into the study of the daily lives of vulnerable populations in urban contexts. She is part of the National System of Researchers, Level I (SECIHTI, 2025–2029).

Nelson Arteaga Botello is Professor of Sociology at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Mexico), Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, and a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences since 2011. He is part of the National System of Researchers, Level III (SECIHTI, 2025–2035). His fields of research are cultural sociology, violence, surveillance, and sociological theory. His most recent books are Civil sphere and semantics of political dispute (FLACSO, 2024) and Semantics of Violence: Revolt and Political Assassination in Mexico (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). His latest articles are: „Structural hermeneutics, dialectical hermeneutics: Is a synthesis possible?“ (Thesis Eleven, 2025); „Weaving the pandemic to make the virus less scary: a performative approach to the making of handicrafts“ (American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2025) with Ambar Varela; „Attack on the US Capitol: A Translation from the Mexican Civil Sphere“ (Society, 2025) with Evelyn Mejia; „Cultural Sociology in Mexico: Meaning-Making as Hybridization, Power, and Cultural Structure“ (Cultural Sociology, 2024).