ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author attempts to show how women have traditionally created for themselves “breathing spaces” within the cultural contexts of classic patriarchy. The author terms these breathing spaces “feminist counterspaces.” The creation of these feminist counterspaces or spaces of resistances is rooted in their practice of indigenous and everyday feminisms. These feminist counterspaces allow for exaggerated and subversive gender performances in order to extract personal agency within patriarchy. However, the tactics of these everyday and indigenous feminisms have also been co-opted into various feminist resistances and are now increasingly being deployed in public spaces and larger causes too. Excavating these feminist counterspaces involves recognizing women’s individual and collective agency within indigenous feminisms in societies rooted in classic patriarchy. Using the epistemological tool of “periscoping,” this concluding chapter thus deploys the idea of a feminist counterspace to visibilize the personal or collective agency negotiated in different spaces and at different scales by the subjects of the case studies included in this volume.
