ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the CoMadres in El Salvador and the CONAVIGUA widows in Guatemala speaking of their transformative process of a constant re-evaluation and self-reflection involved in their gaining a gender consciousness under dramatically repressive conditions. It ends with an evaluation of feminist binary categories of women's actions, and ask how feminist theory might reformulate itself in light of such women's actions. For all its claims to include difference, the maternalist feminist argument, in the end, ignores the contextualization of mothering and thus misses the opportunity to go beyond its own cultural assumptions to deal with the nature of potential actions by politicized mothers within repressive circumstances. Each time, in pushing beyond this denial and censorship of their known experience, they learned more about these claimers of truth, and they began to think about what we were doing as women.
