CHAPTER 9

Transnational Feminism

EVENT, TEMPORALITY, AND PERFORMANCE AT THE 1975 INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S YEAR CONFERENCE

Jocelyn Olcott

IN MID-JUNE 1975, thousands of people converged on Mexico City for the United Nations World Conference marking International Women’s Year (IWY). Billed as the “world’s largest consciousness-raising session,” the conference opened with fanfare and ceremony, drawing some twelve hundred delegates to the intergovernmental conference and an estimated six thousand more to a parallel nongovernmental organization (NGO) tribune.¹ As demonstrators outside protested against human rights abuses in Chile and the exclusion of poor women from the festivities, an all-star cast of prominent women intellectuals, activists, and political leaders from around the world paraded into the inaugural celebration at Juan de la Barrera Gymnasium—the U.S. feminist Betty Friedan and her Australian alter ego Germaine Greer; international icons such as the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova and the Iranian Shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi; first ladies, including Egypt’s Jehan Sadat and her Israeli counterpart Leah Rabin; and prominent stateswomen, including Sri Lankan prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike and the U.S. congresswoman Bella Abzug. Reporters and participants alike remarked on the visual novelty as the auditorium filled with a sea of women in saris, kaftans, huipiles, and European-style suits—an image that signaled both the unprecedented diversity of attendees and the unusual topical focus on women’s status.

These twin aspects of the IWY conference—its novelty and diversity—defined its dynamics and legacies. Although the cast assembled in Mexico City was homogeneous compared to the diversification that occurred over the subsequent UN women’s conferences in Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995), participants in these later gatherings formed their expectations in large part from the preceding conferences. In 1975, however, the Mexico City conference was sui generis. Although hardly the first international women’s conference—the nineteenth-century abolition and suffragist meetings and the early-twentieth-century Pan-American Union congresses stand as notable precursors—it witnessed a radical expansion, achieving a more global reach in terms both of regions represented and of social sectors involved.² It also was among the first of the thematic UN conferences to have a parallel NGO tribune, a fact that would powerfully shape both the conference itself and subsequent activism.³ Indeed, these conferences contributed to the dramatic rise of NGOs during the 1970s.⁴

As the first major international women’s organizing effort since the near-universal granting of women’s political rights, the IWY events not only drew a motley bunch but also included many women who had received political educations either formally or through their labor unions and community organizations. The NGO tribune organizers had conscientiously reached out to participants from all over the world and from different sectors of women’s advocacy, and they had secured funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations to cover expenses for participants from poor countries.⁵

The moment many people—activists and scholars alike—describe most vividly from the IWY conference was when the Bolivian tin miner’s wife Barrios de Chungara confronted the Betty Friedan. “Domitila Barrios de Chungara and the women she spoke for,” recounts historian Francesca Miller,

dismissed as irrelevant the concerns of feminists over reproductive rights, political and economic equity with men, the subordinate position of women within the family. Betty Friedan led the attempt to explain and defend the feminist position and the need to include their platform in the World Plan of Action. The result was a clash between Barrios de Chungara and Friedan.⁶

Sociologist Göran Therborn similarly explains, “[A]bove all, the Tribune witnessed a confrontation between North American feminism, well represented by Betty Friedan, and Third World feminine Leftism, eloquently voiced by Domitila Barrios.”⁷ Such depictions of this showdown gave lie to fantasies of global sisterhood by spotlighting a gaping divide that put First World, liberal, and white on one side and Third World, Marxist, and nonwhite on the other.⁸ The challenge for forging a transnational feminism, many observers believed, would be to close this divide, teaching Western feminists to listen to women like Barrios de Chungara. As the economist Bina Agarwal explains, “In Mexico, grassroots Southern women, such as the Bolivian worker Domitila Barrios, had to protest persistently against the hijacking of the conference agenda by Northern women and assert: ‘Let me speak.’ In Huairou [the Beijing NGO forum] the tables had turned.”⁹ Lest Agarwal’s Hegelianism seem too oblique, the political scientist Carolyn Stephenson puts it even more starkly:

Differences in perspective between First and Third World feminism eventually led to synthesis into an international movement. Each brand of feminism was affected by the other. Women went home from Mexico City with an awareness that there was more to this business of feminism than they had experienced in their own country.¹⁰

What occurred in Mexico City in the summer of 1975, however, was far more interesting than a head-on collision between two ideologies or two geopolitical realities, and what ensued was far more complicated and creative than a dialectical synthesis between anything that might be imagined as First World and Third World feminism.¹¹ The encounter in Mexico City in this sense resembles the World Social Forum (WSF) meetings, which, as the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos explains, demand a “wide exercise in translation to expand reciprocal intelligibility without destroying the identity of the partners of translation.”¹² Such spaces form a “contact zone” where “disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”¹³ In other words, the efforts to foster coherence and solidarity through translation never escape the power relations within which they emerge. Efforts at cultural and political translation in such circumstances are always mistranslations—creating imperfect equivalences, fixing meanings that are fluid, and reflecting anticipated understandings. As Santos explains, the translations at the WSF—much like at the IWY, but with far more experience—involved the decoding and recoding of knowledges and actions as much as discourses, and the translations reflect emotions and dynamics particular to a given context. The unpredictability that has made for the most significant exchanges at both the IWY and the WSF has always exceeded the capacities of translation but reveals a liminal space between that resists fixing—what the anthropologist Diane Nelson dubs fluidarity in lieu of solidarity—but nonetheless opens the most generative transnational exchanges.¹⁴ The IWY offered an unprecedented encounter among a radically diverse array of participants—overwhelmingly women—who brought with them experiences and conceptions of cultural change and social justice that far exceeded what could be captured in the dyad invoked by the Friedan–Barrios de Chungara conflict.

Barrios de Chungara, the radical leader of the tin mining union’s Housewives Committee, did not make it to Mexico City in time to witness the pomp and protest of the inauguration. Bolivia’s Ministry of the Interior had repeatedly delayed granting her an exit visa until the combined impact of her brandishing the official UN-issued invitation and the union’s threatening a walkout finally resulted in begrudging permission to leave the country. According to her memoire, as she prepared to board the plane, a woman from the ministry wished her a good trip and reminded her that, if she wanted to return to Bolivia and see her children again, she should be careful what she discussed in Mexico City.¹⁵ Had she arrived for the inaugural ceremonies, however, it is easy to imagine that Barrios de Chungara would have remained outside, shaking her fist at the enactments of authority taking place within—a lifetime of militancy, after all, had left her deeply distrustful of all things official. By the end of the IWY conference, and certainly in the years to follow, Barrios de Chungara came to stand in for all the diversity both inside the gymnasium and clamoring outside its walls, while Friedan symbolized a played-out feminism best left behind.¹⁶

Tellingly, however, no direct confrontation actually occurred between the two women; the story is apocryphal. Both the women’s memoirs and the contemporary documentation describe each of them having different sets of conflicts. Although Barrios de Chungara’s testimonio mentions a “conversation” with Friedan, the real confrontation she and others describe occurred between her and the Mexican feminist Esperanza Brito de Martí, arguably Friedan’s analog as the leader of the mainstream Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Movement). The issue at stake in this particular confrontation was not Friedan’s feminist views or even the authority Friedan had arrogated to herself to represent the tribune to the intergovernmental conference but rather the legitimacy of calls for unity and equality at the IWY tribune. Amid accusations that she was fascist, reactionary, and imperialist, Brito chastened her hecklers, “The only image that we are giving is that we cannot unite ourselves. Come on, Latin American sisters, let’s fight for equality of women and men.”¹⁷ Barrios de Chungara seethed, “We can’t speak about equality between games of canasta. Women can’t be equals any more than poor and rich countries are equals.”¹⁸

Brito’s emphasis on unity pointed to mounting anxieties that “politics” would eclipse “women’s issues.” Indicating that a clear division existed between these two distinct realms and that reasonable people would agree on where the boundary lay, participants imagined that if they could simply peel away all the layers of politics, they would reach an authentic ideal that the intergovernmental conference dubbed consensus and the tribune imagined as unity. Throughout the IWY meetings, participants expressed mounting frustration at the elusiveness of such concurrence, lamenting that the entire opportunity would be squandered should they fail to reach this Shangri-la. The aspiration is understandable, particularly at this conjuncture. Countless labor battles, civil rights movements, and national liberation struggles had conveyed the lesson that victory depended upon setting aside differences for the sake of solidarity. Another lesson, however—and one that women had learned time and again—was that solidarity and unity implied exclusions and reifications. Françoise Giroud, the French Secretary of State for Women’s Affairs, lamented the myriad instances when women had offered solidarity in revolutionary and social justice movements only to find themselves relegated to cooking and making coffee. “If that happens again,” she told reporters, “International Women’s Year will be yet another deceit.”¹⁹

The repeated calls for consensus and unity at the IWY meetings, after all, begged the question of their contents. The notion of unadulterated “women’s issues” depended, in turn, upon a shared understanding of womanhood—of some combination of experiences and biology that defined a set of concerns that pertained primarily to women. “To establish a normative foundation for settling the question of what ought properly to be included in the description of women,” the feminist theorist Judith Butler reminds us, however,

would be only and always to produce a new site of political contest. That foundation would settle nothing, but would of necessity founder on its own authoritarian ruse. … To refuse the contest is to sacrifice the radical democratic impetus of feminist politics. That the category is unconstrained, even that it comes to serve antifeminist purposes, will be part of the risk of the procedure.²⁰

Indeed, the contestation was continuous and generative, if also immensely frustrating to many participants who perceived “antifeminist purposes” in every challenge to their own priorities. Given the uncertain future of transnational women’s activism, participants hurried to get on the table the concerns they saw as the most compelling, but one person’s core issue was another’s political distraction. Equal pay legislation and educational opportunities seemed superfluous in settings where women faced annihilation by disease, starvation, or political repression. Insistence on lambasting economic injustice or human rights violations, however, seemed to many participants to fall outside the purview of IWY. When delegates from Australia and New Zealand argued at the intergovernmental conference for the inclusion of “sexism” in the World Plan of Action’s list of obstacles to women’s emancipation (along with racism, imperialism, and economic inequality), they were voted down on the grounds that the term was a “nasty North American neologism.”²¹

Amid this frustration, the story about a Friedan–Barrios de Chungara face-off persists for several reasons. First, it reflects the anticipated geopolitical fault lines going into the IWY meetings. Before the opening session, journalists predicted conflicts between “Third World women,” focusing on structural problems of economic inequality, and “Western feminists,” concentrating on sex-specific issues such as reproductive freedom, wage equity, and women’s educational and professional opportunities. The New York Times, covering the inaugural festivities in the newspaper’s “Family/Style” section, noted, “Observers agree that the major goal set out by the organizers—improving the status of women—is not going to be an easy one in light of the political arguments that are expected to erupt between delegates of the industrialized countries and the third world.”²² More pointedly, Pacifica Radio titled its interview with Friedan, Betty Friedan versus the Third World.²³ Second, the story imposes a kind of coherence and legibility on a set of encounters and disputes that proved far more unsettling than these forecasts would allow. It implies a predictable, recipe-like model of diversity that calls for the right array of ingredients in the correct proportions to achieve a satisfactory outcome. Finally, the synthetic narrative implies a teleological progression in which all the disputes and miscommunications and misidentifications resolve into a coherent transnational feminism with clean edges and knowable contents.

To understand what happened at the 1975 IWY meeting, however, we need to see beyond the media depiction of a clash between two caricatured types to consider not only the range of experiences and ideas that participants brought with them—different understandings of political gestures, competing conceptions of the dynamics and time frames of social change, and diverse perceptions of the most significant obstacles to women’s “emancipation”—but also the unforeseeable implications of this heterogeneity. As perceptions, expectations, and convictions all collided in the spaces of the IWY meetings, they combusted to generate both tremendous anxiety and tremendous political energy and creativity, the heat and fire that would propel transnational women’s activism for the ensuing decades. Indeed, the intensely fraught and emotional exchanges that occurred at the IWY gatherings attest to the extent to which these encounters unsettled participants’ commonsense understandings and deeply held convictions about women and their place in the world.

Although contemporary and retrospective accounts have endeavored to distill these collisions into a more easily legible shorthand such as the imagined Friedan–Barrios de Chungara confrontation, appreciating the accomplishments and the unintended consequences of the IWY meetings requires attending to a more complex heterogeneity and the interactions it produced. The payoff of such an approach is not simply a finer-grained, more detailed picture of what happened at the IWY conference. Rather, it offers a more dynamic, moving image that shows how different parts articulated with one another and informed each other’s actions and how the ruptures and explosions induced by misarticulations, the crossed signals, and the unpredictable interactions transformed the structures and cultures of transnational women’s advocacy.

Historian William Sewell argues that historians could most productively move beyond these typologies and road maps through a return to narrative that attends to what he dubs the “logics of history—fatefulness, contingency, complexity, eventfulness, and causal heterogeneity.”²⁴ Such narratives would not offer a tidy recounting of events, much less provide a stage for history’s “great men” (or even “great women”), nor simply serve an antiquarian or journalistic curiosity about eccentric or exceptional figures from the past. Rather, Sewell calls for using narrative devices—including development of complex characters, recognition of dramatic tensions and emotional expressions, attention to temporality and the ordering of events, and attention to what Wittgenstein dubs “language games”—to explore the simultaneous and interrelated importance of structures and agency, culture and contingency, power and affect. Such narratives consider not simply histories as they played out but also the many possibilities present in histories as they developed as well as how such stories shape an event’s meaning. Piecing together a narrative about the IWY conference—a narrative that addresses broader historical implications rather than simply engaging anecdotes—demands investigation of three interrelated elements that played particularly critical roles in its unfolding history: how the conference came to be imagined as an event, the role of temporality in structuring that imagination, and how questions of representation and identification informed participants’ conduct.

UNITY AND CONJUNCTURE: MAKING AN EVENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S YEAR CONFERENCE

It may seem obvious why the Mexico City conference would be considered an event—it was, after all, created as such. Conceptualizing an event for the sake of historical inquiry, however, centers on two elements in particular: how a set of episodes becomes linked as a unified, coherent set designated as a single event—in other words how we describe both its boundaries and its contents—and how a given event comes to be considered a pivotal historical moment or a conjuncture that changes its surrounding world in a significant way. An “eventful” narrative, as Sewell terms it, will demonstrate the contingencies and contestation over both these aspects—bearing in mind not only how the event unfolded but also the roads not taken, the ideas and actors excluded, and the surrounding developments that make an event into a turning point. However, the IWY departs from Sewell’s paradigmatic example of the storming of the Bastille. While it shares with the Bastille event the quality of having gained importance in retrospect, particularly as the subsequent UN women’s conferences grew in size and influence, it operated as a catalyzing event, however, in a quite opposite fashion—rather than consolidating around a coherent political subject, the IWY highlighted the impossibility of that coherence and the necessity of cultivating a decentered and multivalent political practice. While the Bastille acted as a centripetal force amid the chaos of revolution, Mexico City had a centrifugal effect on the effort to consolidate a global women’s movement.

Theorists from Marshall Sahlins to Alain Badiou have stressed the importance of examining how a collection of linked episodes becomes unified as a set, or as the mathematically minded Badiou puts it, as a one.²⁵ Sewell reminds us of the need to historicize this process—both to locate a particular event formation within its specific context and to show the progression of actions and significations through which incidents become bound together into a single event. What we learn from a closer examination of the IWY event is that this unity, this oneness, was not a convergence or a dialectical synthesis of either female subjectivity or core women’s political issues—however much organizers aspired to such outcomes—but rather a contestation and a destabilization.²⁶ In other words, the fragmentation of an episode designated a priori as a unified event was not simply a stage along the way to consolidation but rather was the event itself. Contemporary and subsequent narrations have reinscribed anticipated fault lines, but such accounts obscure the most consequential aspect of what occurred in Mexico City: the unforeseen and unpredictable encounters that fostered a reimagination of women as political actors.

Despite the hyperbolic claims of its organizers, the fact that the Mexico City conference occurred was largely an accident of politics and fate. It was only through what Sahlins dubs the “structure of the conjuncture”—the shaping of contingent events through control over resources—that the Mexico City conference even took place at all, much less that it gained status as a founding moment of a transnational feminism. The UN Committee on the Status of Women (CSW), established in 1946, had called repeatedly for an international women’s conference. In 1972, the communist bloc NGO Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) convinced the Romanian delegate to propose a UN Year of the Woman to assess the CSW’s progress in improving women’s status. In December 1972, the UN General Assembly designated 1975 as International Women’s Year, and Warsaw Pact countries began planning a conference in East Berlin for October 1975. At the beginning of 1974, when it appeared that the main IWY event would take place behind the Iron Curtain, the U.S. representative to the CSW, Patricia Hutar, began to advocate for an official UN conference that would take place in a noncommunist country. The CSW began planning for an intergovernmental conference in Bogotá that later moved to Mexico City amid political uncertainty in Colombia. Through the spring of 1974, the East Berlin and Bogotá conferences seemed to maintain equal stature, with indications that East Berlin might host an NGO gathering, while the Bogotá conference would consist solely of government representatives. Through a series of Cold War–inflected actions and decisions, these two events were separated and the Mexico City (née Bogotá) conference gained status as the principal IWY event. The East Berlin conference still took place—albeit with even fewer resources than were dedicated to the Mexico City conference—but it remains largely forgotten.

Even after the Mexico City conference emerged as the IWY focal point, the conference itself consisted of many parts that might have emerged as a series of episodes rather than a singular event. Before the conference inauguration, two mini-conferences took place that helped define the tenor of the official proceedings: a seminar on women and development, organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a journalists’ “encounter,” sponsored by the UN’s Centre for Economic and Social Information. The conference itself consisted of two parallel but related gatherings—the intergovernmental conference of instructed delegations from UN member states and an NGO tribune of activists of different stripes. These two events themselves disintegrated in telling ways that demonstrate the structures of conjuncture, the institutional and material factors that shaped the conference.

The intergovernmental conference split most dramatically and predictably between the industrialized countries and the Group of 77 (G77), a bloc of Third World countries, including the more radical nonaligned group that prioritized the creation of a New International Economic Order and vocally condemned Zionism as a form of racist imperialism. As recently decolonized nations finally took control of the General Assembly in 1974, the GA had made the struggle against racism and imperialism a top priority on the UN’s agenda, and Arab and African nations consistently formed a bloc to challenge industrialized countries on everything from trade to communications. In the end, the G77 would issue a separate conference report, the Declaration of Mexico, which differed markedly in tone and content from the more technocratic World Plan of Action drafted by a consultative committee to the UN secretariat. The conference would approve both documents—as would the GA—but only the World Plan of Action gained legitimacy as a policy document. How the IWY conference became, over the long run, the event that sanctioned the World Plan of Action rather than the event that sanctioned the Declaration of Mexico forms a critical part of the IWY history.

The NGO tribune witnessed deep divisions that mirrored those of the intergovernmental conference. Whereas the conference reflected the growing divide between poorer countries—particularly those that had gained independence after World War II—and wealthier ones, the tribune revealed the ongoing debates over democratic process. The tribune had been organized by professionalized women who ran established NGOs that enjoyed consultative status with the UN’s ECOSOC—organizations such as International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Young Women’s Christian Association.²⁷ In fact, the main organizers and staff arrived fresh from having staged a similar NGO forum during the 1974 UN Population Conference in Bucharest, where they had succeeded in getting the issue of women’s status into the official document. This experience not only forged strong bonds within this particular group of women but also schooled them in yet another language that allowed for only inadequate translation—what NGO tribune organizer Mildred Persinger dubbed UN-ese, the bureaucratic language of international politics.²⁸ They originally had planned a three-day preconference (akin to those for journalists and development specialists) that would include only representatives of consultative-status NGOs. In January 1975, when the Mexican government offered the auditorium and meeting rooms of the National Medical Center as well as translation services, the tribune organizers significantly revised their plans, arranging instead for an NGO tribune to run parallel to the conference. They set about putting together panels and events featuring “experts” who would address the conference themes of equality, development, and peace, often with a didactic tenor meant to educate activists about suitable and effective modes of advocacy. NGOs were particularly encouraged to send representatives, but anyone could attend the conference as long as they registered in advance—and even the registration requirement was abandoned a few days into the conference.

This dramatic expansion of the tribune—from a three-day conference of consultative NGOs to a full-scale parallel event open to anyone who showed up—meant that participation mushroomed much like the GA membership had, and participants arrived with radically diverse expectations of what the tribune might accomplish and how its daily business would proceed. Much like the intergovernmental conference, the tribune splintered into factions, and the parallel play of spontaneous, participant-initiated exchanges soon eclipsed the carefully choreographed scheduled sessions. Indeed, Persinger echoes a belief held by many U.S. participants that the Mexican government imported several thousand Latin American women to “overwhelm the US women at the tribune.”²⁹ If the organizers envisioned orderly panels following parliamentary procedures and UN protocols that modeled women’s capacity for global citizenship, the activists who arrived by borrowed jalopies, donated plane tickets, and sweaty, livestock-laden busses anticipated an adventure in participatory democracy. Participants began to organize “global speak-outs,” interest-based consciousness-raising groups, and informal forums that soon overshadowed the formal tribune agenda, transforming the tribune into what the New York Times described as “the scene of much shouting, scheming, plotting, and general hell-raising.”³⁰ Animated by all the optimism and intensity of their convictions, activists at the tribune slammed headlong into the soul-crushing bureaucracy and political machinations of the UN. For many participants, their experiences at the tribune precipitated a sort of political crisis as they found themselves galled that the tribune would have no say in the conference deliberations, alienated from the stiffness and formality of the tribune agenda, and confused by encountering women activists with such starkly different objectives from their own. In other words, the NGO tribune not only functioned as an event within an event but also functioned differently as a pivotal moment for its varied participants.

If how we interpret an event depends upon where we imagine its boundaries, it depends just as surely on the people and ideas that fall within those boundaries. The women who populated the planning committees for the IWY meetings had a powerful—although not dispositive—say in who and what made their way onto the official programs in Mexico City. Those with agenda-setting authority could not entirely exclude pressing questions, but their power to sanction certain issues over others underscores the importance of investigating how they attained such power. Correspondence with private foundations reveals a shared emphasis on maintaining order and avoiding political disruptions from either Third World nationalists or “women’s libbers.”³¹ In June 1973, Shahnaz Alami, the WIDF’s representative to the CSW and chair of the CSW’s subcommittee on human rights, had written to Margaret Bruce, then assistant director of the Human Rights Division and head of the Status of Women section, to inform her that a special NGO committee on human rights had begun planning the IWY event in East Berlin. Alami, an Iranian exile living in East Berlin since 1953 and a seasoned activist in human rights and women’s rights, seemed a promising choice to organize the NGO forum. In March 1974, Niall MacDermot, the head of the Geneva NGO Committee on Human Rights, wrote to UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to stress the importance of involving Alami in any NGO activities for IWY. By then, however, a group of professionalized NGO activists in New York City—led by Rosalind Harris, who had organized the NGO forum at the UN Population Conference—had assumed for itself the role of planning the IWY tribune. Harris sent MacDermot a curt note assuring him that her committee included NGO representatives from all but three of those on the CSW and that he should not confuse matters by making individual appeals to the secretary-general.³² Notably, the WIDF, which had initially proposed IWY, was among the three excluded from the New York committee, and the ensuing documentation shows the New York group anxiously keeping the WIDF—and Alami in particular—at arm’s length. The WIDF had long been considered a Cold War rival for U.S.-based NGOs. In March 1953, the United States had refused a visa to the WIDF representative to attend CSW meetings at UN headquarters in New York, arguing that she posed a “security threat.”³³ The following year, the United States allowed a visa for the WIDF to travel in the “immediate vicinity” of the UN headquarters, but orchestrated the WIDF’s suspension from the CSW during that session. The WIDF’s consultative status was not reinstated until 1967. As Francisca de Haan has shown, the U.S. activists (and later historians) consistently presented the WIDF as a deeply ideological organization, while liberal organizations such as the International Alliance of Women and the International Council of Women were seen as apolitical and above ideological skirmishes.³⁴ Given the compressed planning schedule, limited budget, and relative proximity of New York to Mexico City, the New York group quickly claimed exclusive control over the tribune program. Clearly “politics” had informed “women’s issues” at every turn, not least in deciding which organizations were considered too political.

If the New York committee constrained Alami’s participation in the NGO tribune, planning developments for the intergovernmental conference seem to complete her marginalization, exemplifying Sahlins’s notion of structures of conjuncture. The UN’s weak financial commitment to IWY—particularly compared with its generous support for the 1974 population and food conferences—created an opportunity for those willing to help cover the expenses of the IWY meetings.³⁵ In December 1974, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi presented Waldheim with a Declaration on International Women’s Year, signed by sixty-three heads of state, along with a pledge of $1 million to support the IWY events. By February, Pahlavi had been named as chair of the Secretariat’s twenty-three-member IWY consultative committee, the body charged with formulating the draft World Plan of Action—the policy recommendations that would emerge nearly unchanged from the IWY conference. Questions of human rights, which Alami had seen as the centerpiece for improving women’s status, went unmentioned in both the draft World Plan of Action and the tribune program.³⁶ Only through a series of vocal and well-attended protests would human rights command attention in Mexico City.

Despite efforts to control the IWY meetings’ content, official delegates, NGO volunteers, and grassroots activists arrived in Mexico City ready to do battle over a broad range of issues that affected women’s lives, including not only the conference’s official themes of equality, development, and peace but also concerns such as human rights; women’s labor burdens; sexuality, public health, and reproductive rights; and the role of education and the “mass communications media” in shaping perceptions of women and appropriate sex roles. These issues fragmented, however, even as they proliferated. The Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova invoked the theme of peace, for example, to call for an end to nuclear proliferation, while a group of Ukrainian hunger strikers appealed to the same theme to call for the release of political prisoners held by the Soviet government. Israeli first lady Leah Rabin asserted that women’s political participation would naturally yield a more peaceful society, while the South Vietnamese delegate Ma Thi Chu highlighted the importance of women’s participation in Vietnam’s armed struggle for national liberation.³⁷

Deliberations over reproductive labor—the subsistence efforts including feeding, cleaning, and caring—precipitated similarly divergent understandings of the central problems. Many women sought either the redistribution or socialization of their reproductive labors by delinking them from sex roles, while other women adamantly favored a model of gender complementarity, albeit one in which reproductive labors earned more recognition. Some participants favored the commodification of reproductive labor—through models such as wages for housework—and others staunchly resisted the further encroachment of commodification into their everyday lives. Even in this most naturalized and biologized realm, politics and women’s issues remained inseparable.³⁸ Although some issues highlighted difference more than others, even matters that organizers had seen as uncontroversial might raise troubling questions and reveal unseen assumptions. The strong emphasis on literacy programs, for example, implied a privileging of some forms of knowledge production and dissemination over others. The aggressive promotion of training programs to incorporate women into the “productive life” of the labor market indicated that women’s uncommodified labor was unproductive and that labor commodification offered the only sure path to development. The central conference theme of equality set in relief the contemporary debates about how equality related to sexual difference.³⁹ In short, every effort to establish common ground seemed only to till the terrain of diversity, churning up more and starker differences among participants.

It is precisely because of the discussions and ruptures generated by these differences that the IWY conference fulfilled the other expectation that distinguishes a historical event from an interesting episode: it played a game-changing role in transforming the surrounding resource structures and cultural practices. Indeed, the IWY conference occupies an iconic place in the history of transnational feminism. It transformed the culture of transnational women’s activism by launching the “NGO-ization” of women’s advocacy, creating a prominent role for NGOs that would continue to grow over the following three decades.⁴⁰ The proliferation and diversification of NGOs introduced new political actors and new languages and practices around women’s advocacy, emphatically turning away from states and toward a reimagined civil society. The Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, explaining thirty years later how she launched Kenya’s Green Belt movement, described a process that took place in many parts of the world:

It was around the mid-1970s, and many women will remember that was the year when women of the world met in Mexico during the very first United Nations conference on women. It was that conference, by the way, that declared the first women’s decade, and we were preparing in Kenya for us to go and participate at that meeting. And it was during that preparation that I listened to the women from the rural areas, and as they articulated their issues, their agendas, their concerns, I noticed that they were talking about the need for fire wood, the need for energy, the need for clean drinking water, the need for food, and the need for income, and all of these connected very closely to the environment.⁴¹

The creation of the Women’s World Bank and UNIFEM planted the seeds of what has become the microfinance orientation of development programs.⁴² International attention induced many governments to pass legislation that promised important improvements in women’s status. The material resources made available from the UN, donor governments, and private foundations sponsored the creation of centers for women’s advocacy and education that otherwise would have remained very low priorities for home governments. These programs made an important difference in women’s lives, and women’s histories from around the world either explicitly or implicitly periodize around 1975 as a watershed in women’s rights.⁴³ And Mexico City was the point of embarkation for the rocky but often exhilarating journey that took many women activists to Copenhagen and Nairobi on the way to Beijing.

TIME AFTER TIME: TEMPORALITY AND SIGNIFICATION

The IWY’s status as a conjunctural event—as a watershed in transnational women’s activism—depends in part upon the meaning-making role of temporality. Considerations of temporality necessarily include not only the world-historical context of the Cold War, decolonization movements, and the growing influence of feminist thought but also the local and national contexts of the IWY participants, the imagined arcs of historical time that they carried with them, the microconjunctures that occurred at the IWY meetings themselves as issues and encounters layered on top of one another over the two-week period, and the temporal allusions that reminded participants of other historical moments. None of these temporalities operated in uniform or predictable ways. Temporal allusions that resonated powerfully with some participants remained meaningless to others. Participants in the IWY gatherings saw themselves as actors in a wide array of historical metanarratives and understood history itself to be moving at different paces and toward distinct horizons. While participants involved in reform-oriented movements and development politics spoke of long-term processes and interim benchmarks, for example, those who arrived from recently victorious national-liberation movements had experienced a compressed historical time of rapid and extraordinary change. As the feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz implores us to recognize, “[Q]uestions about culture and representation, concepts of subjectivity, sexuality, and identity, as well as concepts of political struggle and transformation all make assumptions about the relevance of history, the place of the present, and the forward-moving impetus directing us to the future.”⁴⁴

Dramatic, world-historical developments combined to create the impression that a new age had dawned at the United Nations and perhaps in global politics more generally. On the broadest scale, events such as the recent wave of decolonization movements and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War conspicuously informed political maneuvers within the UN and, by extension, at the conference. A voting practice that the U.S. State Department branded logrolling and the nonaligned countries viewed as Third World solidarity had, by the end of 1974, led to the suspension of South Africa’s credentials at the General Assembly. The attacks on Zionism at the IWY conference clearly formed part of a larger strategy to paint Israel with the same brush in order to suspend its credentials as well. Furthermore, the 1973 oil shock contributed to economic dislocations that heightened demands for economic justice and strengthened incentives for Third World nations to make common cause with oil-producing countries, creating an affinity between anti-Zionism and calls for the New International Economic Order.⁴⁵ By the summer of 1975, the momentum seemed entirely on the side of the allied forces of decolonization and anti-Zionism as oil-producing Arab countries exercised outsized economic power and national liberation movements gained victories around the world. The United States had finally withdrawn from Vietnam at the end of April, Angolan independence fighters were on the verge of triumph, and Mozambique won independence even as the IWY conference was under way, precipitating a hasty invitation to the new nation to join the proceedings.

Other, more geographically contained developments informed debates at the IWY as well. Two of the world’s three female heads of state—India’s Indira Gandhi and Argentina’s Isabel Perón—were prevented from attending the conference because of mounting political unrest at home. In the context of conference discussions about efforts to bring more women into leadership positions, their absence seemed like a major setback. During the course of the conference, India would declare a state of emergency that would last nearly two years. By the spring of 1976, a military junta had overthrown Perón, launching a terror regime that would endure until 1983. The imbrication of the IWY deliberations with all these far-flung events was evidenced on the front pages of Mexico City newspapers, where daily conference updates were interspersed with headlines about Israel’s permanent claim to Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, Pinochet’s declaration that Chile would not hold elections during his lifetime, and the Organization of American States’ demand for laws to govern transnational corporations—the “corsairs of economic interdependence.”⁴⁶ This widespread instability—and its magnification through mass media—underscored the sense of both uncertainty and opportunity created by the global flux.

Particularly in UN-sanctioned spaces, where the voices of new nations increasingly drowned out the great powers, the force of historical change seemed to push toward a revolution in global power structures and a shift toward revolutionary time. Indeed, the language of revolution and decolonization had become infectious by the mid-1970s and appropriated even by those who did not align themselves with revolutionary nationalism. Betty Friedan, for example, referred to herself as a revolutionary and repeatedly called for the decolonization of women’s minds.⁴⁷ In 1975, the insurgent “majority caucus” within the U.S. National Organization for Women (NOW) took over the organization under the slogan “out of the mainstream and into the revolution.” The Australian lesbian rights activist Laurie Bebbington referred to heterosexuality as a form of cultural imperialism.⁴⁸ Writing in the African American newspaper Chicago Defender, journalist Ethel Payne likened the Mexico City conference to another pivotal historical moment, the 1955 Bandung Conference, which was later credited with consolidating the Non-Aligned Movement. “It is safe to venture that after Mexico City, the world will not be the same,” Payne explained. “The rising tide of expectations has gone past evolution to revolution.”⁴⁹ By contrast, Jennifer Seymour Whitaker, writing in Foreign Affairs, described as counterrevolutionary—to the “women’s revolution”—those “delegates from the developing countries [who were] so intent on the redistribution of resources between rich and poor.”⁵⁰

The setting of a UN conference highlighted the roles that states might play in determining the pace of social transformation. More authoritarian regimes, particularly those with a revolutionary ethos, had made efforts to impose changes from above. International Women’s Year had started, as the Economist tastelessly reported, “with a bang.”⁵¹ On January 11, 1975, Somalia’s Supreme Revolutionary Council, under the leadership of the modernizing socialist Siad Barre, issued a decree to abolish all forms a sexual discrimination. “In the name of Islam,” according to the Economist, “a number of outraged traditionalists went into the city’s mosques and harangued the faithful about the iniquity of the new decree.” President Siad had the protesters arrested, insisting the decree enjoyed the imprimatur of Somalia’s Muslim leadership. On January 23, ten of the protesters were executed by firing squad.

Other state-led efforts to expedite social transformations were mercifully less violent and arguably more significant, if less likely to draw media attention. In July 1974, the Cuban Women’s Federation began deliberations about legislation to address the so-called second shift. On March 8, 1975—International Women’s Day of International Women’s Year—the Cuban government enacted the new Family Code, mandating the equal redistribution of domestic labor burdens among men and women.⁵² The Mexican government, soon after the IWY conference was relocated from Bogotá to Mexico City, pushed through a constitutional amendment declaring men and women equal before the law—a development that highlighted the floundering of the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States. Valentina Tereshkova, meanwhile, insisted that Soviet women had already achieved complete equality with the 1917 revolution. All these efforts and assertions of course begged the question of whether they made any difference in social practice, but the rapid creation of new states confronting long-standing social injustices—as well as the destabilization of old states confronting new crises—drew particular attention to how states would figure into what appeared at the time as an emergent political order.

These global developments informed the ways that IWY participants interpreted the central issues under discussion in Mexico City. For example, for women who had struggled for the right to limit the number of children they had—including the many IWY organizers who had gained UN experience at the 1974 Population Conference—the prominence accorded abortion and contraception rights felt like a positive step in their progress toward emancipation from domestic life. For the many more women who had been targeted by population-control programs, including involuntary sterilizations, these discussions exemplified yet another way in which states and development agencies policed their bodies.⁵³ Indeed, when USAID administrator Daniel Parker (who would co-head the U.S. delegation at the IWY conference) proposed to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the United States link food aid to population-control benchmarks, National Academy of Sciences president Philip Handler responded, “How do you do that internationally without appearing racist? You have to convince the [less developed countries] that population control is in their interest not ours.”⁵⁴ Radical women’s organizations both within the United States and abroad lambasted this eugenicist approach, tagging family-planning policies as genocidal rather than liberatory, sparking accusations against the “population control establishment” and charges of “indiscriminate birth control” in lieu of policies to mitigate starvation wages and the uneven distribution of resources.⁵⁵ One columnist in the Mexican daily Excélsior lamented the implications of the IWY’s “population bomb” sloganeering, which discouraged poor women from having children who consume “food, goods, and space that rightfully belong to others” and implied they posed an obstacle to women who wanted to “liberate themselves, to work and to study.”⁵⁶

In other words, the significance of the IWY debates about family planning might have fit into competing temporal orderings, drawing distinct trajectories of causality. For those anxious to draw attention to the global “problem” of population growth, the IWY discussions strengthened the link between population control and women’s status.⁵⁷ For those who understood women’s liberation as emancipation from the domestic realm and unfettered entrance into the commodified labor market, the ability to control fertility seemed like an unqualified accomplishment. For dependency theorists who argued that First World prosperity and ever-increasing consumption depended upon Third World poverty and exploitation, the emphasis on population control seemed like the next step in a reductio ad absurdum in which poorer populations would be annihilated to conserve “food, goods, and space that rightfully belong to others.” The meanings of the entire issue of family planning fit into all of these larger arcs of historical developments.

The relationship between temporality and the signification of the event extended to the intentional and even unintentional gestures at the IWY meetings. The intergovernmental conference occupied two spaces that conjured Mexico’s own political conjuncture of 1968. The inauguration venue Gimnasio Juan de la Barrera, named after a young lieutenant who died during the 1847 U.S. occupation of Mexico City, had served as an important site of the 1968 Olympics, and the conference itself took place at the Ministry of Foreign Relations at Tlatelolco Plaza, most remembered as the site of the infamous 1968 student massacre.⁵⁸ On the one hand, the selection of these locales was largely logistical—the Olympic-size gym had the largest capacity of any indoor facility in Mexico City, and it certainly made sense to hold the diplomatic conference at the Ministry of Foreign Relations. On the other, for Mexicans and anyone who had paid attention to recent Mexican history, these two locales recalled both Mexico’s aspirations to global prominence and the violent authoritarianism that accompanied those aspirations.

While such gestures were particularly conspicuous—indeed, monumental—the IWY gatherings were replete with smaller gestures that the performance theorist Diana Taylor would describe as repertoire, the ephemeral and embodied acts that transmit knowledges through the performance of meanings and identities.⁵⁹ The significance of performances such as those at the IWY tribune hinges upon their attendant scenarios, the “meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.”⁶⁰ Building on the more familiar historical concept of context, the scenario—the costumes and sets and locales that surround the acting—informs expectations by gesturing to well-known plots and story lines. “The scenario makes visible, yet again, what is already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes,” Taylor explains. “The scenario structures our understanding. It also haunts our present, a form of hauntology that resuscitates and reactivates old dramas. We’ve seen it all before. The framework allows for occlusions; by positioning our perspective, it promotes certain world views while helping to disappear others.”⁶¹

REPRESENTING WOMEN: ACTORS, PERFORMANCE, AND AUTHENTICITY

The IWY conference and tribune each had scenarios of their own and were composed of participants who came with their own hauntologies—their own dramas and histories that might be reactivated in surprising ways. Scenarios materially informed the ways that participants perceived and participated in not only the IWY meetings but also the protests, festivities, and late-night rap sessions. In countless settings, participants engaged in elaborate performances not only of political identities but also of womanhood itself.⁶² These performances, ranging from the sartorial to the ideological, were not feigned or fraudulent—although some aspects of them clearly were more self-conscious than others—but rather inhabitations of particular political roles. Barrios de Chungara performed her subjectivity as a union militant just as Sirimavo Bandaranaike performed hers as prime minister or Ashraf Pahlavi performed hers as a feminist modernizer and international powerbroker. Participants’ speech, dress, and actions were informed by both their own understandings of suitable comportment as well as the expectations or perceived expectations of their audiences. During the course of interactions in Mexico City, these performances adapted—sometimes temporarily and sometimes more durably—as participants developed new understandings of their roles at the IWY meetings and beyond.

Bodies served as sites to express politics, nationalism, ideology, and ethnic identity, and observers offered constant commentary on women as embodied political subjects, including not only remarks upon women’s dress, adornment, and hairstyles but also discussions about the comparative beauty and relative “femininity” of first ladies Leah Rabin and Jehan Sadat or U.S. feminists Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett. Reporters noted that Ashraf Pahlavi arrived in an elegant European-style suit but with no jewelry and only a small retinue and that the “iron butterfly” Filipina first lady Imelda Marcos “was embraced by three Chinese women delegates in sober, dark-gray trouser suits.”⁶³

Once under way, the events quickly became stages for political performances directed not only at an international audience but also at audiences in participants’ home countries and communities, resulting in a cacophony of mingling performances rooted in different contexts and intended not only for fellow tribune participants but, perhaps more importantly, for an array of allies and rivals not present. Deracinated from the scenarios that generated them, inserted into a newly fabricated scenario, and communicating with multiple audiences at once, the performances at the IWY gatherings produced a confusion of meanings. As Barrios de Chungara noted, “We spoke very different languages, no?”⁶⁴ Sewell reminds us, however, that it is precisely amid this Geertzian “confusion of tongues” that “social encounters contest cultural meanings or render them uncertain.”⁶⁵ It was this uncertainty, in turn, that most animated the IWY meetings and that renders them exceptional spaces for seeing both the diversity of gendered performances and the ways those performances articulated. As Sewell observes, the “imperfections or slippages in the articulations” between practices of language and performance more generally function as “important sources of changes in the overall shape of the [language] games in question—which is to say, of social life.”⁶⁶

The social life at the IWY gatherings centered on two practices that functioned both in tandem and in tension: representation and identification.⁶⁷ When Barrios de Chungara later described her anticipation of the IWY tribune, she recalled thinking there would be two groups: elite women in Tlatelolco Plaza “making fancy statements” and, at the tribune, “people like me … people with similar problems, you know, poor people.”⁶⁸ Like many tribune participants, Barrios de Chungara arrived in Mexico City with low expectations for representation and high expectations for identification. She was, to put it mildly, disappointed. Instead she met women whom she imagined spent their days playing canasta and living comfortable lives. “They couldn’t see the suffering of my people,” she explained. “They couldn’t see how our compañeros are vomiting their lungs up bit by bit, in pools of blood. They didn’t see how underfed our children are. And, of course, they didn’t know, as we do, what it’s like to get up at four in the morning and go to bed at eleven or twelve at night, just to be able to get all the housework done, because of the lousy conditions we live in.”⁶⁹

The problem of representation posed a challenge from the earliest planning stages of the IWY. Disputes over who would control and populate the planning committees were compounded by intense confrontations over the composition of official delegations. U.S. feminists protested loudly, for example, when USAID director Daniel Parker was chosen to lead the U.S. delegation. (He eventually served as co-head with Patricia Hutar, and the State Department claimed the whole kerfuffle had resulted from a misunderstanding.) They protested again when the intergovernmental conference elected Mexican attorney general Pedro Ojeda Paullada to preside over the proceedings. Their objections, which hinged entirely on Ojeda Paullada’s sex and made no mention of his role in a repressive political regime, conjured their own hauntologies as security officials envisioned Friedan leading thousands of women in a protest march down Mexico City’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue. In a particularly heated confrontation at the U.S. embassy, a group of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists insisted that delegation member Jewel Lafontant—herself a founding member of CORE, an officer of the NAACP’s Chicago chapter, and a veteran of Chicago’s lunch-counter sit-ins—could not sufficiently represent the interests of African American women. The question of representation seemed to be, as the saying goes, turtles all the way down; there was no firm foundation upon which representational claims might comfortably rest.

The tribune organizers demonstrated awareness of this difficulty from the outset, and the tribune enjoyed more freedom than the conference to sidestep the thorny question of representation. When they opened participation to anyone interested in attending, they diminished claims that the participants might represent larger groups and insisted that the tribune would not produce any official minutes or reports and that nobody was authorized to represent the tribune to the press or to the intergovernmental conference. Friedan attempted to assume this role, organizing a “feminist caucus” and then presenting its recommended amendments to the IWY secretary-general Helvi Sipïla, but her efforts earned her only disapprobation at the tribune. The Latin American women split between a group that loosely aligned with Friedan’s caucus and the more militant and Marxist “group of 200” that adopted Barrios de Chungara as its standard-bearer, with the fault line running not between the First and Third World but rather along ideological and political lines—or what the cultural geographer Cindi Katz has fruitfully dubbed “contour lines”—that did not respect geopolitical boundaries.⁷⁰

Barrios de Chungara’s immediate experience of both poverty and repression set her apart from most participants and probably goes some distance toward explaining why she became such an iconic figure. Although very few extremely poor women attended the conference, concerns about rural poverty and malnutrition had gained international attention as they increasingly seemed to threaten geopolitical and environmental security. The two preceding UN conferences—on population and food production—had highlighted the perceived threat posed by the growing legions of rural poor who increasingly populated insurgent movements, migrated to cities and settled in squatter communities, or remained in their home communities as stark reminders of the limitations of modernization projects. These concerns arrived at the IWY conference via dozens of background papers and mediated by development specialists living in impoverished regions or by privileged sectors of those regions. The concerns of sub-Saharan African women, for example, were expressed by Margaret Snyder, a development specialist with the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa; the Ghanaian supreme court justice Annie Jiagge; the Nigerian health minister Victoria Mojekwu; or the Kenyan legal scholar Opinya Okoth-Ogendo. While this marked a dramatic expansion of perspectives from previous international women’s conferences, the discussion still rarely included the voices of those who saw rural poverty not as a distant problem in need of containment but rather as a personal daily struggle. “These conferences are global theater,” Gayatri Spivak has written about the 1995 Beijing UN Women’s Conference, which achieved exponentially greater levels of socioeconomic diversity. “People going to these conferences may be struck by the global radical aura. But if you hang out at the other end, participating day-to-day in the (largely imposed) politics of how delegations and NGO groups are put together … you would attest that what is left out is the poorest women of the South as self-conscious critical agents.”⁷¹ What Barrios de Chungara seemed to personify, then, was unmediated authenticity, although what she “authentically” represented was projected upon her. Even as she claimed to speak for herself —she titled her memoir Let Me Speak!, after all—she also became an unwitting ventriloquist for those seeking, to invoke Spivak again, to make the subaltern speak.⁷²

Aspirations for identification were widespread but generally disappointed. Chicanas imagined a return to the motherland to “share a common sisterhood” with Mexican feminists but found no such affinity. “We though, oh, yeah, we’re Mexican Americans,” recalled Chicana activist Sandra Serrano Sewell, “we’re going to find all [these] natural connections, you know, and sort of like a romantic view that was quickly dispelled.”⁷³ “Third World women” from the United States hoped to develop bonds of solidarity with women from the geopolitical Third World but found little common ground. Friedan describes Sudha Acharya of the All-India Women’s Conference “shaking with rage” at the protests by U.S. Third World women. “We all know there is racial discrimination in the United States,” she reportedly fumed, “but black or white, you are better off than we are. In my country, women and their families must live on a per capita income of six dollars a month.”⁷⁴ For her part, Friedan maneuvered between reflecting pools and Olmec sculptures during an official dinner at the National Anthropology Museum in order to approach the delegates from the People’s Republic of China. Noting the PRC women’s embodied indicators of oppression—they wore “blue uniforms and no make-up; the head of the delegation had square-cut black hair; a younger one had light-haired pigtails”—Friedan spoke to them through an interpreter, declaiming the accomplishments of the U.S. feminist movement. Suddenly, the Chinese ambassador “barked out something that sounded authoritative,” and the women withdrew from the conversation. Undaunted by either the obvious language barriers or the ambassador who, “like blocking a tackle in a football game,” tried to prevent further contact, Friedan persisted. “[S]he was a woman. I didn’t accept the impossibility of talking to her. Maybe if I could sit next to her, some woman-to-woman things would get across.”⁷⁵

Arguably no question of identification proved more unsettling than the lesbians’ interventions at the tribune.⁷⁶ Women’s sexuality, apart from oblique discussions around family planning questions, had been left off the scheduled program and received only limited attention even in informal sessions. Nonetheless, lesbians’ very presence at the tribune seemed to provoke such intense anxiety that they disrupted the possibilities of identification more than any other group. In Barrios de Chungara’s testimonio, she points to back-to-back encounters with lesbians and prostitutes as the moment of her alienation from the IWY meetings.⁷⁷ Certainly the insistence by some lesbian participants that women should choose lesbianism as a way of opting out of patriarchy posed a powerful challenge to the maternalist feminism based in gender complementarity that prevailed in most of Latin America. Mexican newspaper columnists insisted that lesbians should not even be allowed to enter the tribune.⁷⁸ The Marxist left set up a zero-sum game between recognizing lesbian rights and opposing the Pinochet regime in Chile.⁷⁹ Mexico’s most prominent lesbian, the theater director Nancy Cárdenas, attempted to suture this ruptured identification. Cárdenas recalled her dismay at hearing that her comrades had walked out on a session when the question of lesbianism arose. “They told me that the Communists, my own compañeras from earlier in the party, abandoned the conference hall when an Australian girl said ‘I’m a lesbian feminist,’ ” she recalled later in an interview. “They said, ‘Throw out the sickos, we’re out of here’ and abandoned the hall. That seemed to me to give an incomplete image of Mexico, because I was also a leftist militant, was a lesbian, and I had another position and raised my finger.”⁸⁰ Cárdenas’s efforts were futile, at least in the short term; her public proclamation of Mexico’s first lesbian manifesto, while it stands as a turning point in Mexican lesbian history, provoked only more intense vitriol from the Catholic right and the Marxist left.

All these missed connections generated an overwhelming sense of frustration as participants sought identification with and recognition from other participants. Throughout her testimonio, Barrios de Chungara identifies “people like me” exclusively by class, hoping to meet working and peasant women at the IWY tribune. However, during the tribune—and even more in the years since—people imagined that she might have ended that sentence differently: “people like me … indigenous people” or “people like me … Latin Americans” or “people like me … Marxists.” The dissatisfaction with these incomplete or failed identifications fostered claims to authenticity paired with accusations of manipulation. Friedan aggressively insisted that any women who prioritized economic rights over women’s rights were subject to manipulations by communists, the CIA, or the “far right.” Barrios de Chungara insisted that both feminism and machismo were inventions of U.S. imperialism intended to divide men and women who should be joined in class struggle.

The frustration that many participants experienced stemmed, to a large extent, from the expectations they carried with them to Mexico City. Many women hoped, like Betty Friedan, that “woman-to-woman things would get across” at the IWY, only to discover the impossibility of a normative conception of womanhood. The tensions between those expectations and the developments at the conference and tribune mounted from day to day, exploding into heated confrontations as each forum tried to distill the tumult of conflicts and encounters into unified statements of purpose. The elusiveness of unity precipitated hand-wringing and accusations all around as participants and organizers perceived they had failed in one of their principal objectives. What they could not have seen, however, is that the IWY meetings—precisely because of this failed unification—contributed to what have become some of the most important interventions of feminist thought in the subsequent decades: radical heterogeneity and challenges to normativity, an appreciation for the ways that political performances constitute political subjects, and an unsettling and decentering of dominant historical narratives.

The IWY gatherings were hardly the first attempt to use an international conference to distill solidarity out of heterogeneity, but they offer important historical lessons about the nature of transnational social movements. Perhaps the closest historical analog, as the journalist Ethel Payne pointed out, would be the 1955 Bandung Conference, which launched what the international relations specialist Mark T. Berger has dubbed the Bandung Era (1955–75).⁸¹ As the historian Christopher Lee puts it, Bandung “generated what has often been taken as self-evident: the idea of a Third World.”⁸² As with the IWY conference, participants and observers have debated Bandung’s meanings and legacies.⁸³ Critics have pointed out the many ways in which the participants fell short of the economic and even nonaggression promises of the conference’s final communiqué, invoking arguments that presaged IWY efforts to parse politics from women’s issues. The historian Roland Burke describes Bandung as the “subject of determined reinvention by the ideologues of Afro-Asian solidarity and non-alignment. Their imagined Bandung, more legend than fact, has become the dominant perspective on the conference, despite the collapse of any meaningful Afro-Asian movement over four decades ago.”⁸⁴ Bandung’s boosters, meanwhile, highlight the ways in which the “Bandung Spirit” signified, as Vijay Prashad puts it, “that the colonized world had now emerged to claim its space in world affairs, not just as an adjunct of the First or Second Worlds, but as a player in its own right.” As a “refusal of both economic subordination and cultural suppression,” he explains, “The audacity of Bandung produced its own image.”⁸⁵

Both Mexico City and Bandung produced enduring movements despite the fact that both at the conferences and in their aftermaths participants continued to disagree about even the most critical issues—nonaggression, for example, or reproductive labor. The explosive diversity of their founding moments—and the necessity of accommodating this diversity—gave both these movements their staying power. Much like the IWY conference, Bandung generated a document that simultaneously fell short of its signatories’ aspirations and exceeded their capacities for implementation; it drew a roster of participants who were relative newcomers to international politics and who understood their roles as both agitators and lawmakers; and it emerged as a signifier elastic enough—a “spirit”—that rendered it durable as a historical watershed.

The IWY exhibited similar elasticity—occasionally tipping into revisionism—that allowed participants to reimagine rivals as allies. In a 2006 interview, the New York-based IWY tribune organizer Mildred Persinger described the interventions by the “fiery” Bolivian tin miner’s wife who was “something of a revolutionary.”⁸⁶ In a moving description about the uncertainty surrounding Barrios de Chungara’s arrival in Mexico City and her emotional entrance at the tribune, Persinger describes Barrios de Chungara as having “started a project among the women to bake a special kind of biscuit that is very popular in Latin America and sell them.” In place of Barrios de Chungara’s militancy and radicalism—which had involved hunger strikes and hostage taking and long stretches in prison getting beaten to a pulp, even when eight months pregnant, but very little biscuit making—appears the kind of entrepreneurship that has become the zeitgeist of the microfinance age. In the twenty-first-century rendition of IWY, the militant revolutionary apparently will be played by an enterprising young woman with a business plan and a microloan.

Such representations reveal not only the challenge of translations at the IWY events but also its promise. Women arrived with experiences that were not simply incommensurate; they often were unimaginable. While her glancing encounters with the U.S. civil rights movement might have given Persinger the faintest whiff of what Barrios de Chungara had confronted, she had no personal experiences that would allow her adequately to translate the violence and deprivation endured by a militant tin miner’s wife. Nonetheless, the contact zone created in Mexico City—much like those in Bandung or at the World Social Forum—opened the possibility of developing a common language of transnational feminism, however power laden and fraught. To the extent that the series of UN women’s conferences have brought about real changes in women’s status and greater awareness of the failure to achieve many other changes, those accomplishments reflect the increasingly shared lexicon of performances and experiences that have made diverse feminisms intelligible and fostered the creation of a new language of transnational feminism.