Abstract
In 2016, by moving from armed struggle to collective reincorporation, Colombian women ex-guerrilleras of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) – the farianas – reconfigured the ‘combatant’ identity by leaving their weapons and engaging in post-war politics with their own feminist vision: insurgent feminism. Drawing upon feminist ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the north-east of Colombia in 2019 and 2022, this article has two interlinked objectives. First, through the lenses of embodiment and affects, it explores the challenges and contradictions of transiting from an armed organisation to a civilian identity for women militants. From there, the article then uses the continuum of militancy to explore the (ongoing) consolidation of farianas’ insurgent feminism and the tensions emerging in this endeavour. In doing so, the article contributes, theoretically, to the inclusion of emotions and embodiment in the theorisation of reincorporation and, empirically and politically, to the construction of knowledge and practice about insurgent feminism.
Key messages
Reincorporation into civilian society is an embodied and emotional rupture.
La Havana’s Peace Process led to the historical inclusion of gender and the subsequent consolidation of farianas’ insurgent feminism.
Insurgent feminism reconfigures farianas’ armed struggle into feminist politics.
Feminist tensions have emerged, especially within the political party and with other feminist groups.
Introduction
‘Insurgent’ is related to contentious politics. It is about non-conformity and political rage against structural oppression. It has a long history in Latin America’s insurrections and leftist political mobilisation, and it is linked to strong emotional attachments to collective actions (Dietrich, 2014; 2017; Nieto-Valdivieso, 2020).
When we met in 2022 with the farianas1 – women militants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) – we widely discussed the term ‘insurgent’ and its relationship to their post-peace agreement feminism. One urban militant told me she had changed her mind since our last interview in 2019: ‘Now, I want to keep insurgent because we, as women, are obliged to stand up for ourselves.’2 This article speaks to this multifaceted concept proposed by the farianas: insurgent feminism. It is about disembodying clandestine and armed struggle and transforming it into a feminist combat.
In 2016, the FARC-EP signed a peace agreement with the Colombian government, stated as the ‘very first negotiation space between an insurgent group and a State to have a technical subcommittee on gender’3 (Barrera Téllez, 2017: 1). One of the key points of this agreement was the reincorporation of 13,000 former FARC-EP members, among which 7,000 are combatants transiting from the military context to civilian life (Barrios Sabogal and Richter, 2019). The FARC-EP named this process ‘reincorporation’ instead of ‘reintegration’: while the latter is used internationally in ‘disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration’ (DDR), they choose the former to explicitly state that they want to stay mobilised (Stallone and Zulver, 2017). However, the implementation of the reincorporation strategy, which includes political participation, has faced mitigated results (Kroc Institute, 2022), with several difficulties in including women in politics. This speaks to similar findings in other contexts where insurgent women have experienced political setbacks in transitions to peace (Shekhawat, 2015; Dietrich, 2017; K C, 2019; Steenberger, 2021).
Nevertheless, the 2016 peace deal marked a shift because of the prominent role of civil society and feminist and women’s organisations in pushing the adoption of a gender approach in the final agreement (Vargas Parra and Díaz Pérez, 2018; Corredor, 2022). Those changes allowed the farianas to strategically position themselves during the negotiations, proposing their own feminist vision: ‘insurgent feminism’ (Sandoval Acosta et al, 2018). As the FARC-EP officially transformed into a political party – Comunes4 – the inclusion of those gender provisions and feminism into the ex-guerrilla group’s political practices has yet to be studied.
Through an approach focusing on embodiment and affects as key sites of feminist political contestations (Ahmed, 2014) and drawing upon fieldwork conducted in Colombia in 2019 and 2022, this article has two objectives. First, through the lenses of embodiment and affects, I explore the challenges and contradictions of transiting from an armed organisation to a civilian identity for women militants. From there, I use the continuum of militancy (Anctil Avoine, 2023) to explore the (ongoing) consolidation of farianas’ insurgent feminism and the tensions emerging in this endeavour. By studying the lived, embodied and emotional experiences of the farianas in the context of reincorporation, I contribute to sketching a better understanding of their political militancy in their journey into building insurgent feminism.
The article makes three contributions. Empirically, it contributes to including emotions and embodiment in DDR programmes (Nussio, 2012). It also enhances knowledge about insurgent feminism as a process and political contribution of the farianas to collective reincorporation and gender-transformative peacebuilding.5 Theoretically, it brings together strands of literature not commonly put in dialogue: the Latin American scholarship on revolutionary feminism and reintegration/reincorporation (Shayne, 2004; Ibarra Melo, 2009; Herrera, 2010; Viterna, 2013; Dietrich, 2014; 2017; Nieto-Valdivieso, 2014; 2017; 2020; Simanca Herrera, 2023); the contributions of feminist security/war studies (Enloe, 2023; Parashar, 2013; 2014; KC, 2019; Hedström, 2022); and theories delving into affects and embodiment in (post)war and militarisation processes (Ahmed, 2010; 2014; Chisholm and Ketola, 2020). Methodologically, it shows the relevance of feminist ethnography in tracing the complex construction of post-war feminist politics, and it provides a ground for comparative cases to analyse the transformations of combats.
In what follows, I first sketch the armed conflict with the FARC-EP and, second, expose the methodology. Third, I outline the three analytical lenses: embodiment, affect and the continuum of militancy (Anctil Avoine, 2023). Fourth, I present the results in two parts: (1) addressing the embodied and emotional dynamics of reincorporation; and (2) making a preliminary conceptualisation of farianas’ insurgent feminism and a brief mapping of the feminist tensions emerging in their reincorporation.
From Marquetalia to Havana
The Colombian armed conflict is one of the longest asymmetrical wars in contemporary Latin American history, and it primarily took place in rural areas (CNMH, 2013). Violence in Colombia can be traced to its colonial era (Sachseder, 2020); however, the contemporary conflict is rooted in the La Violencia period, between the liberals and conservatives, starting in the late 1940s. If the causes are contested and multiple, it is generally understood that unequal access to land, drug production and the exploitation of natural resources are the core reasons for the ongoing armed violence (CNMH, 2013; Meertens, 2018). The Colombian war is characterised by its long duration and multiplicity of actors, using a wide range of tactics of violence, such as guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug traffickers, national and global corporations, politicians, and the state (CHCV, 2015).
The FARC-EP was formally consolidated in 1964 in Marquetalia (Tolima). Originally a self-defence peasant group, 46 men and two women founded the Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group. The FARC-EP officially became a people’s army in 1982, peaking in the 2000s with an estimated 22,000 members over huge parts of Colombian territory. While mainly male dominated in its power structures, the FARC-EP has recruited women and children6 from its very foundation (Méndez, 2012; Gutiérrez Sanín and Carranza Franco, 2017).
The negotiations between the FARC-EP and the Colombian government began secretly in 2011 in Havana (Cuba) and were made official in September 2012. They involved several international and national actors and lasted more than five years. In August 2016, it was announced in Cartagena that the final agreement would undergo a national plebiscite for its acceptance or rejection. In October 2016, the Colombian population rejected the peace agreement by a slight percentage difference. The moral panic around ‘gender ideology’7 was a striking point of the agreement’s rejection, as conservatives instrumentalised the plebiscite for their own political gains. On 24 November, the agreement was signed after amendments to the initial text (Corredor, 2021; 2022).
While the peace agreement has met criticism among some sectors in Colombia, it has also been acclaimed by the international community for its gender perspective through the technical subcommittee set up on the matter (Barrera Téllez, 2017). It represents a historical precedent for including a gender approach in peace negotiations, providing a strategic space for the farianas in their political conversion (Boutron, 2018; 2020). The final peace deal included 130 provisions with a gender perspective out of 578 and mainstreamed gender regarding several crucial points, with ‘far more gender provisions addressing structural, intersectional gender inequality than any other previous peace agreement globally’ (Phelan and True, 2021: 173).
This was not a straightforward process but the result of a synergy (Boutron, 2020; Corredor, 2021) between the farianas, the international community and feminist and LGBTIQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer) organisations. As such, although they were not initially included in the negotiations in 2012, it is the farianas, women’s activism and the pressure of the international community that has led to the implementation, in 2014, of a technical sub-commission on gender (Vargas Parra and Díaz Pérez, 2018). This commission fostered the participation of ‘18 feminist organizations, 10 specialists on gender violence, and 10 female ex-combatants coming from other countries’ (González, 2019: 113). The peace agreement paved the way for a public policy on reincorporation with a cross-cutting approach recognising gender inequality as a ‘public problem’, contributing to ‘the guarantee and exercise of the rights of women and people from the LGBTI sectors’ (DNP, 2018: 37). The policy acknowledges the lack of attention to sexual and reproductive health and postulates the need to ‘ensure care, health, and decision-making about the body, sexuality, and the project of building a family within the framework of the transition to civilian life’ (DNP, 2018: 58).
Havana’s peace process unravelled a tension for the Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group: its relationship to gender. Women’s involvement in its ranks has come with the transformation of the guerrilla group into an offensive army and, therefore, with a growing militarisation (Gutiérrez Sanín and Carranza Franco, 2017). On the one hand, this massive integration of women imposed a strict regulation of their reproduction (Anctil Avoine, 2022a) and particular conceptualisations of gender roles,8 where functions were attributed independently from gender but where power positions would generally remain upheld by men (Esguerra Rezk, 2014; Dietrich, 2017). Also, while some testimonies would state that LGBTIQ+ people could find a place in the FARC-EP, research showed hostile views on their rights in this guerrilla and other groups (González, 2019). On the other hand, the growing participation of women has ‘changed the organization and contributed to the construction of its identity’ (Gutiérrez Sanín and Carranza Franco, 2017: 771). Women have gained ground and affirmed themselves as combatants equal in function to their male peers. Most of them recognise the guerrilla space as one where they could perform completely different tasks than the ones they were assigned in their village of origin, generally along traditional gender roles (Simanca Herrera, 2023; Weber, 2023).
With the contact that farianas have made throughout the years with other guerrilla women and feminist organisations, they have increasingly reflected upon their specific experience of combat and militancy.9 The Havana peace process allowed for a space to think, both from within and with other women, about those feminist engagements and attachments.
Feminist and multi-site method
This article rests on my ongoing research on the political militancy of insurgent women in Colombia. It is based on the results of my PhD dissertation (Anctil Avoine, 2022a) and my post-doctoral fellowship. In these projects, I adopt a ‘feminist multimethod’ (Nieto-Valdivieso, 2014; 2017), including the perspectives of many women and the power relations between women and between the researcher and participants. This approach portrays feminist research as a ‘journey of critique, revealing, reformulation, and reflexivity’ (Sjoberg, 2009; 193) rather than a linear data collection and analysis process. I assume that it is impossible and counter-productive to maintain a neutral and objective stance while researching women’s engagement in (post-)war settings (Richter-Montpetit, 2016: 177). While using several core ideas from feminist ethnography (Craven and Davis, 2013), the feminist multimethod that I have used proposes to start from the ethical stances of ‘friendship as methods’ (Tillman-Healy, 2003; Anctil Avoine, 2022b), where affective bonds have a special role to play in the production of knowledge. This means that I follow a ‘feminist emancipatory research’ praxis (Acker-Verney, 2016: 420), where the political demands of the farianas, their self-criticisms and the possibilities of reinventing their struggles are at the core of my epistemological concerns. This article brings these political struggles to the forefront and contributes to the discussion with the farianas about their insurgent feminism and reincorporation process.
I prioritised a multi-sited approach (Hannerz, 2003) in the north-east of Colombia to better grasp the complexity of farianas’ political militancy. This under-studied region has been historically marked by armed violence and state abandonment. Unfortunately, the 2016 peace agreement did not improve the everyday lives of people in this territory (CNMH, 2018; HRW, 2019; 2020). In 2019, I conducted fieldwork in two territorial spaces for reincorporation and training (Espacios territoriales de capacitación y reincorporación [ETCR]) within the framework of the peace agreement: Filipinas (Department of Arauca) and Caño Indio (Department of Norte de Santander). Those ETCRs have been key sites for the collective reincorporation of FARC-EP ex-combatants. Additionally, I conducted interviews and observations in several cities: Bucaramanga, Barrancabermeja, Cúcuta, Tibú and Bogotá. In 2022, I returned to these cities and to Caño Indio. For security reasons, it was impossible to go back to the ETCR of Filipinas.
Using a ‘chain of affects’10 method (Nieto-Valdivieso, 2017), I activated my previous contacts with organisations working in reincorporation, who later introduced me to the FARC-EP political party and women ex-combatants. While I have used several feminist methods throughout the two projects, in this article, I refer to three of them: (1) participant observations, which are the notes compiled while I engaged in different events with the farianas or when I visited the ETCRs; (2) 33 biographical interviews with women ex-combatants, urban militants and key stakeholders involved in the FARC-EP’s political party and organisations working in reincorporation or implementing the peace agreement’s gender approach; and, finally, (3) a feminist diary of field notes (Fort, 2022) gathered during the research process, including the return from the fieldwork and my own reflections and feelings. The biographical interviews (Andrews, 2004; Wibben, 2016) were conducted to give the participants the maximum space to express how they conceived militancy and how emotional and embodied processes impacted it and their reincorporation. Thus, the length and content of the interviews vary, and the participants decided which part of their life paths to narrate.11
In this article, I refer to ‘combatant’ and ‘guerrillera’ to discuss women’s role in armed militancy and to ‘urban militants’ to account for the women involved in the logistical branch and ideological support, generally in urban settings.12 The urban militants were in contact with the armed militants, but they were not armed themselves – though it has happened in several armed groups in Colombia, including the FARC-EP (Boulanger-Martel, 2022). As they operated within clandestine leftist contentious politics, they were constantly threatened by the police and the army. Of course, within those categories, there is a wide range of combat experiences – armed and non-armed. Also, there is a diversity of women with different backgrounds and along rural–urban divides. Lastly, not all farianas are members of the political party; for example, some were members in 2019 and later resigned when I returned in 2022.
Bodies, emotions and militancy: reincorporation through three analytical lenses
Within war studies, ‘the core concept of a body and its linkages with war are underdeveloped’ (Narozhna, 2022: 216). Only a few studies explore the embodied experience of war and the emotional dimensions associated with armed militancy (McSorley, 2013; Åhäll and Gregory, 2015; Åhäll, 2019; Matfess, 2024).
Women’s complex roles in (post)war have only been acknowledged recently, with the growing literature on women and war (Enloe, 2014; 2023; Cardeño et al, 2023; Hedström et al, 2023) and women in revolutionary struggles, not only in Latin America (Viterna, 2013; Dietrich, 2017; Boutron, 2019; Weber, 2021c) but also in Kurdistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal (Parashar, 2014; KC, 2019; Dirik, 2022). However, the dominant narratives persist regarding women in political violence, being mainly portrayed as victims (Schmidt, 2021; Weber, 2021a) or associated with gender stereotypes along the lines of ‘mothers, monsters, whores’ (Gentry and Sjoberg, 2015). Besides, transforming armed militancy into feminist non-violent combat is a challenging journey, as other revolutionary feminism experiences in Latin America have shown (Shayne, 2004; Herrera, 2010). Women ex-combatants are expected to regret their participation in war and are often reduced to silence, either because they face social stigma or because they self-censor for security reasons.13 As such, the positive, sometimes even emancipatory, experiences they had in their armed militancy are sidelined from analyses of their transition from a ‘military’ to a ‘civilian’ political engagement, whatever forms it takes (Nieto-Valdivieso, 2017).
In the study of revolutions, critical feminist scholars have demystified the traditional analysis of (post)war, integrating corporeal experiences and the multiple forms of political roles women play in those settings (Alison, 2009; Parashar, 2013; 2014; Wilcox, 2015; Curtis et al, 2022; Hedström, 2022; Narozhna, 2022). I follow these scholars in bringing three important categories for analysing farianas’ political militancy in reincorporation: embodiment, emotions and the continuum of militancy.
The first analytical lens is embodiment, which I understand as a set of discursive, material and affective processes that characterise the constitution of the self. Embodiment is not only the material body (the flesh, the physical) but the process by which we are constituted through (gendered) norms and power relations. The body is ‘a social phenomenon: it is exposed to others, vulnerable by definition [and its] very persistence depends upon social conditions and institutions’ (Butler, 2009: 33). Bodies are ‘produced by a variety of practices, including political violence’ (Wilcox, 2015: 11), and ‘embodied experiences [are] the ontological pivot of war’ (Narozhna, 2022: 212). Therefore, embodiment is a central political matter, both during the war and in the reincorporation process: it is through the body that war is felt and military discipline is enacted. As Nieto-Valdivieso (2020: 93) argues, ‘becoming a guerrilla entails the transformation of their female civilian bodies into warrior bodies’ and vice versa when returning to civilian life. Therefore, the body is a location to think about women’s political militancy and differential experiences following disarmament. This allows for considering the ‘everyday experiences of people living within the matrix of violence’ (Parashar, 2014) and their different roles in violence, post-war or peacebuilding (Manchanda, 2020). In fact, ‘reincorporation’ into civilian life means ‘re-embodying’ another type of life, identity and militancy.
Thus, bodies are important sites of subjective transformations: with disarmament, even the name of the combatants is modified. These strong identity changes are linked to the social and cultural practices of emotions, occurring both individually and, between bodies, collectively (Ahmed, 2014). As such, the second analytical lens is emotions. In armed insurgencies like the FARC-EP, emotions are crucial forces that cement together the collective: ‘militarism [is] an affectively felt and structurally lived logic’ (Chisholm and Ketola, 2020: 271). Therefore, I follow Ahmed (2014) in theorising emotions as socially constituted. Beyond the debates regarding a clear distinction between affects and emotions, I consider the two as not analytically or practically differentiated. I am interested in grasping the social and collective dimensions of the circulation of the objects of emotions: emotions are ‘collective as they happen between bodies’ (Anctil Avoine, 2022b: 440). Thus, they are embedded in power relations and showcase the power of being affected; this is why they are powerful analytical lenses in reincorporation, which entails the destructuring of war logics and attachments.
Finally, the last analytical lens is the continuum of militancy (Anctil Avoine, 2023), which invites a double move: (1) considering the militancy of women from a circular point of view (rather than linear or only attached to their armed militancy); and (2) debunking the victims–perpetrators dichotomy (Weber, 2021a) by acknowledging the embodied and emotional war affectations and the continuum of violence (Cockburn, 2004) that particularly affects women in (post)war settings. The continuum of militancy brings together the ‘continuum of violence’ (Cockburn, 2004) with the ‘continuum of participation’ (Koens and Gunawardana, 2021: 464) to consider the multiple forms of political participation, both formal and informal, and contestations to existing gender norms, including through means that range from armed violence to anti-militarism or feminist struggles. Thus, the continuum of militancy integrates a view on women militants’ multiple forms of combat that does not position reincorporation as the end of their political militancy. Rather, it addresses the complexity of their political engagements at different levels, including the intimate, embodied and emotional (Anctil Avoine, 2023: 148). This analytical lens also responds to the necessity of reclaiming and maintaining certain categories of the armed struggle in post-war militancy, such as the insurgent identity (Dietrich, 2017; Simanca Herrera, 2023). The continuum of militancy accounts for how revolutionary feminisms create a political space that stems from the ‘development of a political consciousness from war’ (see Shayne, 2004; Dietrich, 2017; Anctil Avoine, 2023: 149).
Through these three lenses, I discuss how emotions and embodied dynamics affect political reincorporation rather than taking it as a linear process leading to becoming a ‘civilian’. I show that the gendering of militancy is tied to emotional and embodied processes of disarming oneself and facing the disintegration of the collective.
Political militancy in reincorporation through embodiment and emotions
This section first delves into reincorporation’s emotional and embodied dynamics and then presents elements for the conceptualisation of farianas’ insurgent feminism and a brief mapping of the feminist tensions emerging in their political reincorporation.
Embodied and emotional dynamics of reincorporation
Becoming an insurgent against a specific political order is a difficult position to embody. It takes different shapes. For example, not all the farianas were armed when the peace agreement was signed; some were already out of the FARC-EP for different reasons (for example, they had been captured, deserted or started to work in urban militancy), and others were not carrying a gun (for example, urban militants). This calls for a broader understanding of reincorporation, with all the complexity of ‘re-embodying civilian norms and values’ (Anctil Avoine, 2021: 7). For instance, many farianas have stated that for combatants and urban militants (armed and unarmed), the peace agreement has incurred an embodied and emotional rupture. Even in the political and armed branches, the militants were organised in compartmented cells of five to six people and operated underground. The peace agreement meant undergoing the de-compartmentation and de-clandestinisation of their lives,14 provoking several changes in their bodies, emotions, identities and political militancy. This section shows the ontological interconnections between the embodied and emotional processes of war and farianas’ militancy in the reincorporation setting.
Disembodying military discipline: women’s experience
What does a woman insurgent body go through in transitioning to civilian life? (Victoria Sandino, quoted in Simanca Herrera, 2023: 15)
What Weber (2021c) demonstrated in the case of women guerrilleras in Guatemala is also striking for the majority of farianas: through discipline, the revolution has occupied their whole emotional and political space, contributing to the erasure of the self outside of the boundaries of the clandestine and military organisation.
In wars, there is an ‘instrumentalisation of the feminine’, a constant oscillation between the exaltation and repression of femininity (Esguerra Rezk, 2014: 187). It is a ‘functional femininity’, where women’s bodies must be functional for armed combat (Dietrich, 2017). Feminine corporeality becomes both an object of desire and an obstacle to war, resulting in a reshaping and perpetual shift between repertoires of femininity and masculinity. This equality in function (not in power) allows for a certain form of emancipation from the norms associated with femininity (Esguerra Rezk, 2014), which seems to work as a ‘de-gendering’ of women (Gonzales Vaillant et al, 2012: 75) to attain uniformity as combatants.
While the labour of women combatants sustains militarisation processes (Hedström, 2022), several aspects of the female body contradict war logics, such as menstruation and reproduction. Some women ex-combatants even claim that these aspects do not have their space in militarised structures.15 For example, in the FARC-EP, one of the strictest controls on women’s embodiment was reproduction (Caicedo Bohórquez, 2018): the productivity of war required the negation of reproduction. This means that women’s bodies were rigorously regulated through armed discipline, as well as through self-regulation; as one of the farianas said, ‘One is a guerrillera or one is a mother.’16
Thinking about farianas’ embodiment processes involves reflecting on the ‘disembodiment’ of military discipline. According to Villamil Castellanos (2018: 5), ‘reincorporation implies the rupture of the insurgent order, in terms of its military structure, of its political work, of the constructed gender relations, and spatiality to which it was linked’. This shift is what it etymologically signifies: ‘re-embodying’ another political location. It means to undo the ‘cells’ structure, which implies strict vertical orders: you must understand that ‘you are no longer a guerrillera, there will be no more orders’.17 This embodied rupture with vertical hierarchies (the organic structure of the guerrilla group) is biopolitical: it breaks the military ordinance of bodies where, initially, more importance was given to the combatants’ functionality at the expense of their embodiment and emotions (Ascanio Noreña et al, 2019). While this affected both men and women, feminised bodies experienced this differently because, for them, militarisation was paired with reproductive control. Similarly, the end of gender regimes based on equal functions and military discipline affects them disproportionally as they need to readapt their bodies to other expectations (for example, of femininity or motherhood).
Therefore, laying down the weapon is an emotionally charged event (Anctil Avoine, 2021). As a guerrillera said, ‘Your weapon is your liver; it is another part of your body’,18 implying that reincorporation is a detachment of the military embodiment.19 The weapon combatants carry is an extension of their body; through this object, they feel that they are attached to life. The weapon becomes a ‘sticky object’ (Ahmed, 2014: 11), an object charged with emotions towards which the weight of survival is directed. For women particularly, this implies a sense of loss in security: as one of the participants said, ‘It is the importance of the gun as a gendered weapon.’20 Although they recognise in the long-term reincorporation that ‘they do not regret laying down the weapons’,21 for many of the guerrilleras, the gun served as a means of self-defence in terms of war and of protection against gendered violence, which is generally not the case for male combatants. As such, most participants remember disarmament as a symbolic event and a central point of identity reshaping.22
The destructuring of the military discipline significantly impacted the way farianas embody reincorporation. The body’s materiality confronts new realities: some farianas narrate the shock of seeing themselves in a mirror and noticing the embodied changes because of military training.23 Others manifested the relation to illness and ageing, arguing that many people in the reincorporation process would gain weight or experience diseases and stomach pains due to the changes in food and years of consuming tinned food.24 They also said that reshaping their lives after armed struggle has meant a readjustment of how they think, sleep and relate to others. For example, one participant affirmed that she needed to ‘adapt to the “normalcy” of civilian life, to buy a mattress [because] it was shameful to think that other people would see her sleeping on banana leaves’, where she was accustomed to rest.25 However, above all, with many of them, we discussed two important emotions: happiness and nostalgia.
Happiness and nostalgia: the uneasy process of reincorporation
Reincorporation reconfigures the collective–individual parameters and challenges the ‘private–public sphere’ divide. Most women interviewed expressed that the failures of the collective reincorporation26 included in the peace agreement have had differential consequences on women. The most noticeable effect is the recasting of women into a ‘private world’27 and a normalised ‘citizenship’ (Dietrich, 2017). In the interviews, this was often referred to with two emotions: happiness and nostalgia.
It can be argued that reincorporation is associated with ‘good feelings’ and the ‘promise of happiness’, tracing a line between armed violence as living ‘bad feelings’ and reincorporating civilian society as a morally higher virtue in society’s eyes. But what about the ‘unhappy effects of happiness’ (Ahmed, 2010: 2)?
In opposition to how they refer to their ties to the collective in the FARC-EP, most farianas argue that reincorporation is uncertain: they feel less useful than when they were engaged in warfare. They describe this feeling as a form of anxiety and a ‘constant waiting’.28 In fact, the ETCR have become ‘liminal spaces’, where the transition is undefined: spaces of ‘perpetual waiting for a transition that never happens’.29 Some participants associate this feeling with the loss of what ‘future’ means; their struggle has become more diffuse in reincorporation, where happiness depends on one’s own path.
Those ‘waiting sites’ have become political locations where happiness needs reorientation. With the transition to ‘civilian’ society, ‘happiness becomes an individual responsibility, a redescription of life as a project’ (Ahmed, 2010: 10). It is a shift in the life project of ex-combatants, where normative happiness is set up as a goal, one that is framed to respond to the dominant model of joy and prosperity. This model is associated with heteronormativity, where the nuclear family is the unquestioned site of ‘happiness’, and the joy to be found in motherhood. Insurgent happiness is not envisaged; as Nieto-Valdivieso (2017: 78) argues, ‘pleasure and joy have been an overlooked aspect of the experience of female participation in guerrilla groups and politico-military organizations’.
This reframing has meant something different for women. While both women and men combatants experience strong emotions and a reorientation of their lives during the reincorporation process, women are the ones who are reassigned to ‘traditional roles’ and care work (Weber, 2023). They are the ones confronting the mental and physical burden of returning to an individual life, despite the intent to promote collective reincorporation (Anctil Avoine, 2023). Most of the women participants have confronted changes in their embodied experiences: thinking about planning, sexual and reproductive health or even buying the basics for their own personal hygiene.30 They did not have to think about that in the guerrilla group: farianas were active militants, thinking about politics and war, but within the realm of care, the organisation was generally planning for them. Some of them talk about this contradicting relationship with autonomy and decision making,31 not because they cannot do it but because most of their embodied decisions were mediated by the collective (Ascanio Noreña et al, 2019); ‘I have not yet come out of the shell’,32 as one ex-guerrillera said.
There are several ‘regulatory powers’ (Dietrich, 2017: 349) at play that pressure women ex-combatants into re-embodying roles tied to traditional womanhood, such as motherhood, entrenchment into the private sphere or an overemphasis on the family. The maternal body is a probing case: a lot has been said about the FARC-EP post-war ‘baby boom’ (see Houghton, 2017) – an expression that is worth being nuanced (Schmidt, 2021). While many participants said that the peace process opened the possibility of motherhood, they also think that it is difficult to reconcile their insurgent identity, political militancy and the social expectations of motherhood. The ex-combatant reassignment to individual houses, primarily organised around the typical patriarchal normative order, has had many consequences on their definition of family, which they previously understood in the FARC-EP as the familia fariana (Ascanio Noreña et al, 2019). This meant that ‘motherhood and oppressive masculinities remain key obstacles to a stronger practice of active citizenship for women’ (Weber, 2023: 16) in the current transition.
For women particularly, it downplays their insurgent identity and political militancy, as they face a growing burden related to care work imposed by a society where the sexual division of labour is still highly patriarchal. One of the farianas, upset about her life conditions, said: ‘After all those years in the monte,[33] to cook?’ Similarly, a gender advisor working with the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement commented: ‘In the territorial spaces for reincorporation, they [the women] are cooking, taking care of the children, and they don’t have all the opportunities to participate in the political activities organised by the party.’34 The non-recognition impacts of this burden are also exacerbated by the high cost for women to express themselves in public and political life because they embody womanhood. One of the participants said: ‘So much struggle for the collective, and we went out, and the collective gave us nothing.’35 In this sense, the ‘new’ conceptualisation of happiness also becomes an inner contradiction to their militancy.
Additionally, a gender advisor working with the United Nations (UN) Verification Mission commented that this reconfiguration towards an individualistic and private life has led to an increase in violence against women (VAW). According to women militants, in the FARC-EP, when VAW occurred,36 it was usually severely sanctioned; for them, this has an impact on how they can deal with that in the reincorporation setting.37 The absence of disciplinary consequences to punish VAW exposes women to the traditional justice system in Colombia: like all Colombian women, farianas must now ask for ‘state’ protection. Many see that as a failure of their many years of struggle for a more just society.
Remembering the armed struggle, many farianas consider that belonging to the insurgency allowed them to break traditional perceptions about rural women in Colombia, especially regarding autonomy and sexual freedom. While most women interviewed recognised the rampant machismo existing in civilian society and the war setting,38 they also pointed out that ‘the idea of the feminine and the masculine in the guerrilla is very diffuse … many roles are transformed’,39 as if the war-related labour contributed to de-gendering some functions naturally assigned to each gender. Even if relationships were mediated by the war system, this has had some positive impacts for some women. For example, they tend to prioritise relationships with other ex-combatants, as they feel the gender roles are not understood well by ‘the civilian men’.40 As one participant affirmed, couple relationships and the impact of reincorporation on those affective bonds have not been reflected upon.41 In heterosexual relationships, most of the farianas still consider a difference between being with another ‘ex-guerrillero’ and being with a ‘civilian man’.
In this context, nostalgia becomes a powerful – and maybe structuring – feeling mentioned in several interviews and other research (Nieto-Valdivieso, 2017; Ascanio Noreña et al, 2019). Many ex-FARC-EP members feel ‘nostalgic’ about their time in the organisation, considering that, now, ‘the small bubble of the familia fariana’ is torn apart (Barrios Sabogal and Richter, 2019: 770). Nostalgia is a contradictory feeling that inhabits most of the women interviewed: accepting their new non-violent way of engaging politically, they also feel they have lost ‘something’. They associate guerrilla warfare with such categories as camaraderie, sensitivity, friendship and amor guerrillero [guerrila love].42 Reincorporation, in turn, is felt as the end of collective love, as detachment and disunity.43 For example, one ex-guerrillera was still expressing feelings of nostalgia in 2022, when we had our conversation about her permanency in the ETCR: ‘For me, it is nostalgic to lose this unity, this compañerismo [companionship], this fraternity that was existing in the guerrilla.’44
The feeling of nostalgia is reflected in how farianas have responded to the growing individualisation of reincorporation since the signing of the peace agreement.45 In their gender strategy, they highlight that ‘the voice of ex-guerrilla women, their experiences and knowledge cannot be forgotten’ (FARC, 2020: 20), including how care, food administration and communal organisation were thought and practised. The National Council of Reincorporation insisted on the centrality of care economy activities to remove any obstacle preventing women from participating in productive projects and politics (Mesa Técnica de Género del CNR, 2019: 51, 58). Their challenge is then to start thinking about collective responses to their claims for gender equality. One of the most powerful has been the translation of their armed combat into the consolidation of insurgent feminism, which is addressed in the following section as a form of continuum of militancy.
Farianas’ insurgent feminism: between consolidation and setbacks
We are revolutionary women … and we have something very beautiful … which is the insurgent feminism … because we will continue to be insurgent. (Olga Marín, quoted in Mujer Fariana, 2019)
Farianas assume that their proposal of insurgent feminism is still ‘under construction’,46 and it is an ‘act of justice and vindication of [their] role as insurgent and revolutionary women’ (Simanca Herrera, 2023: 71). It is about staying insurgent. Here, I propose to contribute to recent and emerging debates about farianas’ insurgent feminism (Sandoval Acosta et al, 2018; Devia López, 2021; Simanca Herrera, 2023).
Women have always been part of the FARC-EP’s insurgent project, so farianas’ ideas about women’s political struggles and armed combat are not new. Even though they recognise that they were not labelling this as ‘feminism’, senior farianas explained how they had already reclaimed their rights and equal functions to men in the 1980s.47 The FARC-EP’s internal norms showcase the long-standing pressures by women combatants inside the ranks to access combat functions and reach middle-level commandments of mixed units. Very early, important figures like Mariana Páez, a commandant, started to politically situate women’s role in combat, arguing for the importance of joining both communist and women’s struggles (Mujer Fariana, 2013). However, above all, gender equality – more than feminism – in the FARC-EP militancy was powered in the 1990s by Olga Marín and Victoria Sandino (Devia López, 2021). In the wake of the post-armed struggle for feminism in El Salvador or Guatemala, as well as in Colombia with other insurgencies like the M-19 (Herrera, 2010; Dietrich, 2017; Elston, 2020), Marín and Sandino discussed more thoroughly women’s inclusion in the FARC-EP. As one ex-guerrillera mentioned, ‘The struggle was not carried out only by men; in the 1970 Conference, rights equality is given, and the women are placed on the same level as men.’48 Therefore, ‘insurgent women see their experience as part of the historical struggles and conquests of the women leaders in Indigenous, anticolonial, independentist, suffragist and feminist struggles’ (CEV, 2021: 1:46–59). For these reasons, the proposal of insurgent feminism must be understood through the legacy of armed and clandestine organisations, with an emphasis on the continuum of the forms of political militancy.
Through their experience of ‘functional equality’ in war and the history of revolutionary feminism in Latin America, the farianas started to increasingly discuss their role in war and peace (Dietrich, 2017; Weber, 2021b). In 2013, during the Havana peace negotiations, farianas increasingly voiced their political demands around women’s political rights within the guerrilla group and Colombian society. They started their webpage, Mujer Fariana, in agreement with some FARC-EP commanders – though not all. Despite the political experience of Sandino and Marín, their ‘guerrillera knowledge was put in doubt’, even by other men and women FARC-EP members.49 However, they persisted and started to rethink their position within the FARC-EP, actively reclaiming the ‘guerrillera’ embodiment as an important foundation of their fariana identity. As explained by Devia López (2021), the work of the four founders of the webpage was central to reflecting, through feminism, on the history of women in the FARC-EP. It was also an opportunity to guarantee higher and more visible participation in the negotiations (Phelan and True, 2021). On that basis, the peace process has been a strategic opportunity for the farianas to reorient their militancy towards feminism through different activities, such as feminist schools, dialogue with grass-roots organisations and the international community, mass-based communications, and the gender subcommittee (Boutron, 2020; Devia López, 2021; Simanca Herrera, 2023).
In theorising insurgent feminism, the farianas drew on their war experiences to publish working documents within the political party and to participate in feminist collectives. They first published the ‘Tesis de mujer y género para el Congreso Constitutivo del Partido FARC-EP’50 (FARC, 2017) and, a pedagogy-oriented document, Feminismo Insurgente: Una apuesta fariana de paz51 (Sandoval Acosta et al, 2018). These documents conceptualise insurgent feminism as having an ‘emancipatory character’ and being built on the need for the ‘redistribution of wealth’ and ‘class struggle’. As Victoria Sandino (Simanca Herrera, 2023: 72) argues, it is linked to the ‘collective effort in the revolutionary and guerrillera struggle [that also] includes popular women’. Many participants in my research insisted on this ‘feminismo de clase’52 (‘class feminism’) as an essential axis of their feminism. Equally central is the idea of ‘feminismo propio’ (‘feminism in their own terms’): their feminism must assume the ‘current challenges of building a stable, lasting and inclusive peace’ (FARC, 2017: 1–2). Insurgent feminism is, therefore, a ‘revolutionary conception of feminisms, consolidating the dialectical synthesis between the experiences of women’s revolutionary struggles throughout history, with the feminist experience of our organisation, from which the political line of feminism of our party is constructed’ (FARC, 2017: 1–2).
Insurgent feminism is conceptualised as revolutionary, anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist (FARC, 2017). Consequently, the farianas refuse the ‘demobilisation’ that usually characterises DDR programmes and opt instead for a ‘remobilisation’ (Boutron, 2017), this time, without arms. This refusal is also strongly tied to the ‘recognition of the legacy of the insurgency’ (Anctil Avoine, 2023: 154). It means that the farianas’ feminism lies directly in their physical, emotional and affective experience of armed and clandestine militancy,53 which is one of the most important aspects of the continuum of militancy. As one of the participants affirmed: ‘Insurgent feminism, which is disputing the gender order, is based on the historical memory of what was experienced in war … insurgent feminism, instead of a complex theory, is a practice.’54
Indeed, farianas insist on being included in the political realm as ‘sujetas políticas’ (‘political subject, feminised’) and in opposition to patriarchal and capitalist domination. They oppose previous DDR programmes, which generally ‘re-fashioned [them] as non-actors, apolitical and non-combatants … to pressure them to embody socially accepted civilian traits and qualities’ (Dietrich, 2017: 10). Insurgent feminism is, accordingly, a political tool for the farianas’ fight to ‘continue to live and exist as political subjects’ (Barrera Téllez, 2017: 5). They have put it this way: ‘As Colombians and insurgents who come from a participative experience typical of our collective, we will not return to our household in traditional roles; we want to be a motor of change and examples of liberation’ (Sandino Palmera, 2016).
In their political reincorporation, the farianas insisted on their embodied, affective and militant memories. The strategy they designed assesses the importance of ‘historical memory for women guerrillas that recognise the causes of their involvement in the insurgent struggle, their contributions and political proposals’ (FARC, 2020: 21). This implies considering the ‘experience and the appropriation of the collective and community logic characteristic of insurgent life which, in the context of reincorporation, finds an opportunity to be strengthened’ (FARC, 2020: 24). Through this collective knowledge, the ‘insurgent woman historical subject’ is recognised and should be embraced as part of the political possibilities of reincorporation. For example, an insightful experience has been conducted in the ETCR of Caño Indio: farianas of this region have gathered their memories and their different feelings through short autobiographies about their transitions to their ‘new life’,55 reclaiming their political militancy through their own voices. Victoria Sandino (Simanca Herrera, 2023) and Tanja Nijmeijer (2021) also wrote autobiographical narratives. However, such initiatives remain sparse, as confirmed by Sandino (Simanca Herrera, 2023), and there are some tensions in the landscape of post-war militancy, as succinctly56 explored in the following subsection.
Emerging tensions
Insurgent feminism was framed as a collective initiative of ex-FARC-EP women. However, as in many feminist movements, differences have arisen between the farianas and within the political party.57 In recent years, two important figures of the farianas’ feminism, Tanja Nijmeijer and Victoria Sandino, resigned from the political party. Several other women have left too.58 According to Sandino, the political party born out of the peace agreement did not offer a favourable terrain for the ‘political participation of women ex-guerrillera, to the point that many were simply discarded or, when not discarded, discriminated against or persecuted for their autonomous and feminist positions’ (Simanca Herrera, 2023: 32). As some have started to channel their militancy otherwise, others have also decided to stay in the political party, where they must fight for their political space.59
Similar experiences of revolutionary feminism in Colombia and Latin America (Herrera, 2010; Shayne, 2004; Weber, 2021c) have shown that it can become highly problematic for women to adhere to a feminist/women’s rights struggle in post-war situations, especially in their relationship with their male comrades and within guerrilla-born political parties. Moreover, insurgent women face social stigma, and their transition to politics faces patriarchal obstacles. As Sandino argues, this is part of a larger process of political and gendered contention60 of insurgent women, with the normalisation of political violence and social stigma against them ‘before, during and after [their] insurgent status’ (Simanca Herrera, 2023: 31).
Thus, discussions have emerged in farianas’ meetings regarding the legitimacy of ‘whom’ is speaking in their name: is being an ex-combatant a precondition for farianas’ feminist struggle? What does ‘mujer fariana’ identity refer to? How is the figure of combatant challenging feminism? How are affective and political bonds reconfigured, especially when facing the disintegration of the collective?
The transition to civilian society has come with many political challenges: ‘When all the fariana collective [urban militants, combatants and Communist Party militants] has been mixed [with the disarming and de-compartmentation], certain hierarchies, prejudices, and struggles for recognition and representation also began.’61 Reincorporation means negotiating with the collective. The combat is no longer armed; it is one of speech and dialogue. Within the newly born party, women’s place in politics remains contentious. In the absence of military structures, power inequalities have resurfaced like in other post-peace agreement settings (KC, 2019; Weber, 2021c; Simanca Herrera, 2023). Also, some farianas felt that others were becoming ‘too radical’ with feminism,62 perceiving them as too intense in their focus on feminism; instead, they would express preferring ‘gender equality’. This is partly because most of them envisioned the struggle for their rights as tied to their male comrades, as in the guerrilla group, a vision that they feel is not very welcomed in some feminist spaces.
Insurgent feminism is relatively new in the ideological armature of the FARC-EP. As such, farianas’ ideas about feminism differ greatly depending on their positionality in the power hierarchies, their relation to the Havana peace process and the region where they are reincorporating (Ehasz, 2020). This makes it uneasy to integrate the different views on gender roles and reshape the Marxist–Leninist ideals. Tensions are thus emerging; for example, the choice of ‘insurgent feminism’ is not entirely accepted the same way by all women. Some participants prefer to call themselves ‘mujeres del común’ (‘common women’)63 because they feel it reflects women’s diversity in the political movement. Others would argue, ‘I consider myself a fariana woman, but I am not part of the group’,64 or some affirm that farianas’ feminist movement should only concern women who actively participated in combat. This shows two tensions for the farianas’ movement: (1) the difficulty of dealing with the diversity of its members, coming from different positionalities (rural, urban, trans, Indigenous, peasants and so on); and (2) the conflict around the combatant figure, or who the ‘legitimate’ voices for advocating insurgent feminism are – a question of inclusion/exclusion.
The management of these friction points will depend on internal coordination and the association with other feminist groups (Céspedes-Báez, 2019). However, in 2019 and 2022, the farianas mentioned tensions with the mainstream feminist movements in Colombia. Theorising feminism from a war standpoint has created tensions with the anti-militaristic and pacifist orientation of feminist movements in Colombia. Since women’s violence and contentious politics have been historically taboo (Fitzroy, 2001), farianas have a difficult double position in the feminist movement, where they must find their voice amid a form of feminism that has rather mostly promoted a ‘version of womanhood in the context of conflict tied exclusively to victimization and peaceful mobilization’ (Céspedes-Báez, 2019: 61). As one of the gender advisors in Havana said: ‘The feminist movement has always stigmatized the farianas’ and portrayed them as ‘victims of FARC-EP patriarchy’,65 thereby erasing their agency. This echoes other processes in Latin America, where women ex-combatants, even after several years of disarming, have been feeling not accepted by feminist movements (Nieto-Valdivieso, 2020).
Continuing the combat, transforming reincorporation?
Combat is felt through the body. Yet, for women, being an insurgent implies paying a high social price in post-war militancy and the exercise of feminism.
In this article, I have shown the embodied and affective transitions that farianas have experienced during reincorporation through the lenses of embodied discipline, nostalgia and happiness. I have also inquired into farianas’ proposal of insurgent feminism and made a preliminary assessment of the tensions emerging in its consolidation.
Exploring farianas’ experiences of war and reincorporation has offered two overarching contributions. First, theoretically, it has contributed to the field of (feminist) war studies by pushing forward an analysis of (de)militarisation of embodied discipline in armed insurgencies from the specific position of women militants. In turn, this has contributed to the field of DDR studies, where it is necessary to include embodiment and affect as analytical categories. The article has also shown the centrality of insurgent subjectivities in the transformations experienced by women militants in the different stages of their political, clandestine and armed involvement in leftist politics. It has contributed to political reincorporation, which is still under-studied (Ehasz, 2020).
Second, practically, it has opened lines of inquiry for the conceptualisation and praxis of insurgent feminism. The article has contributed to theorising this concept, an important building block of the continuum of militancy of women ex-combatants in their collective reincorporation. It has also traced paths for reincorporation programmes, especially in three ways: the necessity of considering insurgent identities; the importance of understanding reincorporation from a collective point of view (including collective emotions); and, finally, the centrality of embodiment and emotions in post-armed militancy.
As insurgent feminism is still under construction and we have yet to witness how the peace talks between the Ejército de liberación nacional [National Liberation Army] (ELN) and the Colombian government will evolve, there is much to be researched concerning women militants’ post-war feminist combats. Of those research venues, an intersectional analysis of ex-FARC-EP militancy would be highly relevant, especially across rural–urban divides, categories like race and class, or war-inherited hierarchies. Also, an inquiry into gender differences in the experience of emotions would be a compelling avenue for research, such as how men’s militancy is affected by nostalgia or how they envision their changing masculinities. Finally, the constant negotiation with the collective of militants has yet to be researched. As I have argued, several women have opted out of the Comunes party, while others who never engaged in the organisation have opted in. These changes in militancy offer a compelling ground to assess the continuum of militancy and the complexity of women’s militant identities in militarised contexts.
Notes
This is the official term adopted by the FARC-EP during La Havana’s negotiations. It is also a political location in construction where some tensions have emerged since 2016 (see Devia López, 2021).
I26, Bucaramanga, March 2022.
I translated all the quotes in Spanish or French.
Initially the Fuerza alternativa revolucionaria del común (‘Common Alternative Revolutionary Force’). In the face of social stigma, the ex-FARC-EP changed the name to Partido Comunes (‘Common Party’) in 2021.
Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for fleshing out this contribution.
Child recruitment has been used – and still is – by all the armed groups in Colombia, including the FARC-EP (see Higgs, 2020). Official figures report that over 9,000 children have been recruited by various armed groups, and estimates of recruitment of minors by the FARC-EP oscillate around 50 per cent, though it is also estimated that 80 per cent join voluntarily (Reed, 2014; Higgs, 2020). In my interviews, several ex-guerrilleras stated that they had entered the FARC-EP while they were still under 18 years old but that they had not been forced to do so.
For an in-depth analysis of how anti-gender advocates used the historical peace deal to advance their political agenda, see Corredor (2021).
For an analysis of gender regimes in insurgent groups, see Dietrich (2017).
I13, urban militant, Cúcuta, 2019.
‘Chain of affects’ differs from snowballing in its focus on emotions and the affective bonds to contact research participants. In my case, I had worked previously with several women and feminist organisations in Colombia, which was a strong affective starting point to connect with the farianas and people working on implementing the peace agreement.
Ethics approvals were received from Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada, 2019) and Etikprövningsmyndigheten (Sweden, 2022). For the interviews, each participant completed and signed an anonymised consent form.
I acknowledge the complexity of these categories and the diversity of the roles occupied by women in the FARC-EP clandestine organisation. Boulanger-Martel (2022) explains this with the M-19: the urban militants tend to have parallel lives as insurgents, civil servants, students or union leaders, workers, and parents, and those roles vary across regions, time frames and political contexts.
I13, urban militant; I11, ex-guerrillera.
I10, I13, urban militants; I11, I21, ex-guerrilleras, 2019. ‘De-compartmentation’ means the possibility of knowing all the militants, as compared to previously, when their relationships with other militants were reduced to their cell. ‘De-clandestinisation’ refers to the passage from clandestine militancy to the open practice of politics in society. Recently, authors have warned that there is a process of re-clandestinisation of women militants (Simanca Herrera, 2023).
I9, ex-guerrillera, Bucaramanga, 2019.
I3, ex-guerrillera, Bogotá, 2019.
I13, urban militant, Cúcuta, 2019.
I9, ex-guerrillera, Bucaramanga, 2019.
Certain experiences here also concern male combatants. However, I focus on women’s narratives and the textures of their militancy.
I13, urban militant, Cúcuta, 2019.
I27, ex-guerrillera, Caño Indio, 2022.
I11, ex-guerrillera, Caño Indio, 2019.
I9, ex-guerrillera, Bucaramanga, 2019.
I14, I15, ex-guerrilleras, Filipinas, 2019.
I17, ex-guerrillera, Caño Indio, 2019.
In collective reincorporation, citizenship, political participation and community building are core aspects (Vargas-Parra, 2023).
I20 ex-guerrillera, Bogotá; I15, ex-guerrillera, Filipinas, 2019.
I14, ex-guerrillera, Filipinas, 2019.
Fieldnotes, Filipinas, 2019.
Fieldnotes, Filipinas and Caño Indio, 2019.
I11, ex-guerrillera, Caño Indio, 2019.
I27, Caño Indio, 2022.
‘Monte’ refers to the ‘bush’, both as a geographical location and as the symbolic place of the guerrilla.
I1, Bogotá, 2019.
I23, ex-guerrillera, Filipinas, 2019.
Sexual violence was perpetrated by all the armed groups in Colombia, including the FARC-EP (see CNMH, 2017).
Ex-guerrilleras from Caño Indio have built a very interesting project called ‘Puntadas por la paz’ (‘Peace Stitches’) (Martin Laiton, 2020) to promote women’s economic autonomy and tackle gender-based violence.
I3, I20, ex-guerrilleras, Bogotá, 2019.
I5, gender advisor, Bogotá, 2019.
I16, ex-guerrillera, Caño Indio, 2019.
I13, urban militant, Cúcuta, 2019.
Guerrilleras understand it as two special forms of love they experienced in the ranks: one that differs from the normative ideal of marriage; and one that understands love through collective and political actions (Davalos et al, 2019; Avella Daza, 2020).
I17, ex-guerrillera, Caño Indio, 2019.
I26, Caño Indio, 2022.
I3, ex-guerrillera, Bogotá, 2019.
I20, ex-guerrillera, Bogotá, 2019; I26, ex-urban militant, 2022.
I3, I11, I20, ex-guerrilleras, 2019.
I16, Caño Indio, 2019.
I13, urban militant, Cúcuta, 2019.
Translation: ‘Thesis on women and gender for the constitutive congress of the FARC-EP Party’.
Translation: Insurgent Feminism: A Fariana Proposal for Peace.
I6, I10, urban militants; I11, ex-guerrillera, Caño Indio, 2019.
I15, ex-guerrillera, Filipinas, 2019.
I5, gender advisor, Bogotá, 2019.
Fieldnotes, Caño Indio, October 2019. Two books have been produced from these initiatives (Davalos et al, 2019; Comité de género de Caño Indio, 2019).
For a detailed account of emerging tensions and the relationship between farianas’ feminism and the wider feminist movements in Colombia, see Anctil Avoine (2023), Céspedez-Báez (2019) and Céspedes-Báez and Beltrán y Puga (2023).
I20, ex-guerrillera, Bogotá; I25, urban militant, Cúcuta, 2019.
Fieldnotes, March 2022.
I am not only focusing on farianas involved in the political party because I consider that the continuum of militancy includes several forms of political participation.
Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers who suggested highlighting the gendered political contention of insurgent women.
I13, urban militant, Cúcuta, 2019.
I10, urban militant, Bucaramanga, 2019.
I6, I10, urban militants, Bucaramanga, 2019.
I17, ex-guerrillera, Caño Indio, 2019.
I2, Bogotá, 2019.
Funding
This work was supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship under Grant Number CGV-151427 for my PhD dissertation. During my postdoctoral fellowship at Lund University, my work was funded by the Vinnova/Marie Curie Seal of Excellence (under Grant 2021-02012) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (under Grant 756-2021-0617).
Acknowledgements
My reflections here result from collective work, endless feminist discussions and powerful feminist attachments. A very good friend and colleague of mine, Jakeline Vargas Parra, refers to these attachments as a ‘patrimonio de afectos’; thanks to her, Yira Miranda and Nadia Paredes for pushing my limits in research and personally. Thank you, also, to Annika Björkdahl, Ekatherina Zhukova and Markus Holdo for their critical feedback on this piece. I am also grateful to the participants of the panel ‘Gender, Armed Women and Political Violence’ at the 2022 European Conference on Politics and Gender in Ljubljana, especially Lucy Hall, for their comments on an early draft of this article. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback. Above all, many thanks to the farianas of the north-eastern region of Colombia who agreed to dialogue with me and are, every day, trying to build a more gender-just peace for their country.
Author biography
Priscyll Anctil Avoine is a researcher in Feminist Security Studies and an associate senior lecturer at the Department of War Studies, Swedish Defence University, Sweden. She is the director of the feminist and anti-racist collective Fundación Lüvo.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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