Women’s Activist Narratives: Participation and Transformation between the Personal and the Political

Abstract

This article presents a contribution to understanding the activist actuation from cultural psychology and elaborates a theoretical and empirical approach based on the concepts of transformative human action, moral commitment, and production of biographical narratives in its political dimension. It presents the qualitative research that studied the narratives of 12 women activists for sexual and reproductive rights in Entre Ríos, Argentina. Researchers carried out a thematic and dialogical analysis of the themes, positions, and emotions. Results show that personal-biographical elements are plotted along with other components of social or political nature in participants’ narratives. The positions are fluid between I and we, while emotions and evaluations appear in relation to the activist participation itself and the processes of social transformation. The interrelation between theoretical elements and empirical results allows advancing in a conceptualization of feminist activisms from the cultural psychology point of view, with emphasis on the processes of participation and transformation in both personal and socio-political dimensions.