"The construction of social representations on the transnational scale of collective action: ideas of nation and region in a Latin American network?

JORGELINA LOZA

Leipzig

Workshop; XV International Summer School of the Graduate School Global and Area Studies of the Research Academy Leipzig and 7th Flying University in Transnational Humanities; 2017

Leipzig Universität

The existence of a Latin American region has been extensively reviewed and discussed. If as a theoretical exercise, we accept the fictional nature of the Latin American region, we find that current transnational experiences are based on the existence of a regional space that includes coincidences, contemporaneity and political similarities. In that context, we propose to study one of the existent movements: the Latin American Female Sex Workers Network (RedTraSex).RedTraSex postulates the existence of a Latin American region based on the construction of a transnational collective action network that takes their claim for the legal recognition of their activity on the global scale. At the same time, from that experience, they change their spaces for action as they build the Latin American region in which they want to live.We propose the analysis of the experience of the RedTraSex to consider the intersection and interaction between the national and the transnational scales of collective action. Women involved in this experience redefine the region from their practices, with an undeniable impact in their sense of local or national, involved in an active process of cultural construction. We propose to deepen the exploration of the construction processes of social representations on the Nation and the (supranational) Region, which coexist as frames of meanings in multiple scales experiences of contemporary collective action. Actors combine those spatial formats in order to achieve their claims.We intend to continue with a line of analysis on cultural constructions that we started in our doctoral research, but with special emphasis on experiences of actors who have crossed the borders of the national space towards a regional construction.Women who build the RedTraSex on a daily basis not only observed the transnational scale as an international framework of political opportunities (Sikkink, 2003), but also built the region to which they wish to belong from their everyday actions (Cabezas, 2004). The construction of a horizontal space, based on coincidences and differences in the kind and amount of resources, functions as a future project that brings together women who exercise a specific activity and claim for their legitimacy in their Nation-States. When they position their political project in global scenarios, they spatialize it and claim their intervention in the region building process. RedTraSex is not alien to the influence of the national contexts of its components, while receiving the impact of regional and international events. RedTraSex interacts with other collective mobilizations, with which it raises differences and demands its inclusion at the same time. It is important to study how they are trying to subvert the existing transnational space. To understand the construction of the regional space that RedTraSex performs, we should observe its link with the Latin American women´s movement and the idea of an "imagined" Latin American feminist community, whose borders are constantly under negotiation (Alvarez, 2003).