Time with Others: Incarcerated Women and Women Searchers in Contemporary Mexico

Abstract

This article presents two scenarios featured by women whose lives have little to do with the timescales of academia. These are women situated within the current Mexican context, whose lives have been trapped, in different ways, by the implacable rules of invisibility and absence: women imprisoned and women searching for their disappeared. I propose to reflect, with them, on time; or rather, to take the time, with them, to consider what we are doing, from feminist perspectives, from academia, from artistic activism. I maintain that by analyzing their methods we (academics) can reach tools to approach processes we were previously unaware of and, above all, to try to unlearn, undo, and stop doing some things we have uncritically incorporated in our works and life. By doing so, I want to show how the use of time and the possibilities of reconnecting with joy and desire, and doing so collectively, is a key lesson: an undoing that is also a claim to stop doing some things in order to take care of others and to take care “with others”.