Abstract

Too often, women from the Global South have been portrayed as victims of gender violence in need of empowerment. Yet in the rural south of Mexico City, many Indigenous women expressed feeling strong, even powerful, despite their varied experiences of violence. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that their felt power was often rooted in their realities. Nahuatl-speaking communities have historically recognized certain kinds of power in women (including healing magic) and others in men (including political power). Women's narratives revealed complex interactions between women's and men's power. Women often represented themselves not as helpless victims but as having the power to change their circumstances, for better or worse. I introduce felt power as a conceptual tool for centering Indigenous women's experiential, embodied, and spiritual knowledge in addressing the gender-based violence they often experienced. Felt power is derived from Dian Million's framework of felt theory, which represents Indigenous people's narratives as feeling-based theory-making, rather than raw data to be theorized into abstraction by non-Indigenous thinkers. I suggest that considering and respecting Indigenous women's felt power in the face of violence will contribute to decolonizing the study of gender violence and development agencies’ responses to it.