Against punishment and patriarchy
Untitled. Mixed media © verteselva.
Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • October 2, 2026 • Leer en castellano
Last month a political earthquake devastated the Program for Feminist Studies and Intervention (PEIF), which is based at the Center for Higher Studies in Mexico and Central America (CESMECA) in southern Mexico. Overnight, the program lost the four faculty members who sustained it and allowed it to exist.
On September 11—a day steeped in memories—Teresa Garzón, Delmy Cruz, Karla Somosa, and Marisol Anzo-Escóbar, faculty researchers at the PEIF, were given notice that their contracts were being terminated for alleged misconduct including discrimination and violence against an employee of the graduate program.
The notification was sent via email on by the legal office of the Autonomous University of Sciences and Arts of Chiapas (UNICACh), the public university of which CESMECA is a part.
The professors were granted no hearings with any higher university authority before their dismissal, nor were they called to participate in any form of mediation after a complaint was filed by an administrative staff member, even though two of those now dismissed are tenured faculty members and researchers. Instead, all four were summarily dismissed, leaving the graduate program adrift.
The dismantling of the PEIF severely impacts the academic careers of more than 20 students who are currently enrolled in the master’s and doctoral programs in Feminist Studies and Intervention. It also disrupts the work of many other colleagues conducting postdoctoral research at the PEIF. Why such urgency to shut down this center for education and research?
The backstory is a long one, and it reeks of retaliation against four tenacious, rebellious, and disruptive feminist professors. It suggests a kind of punishment masquerading as justice, even as it claims to defend against reprehensible actions of racism and violence.
This is an all too familiar tactic: settling disagreements by framing the discussion within a worn out binary between total innocence and guilt. In this case, the UNICACh administration and CESMECA leadership first imposed punishment—dismissal—and only then proceeded to launch an investigation. They presumed guilt and struck first, cloaking everything in the guise of scandal to further weaken the fired professors’ chances of mounting a legal defense.
The binary between innocence and guilt frames any approach to the issue within the framework of a courtroom that aims neither to remedy—should any wrongdoing have occurred—nor to repair what may have been fractured or broken. The innocence/guilt dichotomy pushes toward punishment, not toward truth and justice.
Victim-oppressor-redeemer
The tactic used to strike at and continue dismantling the PEIF in the wake of the layoffs has been to stifle an urgent debate on anti-racist and anti-patriarchal practices and struggles within the workplace that is the university.
In posts on social media, the issue has been presented as a scandal in a manner that’s saturated with criticism of specific behaviors of certain women professors.
This obscures and postpones necessary debates about administration inside educational institutions, as well as about intense and growing administrative control over the activities of professors and students. This issue is, in my view, at the heart of the problem we are addressing: a structural question of how and to what extent the rigidity of the university can be subverted.
Why discuss the wage gap between full-time faculty and precaritized faculty working under the most fragile and varied contracts? Why discuss the future of young PhDs who cannot find suitable and satisfying work after striving to complete their studies?
Better to avoid addressing these issues, and what better way than to drown them out with a smear campaign against professors, who are portrayed as cruel, arbitrary, and rude! Of course! After the dismissal, legitimacy must be manufactured to cover up an illegal decision.
In the first few days following the expulsion, allegations were floated to amplify the image of the professors as “tormentors” of students who, by contrast, are cast as victims—innocent and faultless.
Redemption—of course!—comes from on high: the righteous authorities at CESMECA and UNICACh step in, wiping out a space for persistent and radical feminist thought with their blazing/high-handed decision to summarily dismiss the professors.
Fantastic! Through the perverse patriarchal triangle of victim-oppressor-redeemer, institutional order is restored. The women who are far from being perfect, and who are in fact full of contradictions, but who fight to open spaces for others, have been discredited.
And the PEIF, founded more than 10 years ago, has been dealt a fatal blow.
PEIF's stormy history
The PEIF was founded in 2014 by Mercedes Olivera, Teresa Garzón, and Teresa Ramos. Its aim was to go beyond gender studies by positioning itself as an openly feminist center for education and research. Furthermore, it encouraged feminist activism by insisting on systematically linking the study of women’s struggles and ideas to anti-patriarchal practice.
Olivera (1934–2022) was a prominent left-wing Mexican feminist anthropologist who dedicated many years of her life to educational work among women. She was a model of solidarity, particularly with Indigenous women of Guatemala who were displaced during the worst periods of what is referred to as the internal armed conflict, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
The PEIF has never been straightforward, complacent, or smooth in its inner workings. When something moves against the tide, intense turbulence is to be expected.
The PEIF underwent a split a few years after it was founded. This happened when Olivera was challenged by younger women, and particularly by Garzón.
The feminist graduate program has a history of disagreements and conflicts among colleagues within the CESMECA that have never fully healed.
Garzón herself, along with Cruz and the other now-expelled professors, have kept the project going until now. They have maintained it as a space for feminist thought and struggle in southern Mexico through tremendous effort.
Where do we stand?
Judging one another and spreading accusatory testimonies to fuel a social media scandal that undermines PEIF's continued existence is, in my view, the worst possible approach to the conflict.
Instead, feminist collective practice could be enriched by opening up spaces for debate and reflection on this contentious issue among activists who also study and carry out research. In any case, I believe we should position ourselves “against” the practice of summary dismissal and the destruction of the belligerent and challenging legacy of Mercedes Olivera.
In the 1990s, when Mujeres Creando began flooding the streets of La Paz, Bolivia, with feminist graffiti, there was one I particularly liked: “You want me to be a virgin, you want me to be a saint—I’m sick and tired of you!”
It was a slogan that challenged the patriarchal prerogative that set standards of perfection—virginity, sanctity—to which women were expected to conform.
While the power of those standards has gradually faded because of the tireless struggles and critiques of countless feminists, it seems we now need to establish new terms of acceptance and recognition among ourselves—ones that are neither arrogant, nor are they demands for perfection on the part of another.
These terms ought to name an ethical pact among diverse individuals, and identify that which becomes unacceptable for fruitful collective coexistence. These terms should establish ways to manage shared practices while respecting differences and without stifling each person’s uniqueness, something especially important in a context that involves daily and ongoing interactions, as in university classrooms.
If we continue down the path of expanding lists of grievances, blocking potential paths to balance our coexistence, demanding ideal and perfect conduct, infinite patience, and inexhaustible capacities to support and care for others—then we will be building a new version of that old saying: “You want me to be a saint; you want me to be a virgin.”
Over the years we have explored and used a wide variety of actions to denormalize patriarchal forms of violence that intertwine and limit our creative possibilities.
With great effort, we have taken collective measures to create and sustain spaces for ourselves. Some are within institutions like universities, others as self-managed projects dedicated to nurturing diverse forms of cooperation and our mutual capacities.
What we must never forget is that nothing we create is secure.
The erosion of patriarchal pacts—and, above all, of dominant culture, with its enduring patriarchal and colonial imprints—is slow. Sometimes, exasperatingly so. That’s why persistent acts of undermining, denial, disregard, and destruction of what women and dissidents build and sustain continue to resurface.
We see this happen when the very tools we have collectively built to critique the intertwined systems of oppression and exploitation that suffocate societies are turned against us.
In the case of the professors fired from the PEIF, it appears that in order to call themselves feminists and to have the right to a stable job where they can continue to teach and research, our colleagues would have to be saintly and perfect.
Adopting an “us versus them” mentality is not helpful. And if there is so much unrest within the PEIF, perhaps it would be fruitful for other committed feminist academics to help resolve the conflicts, to help set limits on certain behaviors, and to encourage the development of the ethical pact we seem to need.
I choose to stand with the compañeras who have been arbitrarily and unjustly dismissed. And that does not mean, in any way, requiring them to be “saints.”
It simply means showing up consistently in the fight against injustice.
