Blank Page: Resistance Discourses to Identify and Document Violence against Women in Academia

Abstract

Whereas women experience violence in many different ways, perpetrators use institutional practices and behaviors to exercise control over women through coercion, physical force, or silencing. This study reviews and analysis the legal framework and public discourses associated with reports of complaints addressed to the University of Veracruz. Mexico has a legal framework to promote women rights, whereas the university has a regulatory framework to support women’s well-being in the academic environment. Nonetheless, there is a discourse of resistance that uses strategies of naturalization, attention diversion, and practices that legitimate violence against women in the academic environment. The lack of indicators of violence against woman, like a blank page, it is more than the absence of information in a document; it anticipates hidden and misunderstood processes regarding experiences that women face in the academic environment.