Abstract

BETANCOR, Juliana. Reading in the local area: The experience of the women of a community library in Neuquén. Aljaba [online]. 2010, vol.14, pp.89-102. ISSN 1669-5704.

In this paper I present the collective experience of a group of women that runs a community library in the neighborhood of La Sirena in the city of Neuquén. I set the framework of this experience in two contexts: globalization and the particular stage in the life of each of the women involved. The first one allows to see how the local area, the neighborhood, is resignified as a microworld as well as the role that women play in it; the second allows to look into how each one builds her identity as a woman in relation to volunteer and free work and how they deal with the changes imposed both by today's world and by the "second life of women." From the dialogue between these two contexts there arises a tension between what is public and what is private, between the local and the global, between paid time and donated time, between the social and the particular, between the inside and the outside. When each pair is analyzed from a gender perspective, this tension is reconceputalized and makes visible the way in which the unequal relations between men and women is expressed and reproduced in the organization of the territory.

Keywords : Globalization; Local space; The neighborhood; Women; Time; Library; Sexual division of labor.

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