Available Women: Making Methodological Sense of Sexual Exploitation in Historical Biography

In interviews and her own writings about her life, the Mexican folksinger and activist Concha Michel makes repeated references to various forms of sexual abuse and exploitation — the law student who left her pregnant and unmarried, the Communist Party organizer who lured her to a remote area outside Jalapa only to make sexual overtures, reports that the Party circulated a list of “available women” for Communists visiting from abroad. Sex was central to Michel’s social and political analysis, making it, as Anita Brenner noted in her diary, “the key to things, and the plane upon which woman’s position is placed.” In Michel’s renderings, however, sex never appears as a source of pleasure but only as exploitation, labor, or deviance. This paper explores the methodological challenges of making sense of these episodes and the role they played in Michel’s self-fashioning as well as her disillusionment with the Marxist left.