Rita Segato explains that the colonial invasion[1] opened wounds caused by the appropriation of our lands, territories, resources, knowledge, as well as through the appropriation of bodies, especially women. This means that Latin American and Caribbean corporeality tell a story, and it is that of the power that colonized them, that left us scarred by racism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, by marginalization.
Dorotea Gómez Grijalva (Guatemalan Maya K´iche) cites the feminists Yuderkys Espinosa (Dominican) and Margarita Pisano (Chilean) when saying that
our bodies are political territories and that, therefore, it is necessary to understand them from a historical perspective, not a biological one,
since they were constructed and named by ideologies and discourses that justified their oppression. In this way, Dorotea considers him to be territory. The body also carries memory, history and knowledge, both of our ancestry and our own personal history. In this way, it is political, and we can rethink and build a story from a reflective, critical and constructive posture.
Thus, we ask ourselves: How does feminism reside - and inhabit us - in and from our body-territories? How to think and think as feminists by and for Latin America and the Caribbean?
From the margins - from the periphery of the periphery - black, indigenous, peasant, trans, lesbian, bisexual, fat, PwD (disabled people), migrant, worker, rural, favela, academic, militant women have woven resistance, placing their bodies and proposing/acting in the political and epistemic scope[2]. They - we - want - want - other ways to define the world, discover it, understand it and thus transform it.
Historically, feminism, at any latitude, has built and shaped movements and organizations, while sewing together theories to explain the concrete reality on which resistance germinates.
Because where our feet tread is where we live our oppressions and, based on our cartographies, we think about how to combat them.
Therefore, Yuderkys Espinosa points out that the feminist politics of our latitude works daily to face the internal and external shackles that keep women in those places arranged for us by the interweaving of power. It is for this reason that we rescue the political and epistemic insurgencies of those who from their - our - bodies and territorialities have sought to build a "nuestroamericano" (nossoamericano) feminism, a historical and strategic responsibility that we have, we, who understand that the path is the struggle against the oppressive patriarchal and colonial capitalist[3] system that is racially structured.
Transiting the thinking and doing of our fellow feminists implies reflecting/reflecting them considering the trenches from which they write and fight. Like those they do in classrooms, in their homes, on the street, in the office, in the factory, in the countryside and in the city, the cry of Latin America will be all feminist! Yes, all, all.
For it will be all feminist to the cry of Community feminists who invite us to question the patriarchal formation, that is, the love triangle between colonization[4], capitalism and patriarchy[5], and to understand the body, the community and territory as a totality where we, the warmis[6], are half and, when they violate us, they also mutilate these spaces of life, reproduction and resistance. To the cry that consigns that
"To decolonize there is a need to depatriarchize".
It will be all feminists with the raised fist of Decolonial feminists who propose the need to find ourselves in the category "mujeres de color" (women of color) and thus together - in unity - to fight the multiple oppressions to which we are subjected in the geopolitical place where we were born, with the class, gender and ethnicity that we carry in our physiognomy. With fists in the air, on the streets and in the academy, they imagine other ways of producing and disseminating knowledge. By word of mouth, stories of life, pain and emancipation spread to be an example and subordinate guide on the paths to the feminist horizon.
It will be all feminist to the rhythm of the drums of Intersectional feminists, who call us to denounce the structure that intersects forms of domination and exploitation over us, our peoples, that cross our struggles, weaving resistance and setting up networks that contain and reinforce popular power. as the main tool. Because we are "las de abajo, las del culo del mundo", we are the ones who fight for recognition and redistribution. And let there be no doubt, let's go against those above!
We don't want the neoliberal 50% sky, nor parity in exploitation or equity in violence. We are in the process of healing ourselves from all patriarchy and the binary, essentialist, colonialist and hegemonic reasons that we carry within us. We want our territoriality to be our paradise, we want a world where other worlds fit!
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Macarena Mercado Mott (Maqui) is a political scientist, Latin American, feminist.
Cynthia L Montalbetti (Chichi) is a sociologist and political scientist, Sudaka, migrant, feminist and fat activist.
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[1] By colonial invasion it is understood that it is about the usurpation/assault which our continent was victim of in 1492 with the arrival of Europeans in our territory.
[2] By epistemology we understand as the area of scientific construction of knowledge.
[4] Colonization is the process by which Europeans -in the case of the Americas- occupied the continent.
[5] Patriarchy according to Lagarde is the social order of power where there is a mode of domination that ensures the supremacy of men -white- and the masculine over the inferiority of women and the feminine.
[6] Warmis means woman in Quechua.
*The text was re-elaborated together, adapted and complemented from a first version published in Argentina by my partner Macarena in 2019. To learn more about the work of the "Fanzine de las pibas" friends, follow their instagram: @Rata_libre; Facebook: ratalibrelr
Photo: #8M demonstration in Chile, 2020.
Readings that helped in the discussion:
ESPINOSA, Y. The Political Body of Feminism. Guatemala, 2010.
GRIJALVA, D. My body is a political territory. In: Decolonizing Voices. notebook n. 1, 2012.
LAGARDE, M. Gender and Feminism. Human Development and Democracy. Madrid: Horas y Horas, 1996, p. 92.
QUIJANO, A. Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America. 2000.
SEGATO, R. The scripture in the body of the women asesinadas in Ciudad Juárez: territory, sovereignty and second state crimes Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, Mexico, 2006.
