1Feminism is not a universal movement per se. Over the last decades, women from a variety of backgrounds, including indigenous, african-american and women of color, have pointed out how hegemonic feminism is intrinsically exclusionary and elitist, as it relies on ethnic, racial, class and gender premises that are considered to be all-inclusive and all-encompassing. Moreover, critiques from the Souths of the world (including the Souths of the North) have addressed how hegemonic feminism operates within the structures of capitalism and coloniality, to the point of becoming a tool of neocolonialism, hence of oppression, by means of the civilizing project.
2Theoretical and praxical revisions of the tenets of feminism include decolonial epistemologies from academia and movements based primarily in Latin America. In this sense, and to give a proper representation of the different nuances and contexts of both new theories and praxis, it is important to reference them in the plural as decolonial feminisms. These novel epistemologies, however, do not merely challenge the assumptions of white hegemonic feminism, as they prioritize a different understanding of the concept of «woman», or better, of «the Third World woman», her agency, and her decolonial political, social and cultural context.
3Based on a theoretical and historical review, and employing a decolonial perspective, the present investigation attempts to push the boundaries of traditional scholarly production, challenging the concepts of theory and knowledge, as well as the processes through which they are produced and legitimized. Latin American decolonial feminisms are, in fact, rooted on the assumption that theory and knowledge are re-made constantly through activism and resistance. Employing a body of literature that also includes concepts formulated outside of the academic realm, the article intends to amplify voices that have been relegated to epistemological peripheries.
4To this purpose, the article offers a short historical overview of hegemonic feminism and its discourse, subsequently analyzing the critiques that have emerged from alternative feminist movements and theories, such as black and chicana feminisms, as well as postcolonial critiques of coloniality and knowledge production. An illustration of Latin American feminisms will allow a better understanding of decolonial feminisms and their plural epistemologies, both at theoretical level and in consideration of practice and movements advancing or reassessing theories on the ground.
5Feminism and feminist struggles have become an important feature of contemporary societies, as well as a major concern for a great number of citizens around the world. It is important to note that feminism, according to Dietz, is “a historically constituted, local and global, social and political movement with an emancipatory purpose and a normative content” (2003: 399). However, over time, European and North American feminism has been identified as hegemonic, as it implies the universality of representation of identities as well as of women’s struggles and revindications. Nevertheless, critiques from marginalized women in the North, as well as women from the Souths of the world, have pointed out its essentialization and othering of women who do not identify with a white, heterosexual, middle-class milieu, as well as its failure to represent women’s hardships in different political, social and cultural contexts. It is, therefore, important, to briefly examine the historical evolution of European and North American feminism first, to then investigate and understand the critiques that women and queer people not identifying with European and North American backgrounds have made to hegemonic feminism. This way, putting forward the idea of a plurality of different experiences, instances and subjectivities, it becomes better identified with the plural of the word: feminisms.
6Historically, feminism has primarily been contemplated as originating in European and North American countries, and consisting of a political and social movement intended to oppose and respond to the structural inequalities produced towards women. It initially focused on visibilizing the subordinate condition and position of women in society.
- 1 Olympe de Gouge also advocated for the abolition of slavery, whereby she understood it as intimatel (...)
7During the Illustration, and following the widening of the debate on citizenship and democracy (or its lack thereof) promoted by contractualist political philosophers such as Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, Olympe de Gouge1 in France and Mary Wollstonecraft in England began questioning the patriarchal foundations of society and advocated for the political inclusion of women in the public sphere (Bidaseca, 2015). From this point onwards, European feminist movements were the expression of elite classes and, particularly, of the bourgoisie, who promoted the revindication of political interests, initially focusing on the extension of the suffrage as a rejection of women’s confinement to the domestic space. These movements were, thus, the expression of a new class that articulated new interests and a novel agenda in a rapidly changing context of industrialism, urbanization, and in the framework of the introduction of innovative means and processes of production. Similarly, in the United States the suffragette movement was marked by the Declaration of Seneca Falls, promoted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848 and aimed at advancing women’s equality. In this phase, feminism was connected to the abolitionist movement, and, despite giving voice to marginalized women such as Sojourner Truth in the quest for a political affirmation signalled by the rhetorical question “Ain’t I a Woman?”, the movement remained firmly the expression of white middle-class educated women. Foundational texts of this period are Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Apart from the liberal strand, another direction of feminism was determined by the influence of Marxist ideas and social reformism, whose leaders were Rosa Luxemburg and Alexandra Kollontai.
8A second phase of western feminism occurred in relation to the students’ and antiwar protests in the 1960s, LGBT+ demonstrations, the black power and civil rights movements, and the women’s liberation movement. Radical feminists openly contested the establishment and the status quo, also backed by feminist theory denouncing the myth of domesticity and the patriarchal arrangements of modern nation-states. Under the banner “the personal is political” (Friedan, 1963), feminists campaigned to overcome the relegation of women to the private sphere and to reproductive and care duties, and for them to be fully included as egalitarian citizens and recognized as political subjects. Betty Friedan, Juliet Mitchell, Shulamith Firestone, and Kate Millett, among others, addressed sexuality and reproductive rights, questioning marriage and maternity as the ultimate social and cultural fate of women and, therefore, opening up the debate on citizenship and the participation of women in the public sphere. They also linked gender oppression and marginalization, and the social organization of societies around the institution of the family, with the capitalist mode of production (Chodorow, 1978; Okin, 1989). Moreover, grassroots organizations were created to further feminist instances and raise awareness on women’s revindications.
9A third phase, starting in the 1990s was marked by the emergence of the feminist figure of riot grrrls (Kroløkke and Scott Sørenson, 2006), taking to the public sphere as empowered young women, rejecting pre-defined patriarchal definitions of beauty and behavior, as well as imposed moral codes and institutions. Emerging from the music scene in the United States, these groups moved on to political and social activism, both street-based and in the cyberspace, addressing the intersectionality of women’s subordination and oppression, as well as questioning the meaning of “woman” to include a wider range of sexual identifications, and problematizing the future of feminism towards the end of the century.
10Over the years, hegemonic European and North American feminism was subjected to multiple critiques regarding its lack of inclusion, as well as the systematic reproduction of colonial and patriarchal patterns of dominations towards women from the Global South or minorities in countries from the North of the world in the context of the very same feminist movement. Or, as Cherríe Moraga puts it: “the deepest political tragedy I have experienced is how with such grace, such blind faith, this commitment to women in the feminist movement grew to be exclusive and reactionary” (Moraga, 2015: XXXVII). Chicana feminism, in fact, recovers the interdependence between the border -both a physical and symbolic signifier- and identity, to delve into the intersectional marginalizations, adding up oppressions in the form of gender and sexual identification, race, and class, among others (Buscemi, 2020).
11Historically, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, former enslaved subjects, as well as abolitionists and women's rights advocates in the XIX century United States, by claiming an active role and a political visibility for black women in society set the basis for what would be known later as black feminism. As recently pointed out by Kendall on this subject:
even the most “positive” tropes about women of color are harmful precisely because they dehumanize us and erase the damage that can be done to us by those who might mean well, but whose actions show that they don’t actually respect us or our right to self-determine what happens on our behalf. (Kendall, 2020: 13)
12It is also relevant to note that the struggles of women from the so-called Third World countries, who were involved in the movements for the independization from colonial powers, resulted in questioning hegemonic white middle class feminism and its lack of consideration for racial diversity, sexual orientation, class, and socioeconomic status. Chandra Mohanty, in her seminal work “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse” (1988), investigates the production of the “Third World Woman” as a feature of white feminism that is consistent with the tenets of colonialism as “a relation of structural domination and a discursive and political suppression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question” (61). Mohanty maintains that the essentialization of “the Third World woman” implies a process of othering whereby western white feminism exerts its categorizations and identifications on the basis of an unequal relation of power that inevitably nullifies the possibility of forming alliances based on common instances and struggles. Moreover, the universal assumption of western hegemonic feminism that women are a homogenous, undifferentiated category struggling against the same form of patriarchy, cross-culturally erases all differences and agency (Mohanty, 1988: 64) while reproducing the cultural bias and dominant perception of third world women pictured as hegemonic white feminists’ “ourselves undressed'' (Rosaldo, 1980: 392 cited by Mohanty, 1988: 65), thus unilaterally constituted as victims (Mohanty, 1988: 69). Homi Bhabha highlights the unquestionable relation between the colonial discourse and the production of knowledge, thus clarifying and adding to Mohanty’s position on cultural imperialism and the essentialization of the Other:
[the colonial discourse is] an apparatus of power [...] that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences. Its predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for a “subject peoples” through the production of knowledge in terms of which surveillance is exercised [...]. The colonial discourse seeks authorization for its strategies by the production of knowledge of colonizer and colonized which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated. (Homi Bhabha, 1990: 75)
13As other feminisms from the Global South and the Souths in the North contribute their critiques and innovative perspectives to hegemonic white western feminism, a more inclusive definition of feminism can be offered from a novel and revised perspective: according to Barbara Smith (1979, cited in Moraga and Anzaldúa, 2015):
Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as all white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement. (57)
14In the next section, the perspective of feminist movements and theories from the Global South will be discussed in order to provide a wider base for the critique and reform of hegemonic feminism.
15Parallel to what hegemonic historiography has conceptualized as feminist universal history, women in the Global South have been organizing and fighting from a different standpoint, experiencing their own order of events. As noted by several authors, feminisms and their history were studied from a perspective of European exceptionalism, epistemic racism and coloniality of knowledge, which has led to heavily eurocentric bodies of literature (Gómez Vélez, Saldarriaga Grisales, López Gil & Zapata Botero, 2017; Mignolo, 2007). Naturally, non-white women have proposed a different timeline as an alternative to the traditional three (now four) wave history.
16First of all, the idea that feminism started in Europe with the so-called first wave of “enlightened feminism” is rejected. As Vergès (2017) recalls, various anti-patriarchal movements have been carried out by black, indigenous, and Asian women all over the world. Their voices, however, have been silenced and invisibilized because of the subaltern subjectivities they embody: the stories of slaves, migrants, indigenous and racialized women (Curiel, 2007). Those social movements and historical struggles have been relegated to anonymity. Accordingly, decolonial scholars and activists have reconceptualized the recent historiography of feminism in Latin America. Carosio (2017, in Tock, 2019) maintains that the first wave of feminism in Latin America took place in the late 19th century, the second wave during the dictatorial context of the late 70s, while the third wave can be considered to begin after the 80s, when the post-dictatorship juncture brought up a progressive institutionalization of feminism and the formal inclusion of gender studies in academia. These changes catalyze an even more prominent division between hegemonic and autonomous feminisms. Each category, in this case, serves as an umbrella term, whereby hegemonic includes both liberal and radical feminisms promoted by government agencies, international organizations and non-government organizations. On the other hand, autonomous feminisms refer to those that criticize the paradigms and premises of the mainstream (hegemonic) gender agenda that was predominantly set by white, privileged, middle-upper class women (Carosio, 2017 in Tock, 2019).
17Autonomous feminisms carve their way out of political activism into academic spaces, while still being relegated to the margins in a clear disadvantage due to structural inequality and power dynamics (Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014). In the course of the third wave, moreover, indigenous, black, chicanas and queer feminists criticize the lack of intersectionality in hegemonic feminism, opening up the conversation on privilege, elitism, racism and gatekeeping in mainstream women movements (Tock, 2019).
18Women from the decolonial turn, such as Ochy Curiel, Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso and Aura Cumes reflect on how hegemonic feminism conceals a racist discourse by implying a need of salvation (white savior complex), and therefore providing a justification for neocolonial practices. In this context, Latin American thinkers consolidate and strengthen the referential framework for decolonial theory and activism, differentiating it from postcolonial postulates (Gómez Vélez et al, 2017).
19The unfolding of feminist movements and practices in Latin America has been intrinsically linked to the theorization of ideas and concepts that are deeply rooted in the local history, particularly in relation to a reconsideration of politics and society, as well as of nation-building, as a result of the Conquista. Aníbal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist, coined the term decoloniality to describe the necessary process of de-linking former colonial societies from the coloniality intended as the elaboration of a eurocentric perspective and knowledge production, as well as the theorization of race as the naturalization of colonial relations of domination (2014: 779). With respect to decoloniality, Catherine Walsh observes:
it is a form of struggle and survival, an epistemic and existence-based response and practice – most especially by colonized and racialized subjects – against the colonial matrix of power (…) It implies the recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity. (2018: 17)
20Decolonial feminisms employ this alternative perspective as a standpoint by rooting their principles in antiracist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist narratives, and with some strong established goals such as social and environmental justice, the rights of indigenous people, and the decolonization of knowledge (Vergès, 2017). Both within the academia and in feminist organizations and groups, hegemonic white western feminism is questioned in relation to the Latin American context, cosmovisions and lived lives (Cumes, 2012).
21María Lugones (2010) conceptualizes gender as a prism to look into the multiple oppressions and marginalizations produced by coloniality, and quintessentially as a colonial imposition. Moreover, the gender categorizations constructed through the colonial experience implied a gender hierarchy whereby “the imposition of dichotomous hierarchies became woven into the historicity of relations, including gender relations'' (Lugones, 2012: 743). According to Lugones, thus, decolonizing gender entails “a praxical task [...] to enact a critique of racialized, colonial and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social'' (2010: 746). Accordingly, the author conceptualizes the coloniality of gender as “the analysis of racialized, capitalist gender oppression”, while decolonial feminism is posited as the “overcoming of the coloniality of gender” (Lugones, 2010: 747). In this process, Lugones invokes Gloria Anzaldúa’s border thinking as the revindication of autonomous spaces of difference where to deconstruct the coloniality of knowledge and enact decolonial insurgent feminist practices. For this reason, the term is used in its plural form.
22Decolonial feminisms, for their very nature and aspirations, however, are not limited to the Latin American context, nor to the experience of de/colonialization. Zahra Ali (2016) invokes the urgence to decolonize feminism(s) everywhere women feel that hegemonic western white feminism has represented only a narrow portion of women’s revindications. She also argues that even when women refuse to be recognized or labelled as feminists for the exclusionary and essentializing implications of the term, and for its universalistic aspirations as well as the imposition of a normative model, their reformist actions and activism can and should be considered as such (2016). On the same vein, Spivak (1988) conceptualizes a position of subalternity in the colonial relation whereby the subaltern is sociologically and epistemically refused to voice his condition for lack of a “space of enunciation” (Bidaseca, 2011: 69).
- 2 Written in lowercase as preferred by the author.
- 3 From the Spanish saberes, referring to collective knowledge, not necessarily produced in a formal o (...)
23Decolonial feminisms originated in Latin America both as a political struggle and a theoretical framework. Due to this background, academic literature has been hybridized with social movements, thus providing a space of enunciation for persons and groups that were left out from traditional scholar structures (Martínez-Cairo, 2019; Lugones, 2010). Furthermore, Millán (2014) argues about an ever-decolonizing epistemology that is continuously replicated in multiple contexts by a variety of voices. valeria flores2 (2018), on the other hand, reflects on an ‘excremental feminism’ that arises out of the waste and garbage of institutionalized feminism, including knowledges3 deriving from scavenger methodologies that gather experiences that were invalidated by western imaginary.
- 4 Segato (2011) parts from an anthropological analysis and argues that before colonization in most La (...)
24Tock (2019) claims that in Latin America, decolonial feminisms twist the traditional top-down logic and instead propose horizontal, grassroot and bottom-up spaces while questioning the centralization and institutionalization of social struggles. Among the different expressions anti-patriarchal movements within decolonial feminisms, a relevant one is communitarian feminism (feminismo comunitario), based on indigenous women's worldviews, which sheds light on a new understanding of oppression by reflecting on the multiple patriarchal structures that coexist nowadays, in particular an ancestral original patriarchy and western patriarchy, imposed through colonization (Cabnal, 2010). The authors state that this intersection results in the intensification of the ancestral original patriarchy and affects not only women, but also men of each indigenous community (Paredes, 2013). On this matter, Rita Segato (2011) classifies these multiple patriarchies as low and high intensity. She argues that the original ancestral patriarchy can be considered one of low intensity4, but was reinforced and re-articulated with colonization, which brought with it a high intensity patriarchy (Segato, 2011).
- 5 Cumes (2012) exposes the term “whitened” to refer to those who are not necessarily white regarding (...)
- 6 Ramón Grosfoguel proposes this concept to understand western hegemony and the transformation of the (...)
25Aura Cumes, a Mayan activist and researcher, studies how coloniality is reinforced by white or whitened5 women and their interactions with black and indigenous women (2012). In this sense, power dynamics exemplify the civilizing project6 whereby racialized women are being told what to do, what is right and what to aspire, following western and “modern” values that they claim as universal (Cumes, 2012). In this same line, Lorena Cabnal (2010) and Julieta Paredes (2013) note that the body of Latin American women becomes disputed territory both by the patriarchy and by colonial ideas. Consequently, decolonial feminisms urge “the conscious recovery of our first territory: [the] body" (Cabnal, 2010: 21). As María Galindo (2015) observes, bodies have been marked by colonization and patriarchy through two main belief systems: Christianity and capitalism, resulting in a “colonial discipline of erotic desire” (38). This becomes another important nuance in decolonial feminisms, since it is proposed that decolonization sustains de-patriarchization.
26On the other hand, a number of black and indigenous women point out that hegemonic feminism in Latin America tends to separate experiences from systems of oppression, and in particular when talking about gender, race and class (Martínez-Cairo, 2019). Cumes (2012) argues that when analyzing indigenous movements, “the ethnic dimension is considered the only way to study the problems of indigenous women” (p.8), following an inaccurate and reductionist understanding of the experiences of women that inhabit the intersections of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism (Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014). Furthermore, Cumes (2012) insists on the heterogeneity of the experiences of indigenous women: when referring to racialized subjects, racism and coloniality can be found as a general, common struggle (Mignolo, 2007). Nevertheless, each indigenous or afro-descendant community has their own specific needs and agenda, and, beyond their ethnic or cultural origins, each woman has her opinions, agency and decision-making capacity (Cumes, 2012). Because of that, the author emphasizes the importance of seeing indigenous women as “epistemic authorities and knowledge producers from their multiple, non-uniform experience” (Cumes, 2012, p.3).
27Finally, Tock (2019) points out that Latin American decolonial feminists, while recognizing the abolishing-the-State-utopia, are also strategic and employ daily resistance and informal organization to achieve their objectives. Their agenda is often far from the State’s discourse, even though interactions with government bodies help alleviate the harsh effects of patriarchy, coloniality and capitalism (Martínez-Cairo, 2019). In this sense, decolonial feminisms have gained terrain in the mainstream discourse, whilst making clear their differences with respect to western feminism. Other criticisms, however, are made on different points: the idea of unhesitating sorority and how this can enable and conceal violence between women (Swaby Campbell, 2021); the fact that the political subjects and main references in hegemonic feminism are white women and their life experiences, which are taken as universal (Curiel, 2007; Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014); the belief that all women are oppressed and the source of their oppression is biological sex (Curiel, 2020); affirmations of gender binarism, as decolonial feminists claim, is not a biological reality but a colonial construct (Curiel, 2007; Drullard, 2021); the urge for separatism, that its considered white, since it doesn’t consider the matrix of domination and the other struggles a woman may be living and assumes her only fight is against patriarchy (De la Cerda, 2020); and the dichotomous division between public and private and its historiographic connotation for women, being that racialized and subaltern women were always part of the workforce, both in slavist and capitalist systems (Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014).
28The purpose of the present investigation has been to critically examine decolonial feminisms’ epistemologies and practices to open up the debate on decoloniality and gender in the South of the world, in particular focusing on the Latin American context. We have analyzed the historical development as well as the critiques to white hegemonic feminism and its failure to universalize women’s struggles, which has led to an investigation of the tenets and discourses of decolonial feminisms, including their theoretical as well as praxis-based epistemic revisions.
29The problematization of decolonial feminisms relies on their standpoint as anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist theories, narratives and practices, including in most cases an engagement towards social and environmental justice, the self-determination over the woman’s body as well as the natural territory, the rights of indigenous people, the decolonization of knowledge and the understanding of today’s sex-gender system as a colonial consequence. Decolonial feminisms and their framework, however, are not limited to Latin America, but can be regarded as epistemic and practice-based critiques, whose innovative character, aspirations and revindications extend well beyond the geographical limits of their conceptualization.
30The decolonial turn is not only changing the ways feminism is regarded, nor is it merely critiquing and responding with alternative messages. Recent waves of migration, the over-present social media, and the globalization of the cultural production (and of its resistance) are infiltrating and hybridizing feminist and activist practices all over the world.
31Further studies are needed on cyberactivism and digital spaces. Since many decolonial feminists operate outside the academic realm, knowledge is being produced in different and non-traditional ways. This can take the form of tweets and Twitter threads, Instagram and Facebook posts, stories, memes, hashtags, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc. Facing this scenario, it is relevant to continue questioning academia’s monopoly on the creation, production and legitimization of knowledge. What voices keep being left out, and why do they remain objects and not subjects of study? What is the role of decolonial feminist cyberactivists performing mainly on digital spaces? Do power structures replicate the dominant narratives in the digital arena? How does this affect the interactions between hegemonic and decolonial feminisms, considering the inequality of resources and technologies? In regard to what has been mentioned, it will be fundamental to study the different digital tools used to disseminate accessible information for those outside of formal and institutionalized spaces.
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