The Distinguishing Features of Latinx Feminist Thought

• In Event: 2304 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session: Issues in Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Stratification

Abstract

Latinx feminisms that span geographical location, sexuality, race, language, generation status, and class position have flourished over time and space. However, existing scholarship has yet to place these diverse critical social theories into conversation. Drawing on a three-year ethnography with California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, qualitative content analysis of podcasts and other social media, and a review of existing scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, in this paper I define the parameters for a Latinx feminist framework by outlining its distinguishing features. Among the features of a Latinx feminist consciousness: interdisciplinary methods are integral for understanding Latinx subjectivity; scholarship must shift from categorical comparisons of Latinxs to relational analyses that reflect Indigenous fluidity; a rejection of binary logics as decolonial praxis; the need to understand migration experiences while theorizing about the abolition of borders; the importance of recovering community memories while recognizing how the political project of remembrance always reproduces disappearance; queer chosen families, young families, and activist parents reimagine radical family formation; intersectional activisms are integral to tackling disappearance; reproductive politics are central to how the U.S. understands Latinxs; mental health issues and self-care practices as costs of resistance; a search for kindred spirits to articulate the intersectional self; and imagining utopias as a refusal to only live in the here and now structured by violence. By discussing the connections and key distinctions across these distinguishing features, I argue for the need to center the erasure of Blackness, Indigeneity, feminisms, and nonbinary experiences in views of and from Latinxs. In doing so, I outline the making and necessity of a politics of accountability to address intra-group differences and challenge the cultural logics of non-intersectional, mainstream politics and discourse.

Author

• Rocío R. García, Arizona State University