Popular Feminism, Materialist Feminism, and the Production / Reproduction Nexus: Decolonizing Past and Present Latin American Feminisms

• In Event: Pasts, presents and futures of ‘popular feminisms’ in transnational struggles for a better world

Abstract

This paper takes Andean Peru as a case in point and places it in the context of broad developments in Latin American feminism to examine currents of thought that emerged among scholar-activists in the 1970s and 1980s. I consider debates over gender complementarity/inequality, popular/feminist women’s movements, and the public/private and production/reproduction frameworks. These frameworks, though far-reaching, came to be viewed by feminists in Latin America and elsewhere as essentializing, dualistic, and/or Eurocentric. By the decade of the 1980s, women of color were calling for more nuanced attention to intersecting forms of difference and inequality, a foundational concept that would later be embraced by feminists around the globe.
In Andean Peru, the debates sedimented by the 1980s along two distinct lines: those who hailed the popular, grassroots initiatives of women organizing community actions or defending their rights to land and markets; and those who questioned whether such “traditional” women’s activities might entrench gender inequalities rather than dismantle them. More recently, a diverse array of feminisms go beyond dichotomies of women’s experience to examine indigenous-identified and Afrodescendant feminisms, and feminisms that focus on biopolitics (sex workers, trans activists, reprosalud advocates). Feminists are calling for gender justice and an end to sexual violence, whether in the home, the streets, or stemming from the conflict between Sendero Luminoso and the military.
The Feminist Encuentro in Lima in 2014 drew women from Latin America and the Caribbean and illuminated the strengths and tensions in feminist organizing at the continental level. The diversity of the participants was evident, yet exclusions in the program were identified, notably by Afrodescendant participants. Prominent at the Encuentro were Andean communitarian feminists who called for decolonizing feminism and reinterpreting gender in relation to race and indigeneity. Drawing on insights from the Lima Encuentro and decolonial feminism, I suggest that we need to reconsider past analytical frameworks. I contend that gender complementarity warrants another look and that the debates over popular women’s movements and the production/reproduction analytic must be rendered more complex. Indeed, in these past practices and movements are found some of the roots of today’s decolonial and popular feminisms.

Author

• Florence E Babb, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill