Feminist Figures of Social Death in the Americas

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Characterizing most radical forms of non-belonging, from slavery in the plantation system to mass incarceration in militarized urban spaces and contemporary forms of genocide, social death has become a crucial concept for critical race theory and decolonial feminism. From the historical spaces of social death, this panel aims to interrogate the role that Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina feminist figures have played in reimagining the political from such locations of “impossible speech.” From the colonial genocide of indigenous populations, to mass disappearances, to more contemporary systematic forms of feminicide, death abounds in the Americas. Death also figures as a primary site for erasing bodies that are relegated to the status of non-belonging, either through the prohibition of burial, or through the non-recognition of the community’s losses, just to name a few. Death, too, becomes the ultimate limit of the historical archive; the mass of irrecoverable losses that conditions the narrative possibilities of the remaining texts. Real, symbolic, and imagined death, this panel explores theory’s way of reckoning with massive loss in the Americas. This panel, however, is particularly interested in rethinking the political through feminist figures that have both: articulated and contested, endured and made visible, extreme conditions of racialized and gendered violence resulting in the normalization of social death.

Sub Track

• Genders and Feminisms

Chair

• Aurelia Gómez Unamuno, Haverford College

Individual Presentations

• Social Death at the Stake: The Witch-Hunt in Theory, Ideology, and Practice in Colonial Latin America - Ashley Bohrer, Hamilton College

• Undoing Disposability: radical praxis and knowing from the margins - Elva F Orozco Mendoza, Drexel University

• Antigone In Latin America and Racialized Membership: Between Social Death and the Death Drive - Andres F Henao Castro, University of Massachusetts/Boston