The construction of the Latin American feminist horizon in the 21st-century: a new geopolitics of knowledge

Abstract

The article begins with a brief reference to the struggles and reflections of feminists in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean throughout the last three decades of the 20th century (1970-2000), the framework on which feminisms of the 21st century will be shaped. In the 20th century, they had to confront how society and the State placed the secondary, traditional, and naturalized role of women. Having done so meant profound epistemic disobedience against “single thoughts”, hierarchies of knowledge, the non-existence of the feminist subject, and the absence of her voice. In the 21st century, this epistemic disobedience spreads from the voices of new actors – or old ones, today with new audibility –, which are based on bodies, in the search for autonomy, in the recovery of memories of struggle, in “other” visions of the world, enriching the feminist horizon with thinking-sentient categories. They thus represent new ways of understanding the multiple realities that mark the diversity of women's experiences and ways of life. From this new geopolitics of knowledge, struggles, feelings, subjectivities, and memories unfold, revealing the existence of plural and diverse feminisms that feed theory and action extended to multiple spaces, as characteristics of 21st-century feminisms.