Popular Feminism(s) Reconsidered: Popular,Racialized,and Decolonial Subjectivities in Contention

This issue is concerned with the salience of “popular feminism” as an analytic category for naming the myriad contemporary forms of gendered awareness and agency appearing among Latin America’s poor, working-class and racialized ¹ communities. Although we have an analytic agenda, our underlying concern here is with the politics of feminism—the construction of intersectional feminist praxes of gender, race, and economic justice and their relation to other projects for social justice. Our focus on popular feminism addresses the relationship between the subaltern ² subjectivities of marginalized women, their relation to feminist political agency, and the relation of both to mixed-gender efforts for social transformation on the broader left. Although it may be a current within them, popular feminism is distinct from the mass feminisms on the streets and online, the “feminisms of the 99 percent,” that have gripped the continent in recent years. It is the feminism of the poor and the subaltern, whose concerns for gender justice are inescapably co-constituted with their collective struggles for material, cultural and psychic survival against racist violence, land dispossession, environmental despoliation, and economic deprivation. One well-known contemporary example of self-identified popular feminism is that of the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares y Indígenas de Honduras (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras—COPINH) whose founder, Berta Cáceres, a recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, was assassinated in 2016. Her assassination signaled retribution for COPINH’s hard-fought struggle against the rapacious capitalist, patriarchal, and colonizing practices destroying the land, rivers, and lives of the Lenca people. COPINH activists recently participated in an International Feminist Organizing School involving 200 grassroots feminists from around the world organized by the World – a popular feminist initiative March of Women, among others. ³

Racializing, indigenizing, and decolonizing popular feminism as a category and a praxis is also a central preoccupation of this journal issue, as popular feminism has historically been a racially unmarked concept. Its usage in the present can efface, for example, the indigenous character of COPINH’s praxis unless its intersection with race and indigeneity is specified. In addition to documenting a range of activisms emerging in different national contexts and at various scales, this journal issue is concerned with questions of subjectivity, especially the collective subjectivities of marginalized populations. These are central to the building of collective agency, to any prospect of coalitions across difference, and to any broader politics of social transformation. The agenda of this journal issue must be understood in the context of the historical specificity of the concept “popular feminism” in the 1980s, its relation to socialist feminism, ⁴ its abeyance in the 1990s, and its recent reappearance, as charted by Janet Conway in “Popular Feminism: Considering a Concept in Feminist Politics and Theory.”

Born in Latin America in the 1980s, the term feminismo popular was a way of naming the gendered character of the struggles for survival and against dictatorship by women of the popular sectors and signaled their significance for feminism imbricated with the left in mass-based struggles for economic justice and wider social transformation. In many historical contexts, popular feminism has overlapped substantively and analytically with the movimiento de mujeres. Aside from meaning “women’s (not necessarily feminist) movement,” the term movimiento de mujeres (hereafter “grassroots women’s movement”) referred to self-organized women working on issues affecting family and community well-being with no necessary connection to feminismo histórico (hereafter “mainstream feminism”). These issues included sanitation and housing, food insecurity, public health, and the cost of living. In the context of dictatorship, women protested the disappearance of their children and became actors in larger human rights and pro-democracy movements. Originally, many claimed motherhood rather than gender equity as a basis of legitimation for their public protests and demands and not infrequently mobilized with men in common efforts.

These grassroots women’s movements displayed significant tensions with the demands and strategies of the mainstream feminism of the period. The latter was composed of middle-class, educated women organizing for gender equity under the law in education, employment, and the family, for sexual and reproductive rights, and against domestic violence. The latter saw the former as problematic for feminism in its valorization of motherhood and conventional gendered divisions of labor. As grassroots women’s movements came into contact with feminism and critical gender consciousness grew among popular-sector women, they sought to claim space in the feminist movement. Their “popular feminism” was distinguished by its anchorage in popular-sector lifeworlds and attendant survival struggles, which also came to include more explicitly gendered struggles such as those for child care and women’s health and against gender-based violence. Socialist feminist activists were often implicated in these mobilizations, and “popular feminism” also came to be associated with their praxis (Espinosa Damián, 2011; Maier, 2010). As Conway points out, the abeyance of popular feminism as an analytic category maps onto the decline of socialism as a political horizon. In the decades since the 1980s, however, gendered agency in the popular sectors has proliferated, and analysts use a range of concepts to describe the popular feminist practices under study. Readers will encounter “differential feminism,” “decolonial feminism,” “insurgent, revolutionary, rebel, and autonomous feminism,” and “feminismo comunitario (communitarian feminism),” among others, in the following pages. What is noteworthy here is the contemporary reappearance of sizable self-identified expressions of popular feminism in the World March of Women, the Coordinadora Latinamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations—CLOC) and the Via Campesina, and the Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (National Confederation of Agricultural Workers—CONTAG), in relation to the Bolivarian project in Venezuela, and in small-scale, community-based organizations.

Given the racialized character of the popular sectors in many contexts, popular feminisms are often composed of racialized women. Popular feminist initiatives often overlap substantively with those of racialized and indigenous women and share with them an ambivalent relationship with mainstream feminisms. This, in part, accounts for the multiple ways of naming gendered agency in the popular sectors. Where these forms of agency engage with feminism, they insist on its having a more expansive, “intersectional” and open-ended agenda than that of mainstream feminism. However, despite their convergences with the gendered struggles of the racialized poor, popular feminisms themselves often remain conceptually grounded in a race-blind, nationally bounded, heteronormative, and class-based notion of the “popular” and one that mobilizes generic and majoritarian notions of “women.” Nathalie Lebon explores the roots of this race-blindness and its implications for contemporary popular feminist praxis in her contribution “Decentering a Mulher popular? Gender-Class and Race in Early and Contemporary Latin American Popular Feminism.”

Women’s agency in rural and urban unions, political parties of the left, and popular movements of all kinds have all been understood by social actors as well as analysts as forms of popular feminism. When “popular feminism” is used as a generic descriptor to denote the presence of gender consciousness and activism grounded in the popular sectors and appearing in popular movements, its genealogies, alignments, and/or tensions in relation to socialist feminism and the larger left can be obscured. Nevertheless, in evoking notions of the popular (popular sectors, popular movements, the national popular), popular feminism is continually positioned as relevant to projects of the social and political left.

Through critical and contextualized studies of popular feminism, the contributions to this issue make these relations, tensions, and contradictions explicit and explore their import both for the concept of popular feminism and for the practices and politics it seeks to name. They foreground the activism of subaltern women, which overlaps with but is different from the mass women’s movements protesting gender-based violence, such as the marchas de las putas (part of the worldwide 2011 “Slut Walks” initiated in Toronto), Ni Una Menos (Not One Less), and the Chilean viral flash-mob song Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist in Your Way) (Souza, 2019). The 2017 International Women’s Strike and its “feminism of the 99 percent” show greater affinity with cross-class popular feminism such as that of the World March of Women (Palmeiro, 2017). All these emergent phenomena and their relations to popular feminism need to be investigated. They foreground gender and feminism and see patriarchal violence as articulating many popular struggles. They have clear affinities with popular feminisms, but their race and class composition and political culture need to be more carefully situated vis-à-vis the activisms of subaltern women that we foreground in this issue.

Popular Feminism in the Present: The World March of Women

As editors, we have engaged with the agenda of this journal issue from the perspective of our studies of the World March of Women. Although the March is not the only node of continental popular feminist organizing, its size, dynamism, and political force have shaped the sociopolitical field of social movements in the region in which popular feminism as a praxis has gained renewed salience. This collection includes four articles anchored in it (those by Conway, Lebon, Díaz Alba, and Masson and Beaulieu Bastien). Founded in the late 1990s, the World March of Women is a large and complex feminist network active on every continent and operating at multiple scales. It is made up of local women’s groups organized in autonomous national coordinating bodies, of which there are 14 in Latin America. In Brazil, for example, local groups such as Coordenação de Mulheres da Zona Leste in São Paulo (see Lebon in this issue), the Solidarity Marketing Network Xique Xique in the Brazilian Northeast (see Masson and Beaulieu Bastien in this issue), women’s caucuses from a range of (rural) unions (see Renata Motta in this issue), organized women within the Landless Workers’ Movement, the Via Campesina, and more formalized feminist NGOs and organizations such as Sempreviva Organização Feminista are among its members. The March in Latin America uses the term “popular feminism” to describe the kind of feminism it is building: It addresses poverty and violence against women within a broader antisystemic, anticapitalist, and feminist struggle (Giraud and Dufour, 2010). Every five years since 2000, it has orchestrated a worldwide international action articulating this base of popular feminist organizations to promote consciousness raising, organizing, and street protest. Connections are sustained throughout the network from one international action to another.

We understand the World March of Women as situated within a longer tradition of popular feminism outlined above, as an expression of a socialist feminism aligned with mixed-gender organizations of the popular classes engaged in redistribution struggles (Conway, 2018; Conway and Paulos, 2020; Lebon, 2013; 2014; 2016). The expansion of the March in Latin America in the late 1990s maps onto the Red Latinoamericana de Mujeres Transformando la Economía (Latin American Network of Women Transforming the Economy—REMTE), whose focus has been to articulate a feminist economics (economía feminista) in which women’s reproductive work is recognized as intrinsic to the economy. In arguing for the centrality of gender relations to the reproduction of capitalism, REMTE (2015: 32) insists that overcoming gendered hierarchies is central to any progressive alternative to capitalism. One can see here clear continuities with socialist feminist analytics. The March has built on these views to incorporate feminist perspectives into the mixed-gender cross-movement mobilizations against neoliberalism in the region (Conway and Paulos, 2020).

The popular feminist character of the March as representing “class-inflected gender struggles” is attributable to the influence of its massive Brazilian chapter (Lebon, 2016). Pre-dating the March, Brazilian March activists have a history going back to the 1980s of engagement with rural women’s groups and with questions of land and rurality. They employ feminist economics in arguing the importance of women’s reproductive work for imagining alternatives to capitalist models of food production. March activists seek to valorize women’s work while challenging gendered hierarchies and introduce these perspectives to their alliances with mixed-gender movements (Conway and Paulos, 2020). The March has been a partner in the Marcha das Margaridas, a national-scale cyclical mobilization of rural women organized by CONTAG (see Renata Motta and Masson and Beaulieu Bastien in this issue). This mobilization became part of the World March’s inaugural international action in 2000. The CONTAG and the Landless Workers’ Movement have been formal allies of the March in Brazil since that time.

The appearance of feminist formations like the March in the 1990s signaled both the transnationalization of popular feminism under conditions of globalization and its transformation. New forms of popular feminism were also appearing within nonfeminist mixed-gender movements—rural and urban unions, peasant and indigenous organizations like COPINH, the transnational peasant network Via Campesina, and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (see Renata Motta and Barbosa in this issue). A number of contributors address the scaling up of popular feminisms, their articulation to larger networks, and the attendant transformations in their practices and discourses.

Carmen Díaz Alba, for example, in “The World March of Women: Popular Feminisms, Transnational Struggles,” addresses the challenges brought about by the transnationalization of popular feminisms, analyzing conflicts over heteronormativity and the status of race in the March as issues arising from place-based difference and from different scales of practice in a transnational network. At the same time, she maintains that the March is continuous with earlier expressions of popular feminism in its focus on the protagonism of poor women. Its praxis of feminist popular education starting with the experiences of the women who participate is crucial to participants’ generating a critique of systems of oppression and becoming subjects of the transformation of their societies.

With our grounding in studies of the March, our own gaze has been directed toward formally organized, class-conscious, highly politicized, and self-identified expressions of popular feminism that understand themselves as aligned with mixed-gender social movements of the left in a shared struggle for social and economic justice. Our questions about popular feminism in this collection have had to do, on the one hand, with the putative relation between such high politics and the subaltern subjectivities of poor women and, on the other, the persistent elision of race and sexual and gender difference in the gender-class discourses of the March despite its affirmation of the diversity of feminist struggles. The remainder of this introduction is organized as a discussion of the contributions as they address these two lines of inquiry.

While this collection is centrally concerned with the elisions of racial and colonial difference, similar work needs to be done around the heteronormativity of the “popular” and of “popular feminism.” Some contributors have initiated that conversation here (Díaz Alba, Lebon). “Women” in popular feminist movements and scholarship about them virtually always refers to straight ciswomen. The presence of LGBT/Queer people, especially trans women, is not noted, and, to our knowledge, the significance of sexual and gender diversity for these movements remains uninvestigated. We wish to flag these and other erasures, such as the invisibilization of those of Asian heritage and, through an ableist discourse, of those with disabilities among Latin America’s popular sectors.

Popular Feminist Subjectivities and The Politics of Social Transformation

Examination of the conditions for the appearance of popular feminist subjectivities among subaltern women includes questions about the role not only of self-identified feminists but also of other organizations and institutions. Because of both the history of popular feminism and our study of the World March of Women, we were attuned to the protagonism of self-identified, cross-class, and highly politicized feminist initiatives—what we might call a popular feminist project of social transformation. With respect to this project, we were alert to the question of its relations with other organized social forces, such as social movements, unions, parties, and state institutions.

Crucial here is Conway’s distinction between two main understandings of popular feminism in the literature: as a generic analytic descriptor of the gendered agency and consciousness of economically marginalized women from the popular sectors and as a more politically freighted designation signaling feminist political agency undertaken intentionally by formally organized actors in relation to feminist efforts for social transformation and societal projects on the left. In neither usage is the label necessarily used by grassroots women themselves, reflecting the cross-class tensions and complex political subject formations discussed in these pages. It is more frequently an analytic category meant to situate their practices.

This dual usage and equivocation between gendered subjectivity and feminist politics are apparent throughout the contributions to this collection. One metric for the distinction is whether the popular-sector actors identify themselves as popular feminists, as they do in a number of studies here (those of Arango-Vargas, Hiner, Díaz Alba, Lebon, and Renata Motta). Their adoption of this identity is often correlated with closer articulation with formal organizations situated on the social and political left: the liberation church of the 1980s, the Bolivarian project in Venezuela, CONTAG in Brazil, and the World March of Women. For Afro-descendant and indigenous women’s organizing, the term “popular feminist” appears less salient, although other feminist alignments are apparent (see Sara Motta, Zulver, and Barbosa in this issue).

It is difficult to empirically separate the two meanings of “popular feminism,” as Dominique Masson and Elsa Beaulieu Bastien thoughtfully argue in “The Relational Dynamics of Becoming Popular Feminist Subjects: The World March of Women and Rural/Peasant Women’s Organizing in Brazil in the 2000s.” Historically, as women from the popular sectors organized, their consciousness of the gendered nature of their concerns grew and helped generate more politicized activists with explicitly feminist consciousness (who also often had ties with historical feminist organizations). Self-identified feminist organizers buttressed popular women’s local organizing and self-understandings with a gender-class analytic framework and sought to connect them to a political project of socialist feminist mass-movement-building.

Masson and Beaulieu Bastien document the interplay between peasant women and feminist organizers, the emergence of “popular feminist subjects” with their own projects and initiatives, and their articulation to larger networks for feminism, agroecology, and the solidarity economy. In their account we see a continuum of popular feminist practices, as the lived experience and situated knowledge of poor, rural working women come into contact with a local feminist NGO that is networked to the World March of Women, and through it to mixed-gender organizations calling for the redistribution of power and wealth. They demonstrate how cross-class and multisectoral dynamics contribute to the development of popular feminism, as a political project, and how popular feminists achieve a collective voice at the national scale.

Masson and Beaulieu Bastien also track developments in the Marcha das Margaridas, a national-scale mobilization of peasant and rural women organized by the Women’s Commission of CONTAG. The latter is an important member of the World March of Women network in Brazil, and the Marcha is seen as a joint initiative. This alliance has enabled the consolidation of a popular feminism within CONTAG that makes a claim on the political power and organizing capacities of the union and, further, in the sphere of public policy. Masson and Beaulieu Bastien demonstrate that rural women producers have become subjects of rural development policy making, achieving policy changes that support rural women’s economic autonomy and right to organize.

Renata Motta’s “Feminist Solidarities and Coalitional Identity: The Popular Feminism of the Marcha das Margaridas” is likewise focused on the production of political subjectivities in the context of complex coalitional dynamics. She identifies the convergence through the 1980s of progressive elements in the Catholic Church and more militant forms of unionism in their interface with feminism as creating conditions for the appearance of popular feminism in CONTAG in the 2000s. Her study, along with those of Masson and Beaulieu Bastien and Barbosa, shifts the historic locus of popular feminism from the urban peripheries to the “land, forests, and waters” and to rurality. We can detect here affinities with various ecofeminisms and gender-aware environmental justice movements. In rural as well as urban settings, formal organizations beyond local, informal, grassroots organizing are significant in the incubation of popular feminist subjects, organizing, and demands.

Popular feminism, in Motta’s account, involves mobilization, formation, and claims making resonant with popular feminism’s more politicized meaning and directed to the union, to the state, and to Brazilian society (see also Barbosa in this issue). However, she also engages with the complex relation between the politicized identity and the situated perspectives of poor rural working women and the necessarily open-ended content of popular feminism. For the popular feminist subjects of the Marcha das Margaridas, rights to land, water, and a sustainable food system have been central to popular feminism, along with defense of democracy and the welfare state. Alongside of strong consensus opposing violence against women there remains ambivalence about abortion rights that correlates with strong religiosity. Also, and interesting in terms of the history of maternal politics in popular feminism, there is a broad-based politicization of care work rather than a valorization of motherhood per se.

With its strong base in the union movement at the national scale, the popular feminism of the Marcha das Margaridas is interpolated with the more institutionalized left (in organized labor and its interface with political parties and state institutions) where, as Motta reports, feminist conceptions of leadership have challenged prevailing practices, notably by rotating positions of authority and asserting the importance of leadership by women. Popular feminists of the Marcha have also had to navigate their autonomy as a women’s initiative within the male-dominated CONTAG, vis-à-vis relations with political parties at various scales, and in relation to CONTAG’s alignment with the political left.

As Renata Motta’s genealogy attests, progressive elements in the Catholic Church were operative in the incubation of 1980s popular feminism. Hillary Hiner’s and Carolina Arango-Vargas’s studies of popular feminism in urban peripheries in Chile and Colombia also testify to this. Hiner’s historical case study “Finding Feminism through Faith: Casa Yela, Popular Feminism, and the Women-Church Movement in Chile” documents the origins of a women’s shelter, Casa Yela, as a popular feminist organization amidst the hardships of the Pinochet dictatorship. Her study evokes the living conditions in informal settlements in the 1970s and 1980s and the pivotal role played in this particular neighborhood by North American women church workers who organized with neighborhood women both in pastoral activities and to feed families through popular kitchens. The women’s organizing was also the site of their becoming critically aware of and resistant to the gendered violence that many experienced in their homes.

Hiner documents how the earliest women’s centers and shelters in Chile emerged from such organizing processes by popular feminists—grassroots women working collectively and, in this particular case, with women missionaries influenced by feminism. As such local organizing initiatives proliferated, urban and national networks formed, enabling popular-sector women to meet each other outside their neighborhoods. Hiner documents the feminist consciousness raising under way and how it began to converge with antiviolence organizing and training by feminists beyond the Church and with a public-facing feminist movement. Without being conclusive, her narrative is sensitive to the limitations imposed by the Church sponsorship of these popular feminist initiatives. Characteristic of Christian feminism but also running through many expressions of popular feminism is endorsement of “good feminism,” maternal, feminine, heteronormative and committed to family and community (and class), and silent on sexual and reproductive rights ⁵ —in other words, of the body politics considered the core agenda of mainstream feminism.

Accounts by both Hiner and Arango-Vargas complicate the opposition often asserted between grassroots and institutionalized popular and NGO-ized feminisms. Hiner’s story testifies to the Casa Yela’s becoming a formal organization independent of its Church origins, receiving donor money and working at scales beyond the local. Moreover, the women of Casa Yela of necessity became experts and policy advocates on issues of violence against women as the postdictatorship Chilean state relied on these early initiatives to help frame its public policy when the state had little expertise in the matter.

Carolina Arango-Vargas’s account of the contemporary struggle for water in a poor neighborhood in present-day Medellín is startling in its continuity with Hiner’s. Her contribution “Perched on a Parched Hill: Popular Women, Popular Feminism, and the Struggle for Water in Medellín” testifies to the work of popular-sector women and self-identified popular feminists who organized to bring basic public services to their community on the urban periphery, and to the central role of feminist NGO-ization in that effort. Her study historicizes the emergence of this popular feminist political identity from the activism of left-leaning feminists in poor neighborhoods in the 1980s, to the self-organization of domestic workers through the 1990s, the role of popular education, and the appearance of more durable organizational forms of popular feminism.

Where Hiner’s account stresses the importance of a feminist critique among women Church workers, Arango-Vargas’s points to the centrality of an explicit and evolving socialist feminist critique of patriarchal capitalism that politicized care work and framed popular feminist demands for public services and urban infrastructure. Popular feminists in Medellín argued that access to water was a gendered issue imbricated with sustaining life, health, livelihoods, and care work and also an issue of gender-based violence in the context of the country’s armed conflict. Arango-Vargas describes the community mobilization that led to a citywide action and to legal strategies to press for community access to water. Popular feminist organizing here was embedded in a wider web of alliances with other organizations, notably the citywide Women’s Movement of Medellín, that resulted in the demand for water’s being made central to the urban feminist agenda. The latter was the result of protracted debates driven by popular feminists about the political importance of valorizing care work as both a practical and a strategic demand for feminism.

Rachel Elfenbein’s study likewise focuses on the politicization of care work as central to contemporary popular feminism, its overlapping with an anticapitalist political project, and the fraught dynamics that result when the state adopts popular feminism as its own. In “Mobilized Yet Contained: Popular Women, Feminisms, and Organizing around Venezuela’s 2012 Organic Labor Law,” Elfenbein analyzes how popular feminism was appropriated by Venezuela’s state-led national-popular revolution through a study of mobilization around labor law reform that promised to remunerate women’s unpaid house/care work and thereby provide income support for housewives. The Bolivarian revolution aimed to restructure state-society relations through expanding popular participation but, as she points out, this was marked by a dialectic of radicalization and governability in which the state ultimately exercised its hegemony over community organizations. Popular feminism was officially embraced as essential to twenty-first-century socialism, and popular-sector women and their community organizations were fostered as central to both delivering welfare services and shoring up political support. At the same time, the Bolivarian division of political labor between leaders and followers intersected with and functioned to reproduce the traditional gendered division of labor. Popular feminists were assigned responsibility for care work and were celebrated for their maternal altruism in the service of the revolution, while the gendered division of labor was never fundamentally challenged. Endorsing popular feminism enabled the Bolivarian regime to sidestep feminism’s more “divisive” demands (for decriminalization of abortion, for example).

While the regime’s valorization of popular-sector women led to opportunities for their mobilization, it did not lead to effective mechanisms for realizing the constitutional guarantees of social security for homemakers. Elfenbein concludes that popular feminisms were instrumentalized by the regime and their autonomy undercut by the imperative of popular unity. Her study reprises the permanently fraught and ambivalent relationship of feminisms to revolutionary movements and to political parties and governments. It reminds us why autonomy vis-à-vis mixed-gender movements on the left with which they are broadly aligned remains such a hard-fought value for feminisms, including popular feminisms (see also Renata Motta in this issue).

In contrast to Elfenbein’s account of Bolivarianism, Lia Pinheiro Barbosa’s study argues that Zapatista feminism is constitutive of the Zapatista revolutionary project. In her “Lajan lajan ’aytik or ‘Walking in Complementary Pairs’ in the Zapatista Women’s Struggle” these Mayan women come into view as forceful interlocutors, producing the Revolutionary Law of Women enacted prior to the armed uprising, in 1993. The law was a result of the women’s demand to participate and have authority in their communities and become educated so as to be able to exercise their rights vis-à-vis both the Mexican state and the elaboration of Zapatista autonomy. Barbosa describes the centrality of the political education, Spanish language skills, and literacy that they acquired as part of their clandestine military training. In the transition from armed struggle to political negotiation, Zapatista women combatants expanded their “pedagogy of the word,” a broad-based, grassroots political training effort with indigenous women, coupled with ongoing exchange with other currents of Latin American feminist thought and practice.

Barbosa situates Zapatista feminism as in dialogue with a “bloc” of popular feminisms, notably the peasant and popular feminism of the CLOC. ⁶ Zapatista women see affinities with the CLOC in their popular and emancipatory political projects “against patriarchy and capitalism, to defend land, territory, and agrarian reform, and to confront transnational capital in the countryside.” They share with the women of the CLOC demands for a different gender paradigm and insist on the mutual constitution of their individual rights as women with the collective rights they claim as peasants and as indigenous people. Barbosa (citing Lagarde, 1999) says that these educative and dialogical processes were instrumental in the formation of indigenous women as political subjects and their “epistemic redefinition of feminism, that of ‘being Zapatistas, being women.’” Although the Zapatista women engage with feminist thought and practices, they do not explicitly identify themselves as feminist. Barbosa attributes to them a decolonial “feminism otherwise.” Another conception of subjectivity comes into view in Zapatista women’s agency, one based on the Mayan concept of tik (us), “the backbone of Zapatista political thought and subjectivity. So-called we-centered action is a form of sociopolitical organization and intersubjectivity that determines the principles of community sociability, locates the social place of each member of the community, and delimits the internal and external social reality of communities from the perspective of a new commonality.” The Zapatista women emphasize their desire for “a feminism that is useful for the struggles of their peoples,” in which they work collectively in the community and together with men, walking “on equal footing” in “complementary pairs,” all the while underlining the need for their communities to move away from the “patriarchal conjunction” between ancestral and colonial patriarchies. They understand their struggle as deeply rooted in the intersectionality of their being poor indigenous women, recognizing “the role of mestizaje and class in their historical subjugation.”

The Politicization of Race and Colonial Difference

Black thinkers such as W. E. B. Dubois have long warned that dividing the working class along racial lines has been a key tool of elites to keep working people subordinated. In fact, Quijano and Ennis (2000: 569) have demonstrated that race is intimately intertwined with class in Latin America, where the coloniality of power is “based on the imposition of the idea of race as an instrument of domination.” Yet, in Latin America as elsewhere, many expressions of left politics, including its feminist variants, have been characterized by the race-blindness pervading their societies (Wade, 2010). In their contributions to this collection, Conway and Lebon propose various sources for this occlusion: the class foundationalism of left politics and organizing, in which class was understood as analytically separate from and structurally determinant of racial inequality; a gender-class dual-systems approach in socialist feminism that did the same; the emergence in the 1980s of a distinct “popular feminism” contesting hegemonic feminism as an assertion of working-class against middle-class politics; and mestizo Latin American national identity formations that efface race and indigeneity.

In her genealogy of the praxis and the concept of popular feminism, Conway notes that in Marxist and feminist activism and scholarship “the alignment of black and indigenous struggles with popular struggles is often assumed.” In the face of black and indigenous feminisms increasingly visible in the 1990s, feminist scholars simply did not inquire into “their possible relationship or break with what had earlier been understood as popular feminism.” Conway highlights the cost of this dynamic for coalition building. In the case of black feminisms, “playing down the differences between race-blind and race-conscious popular feminisms on the basis of a partially shared experience of exploitation effects an erasure of race and contributes to ongoing misalignments.” The elision of race in popular mobilizations on the left, moreover, “discourage(s) black communities [women] from organizing around a shared class position (Perry, 2016: 106).” In the case of indigenous feminisms, ignoring demands for “acceptance of difference, the legitimacy of other forms of life and citizenship emerging from a civilizational matrix distinct from the West,” means ignoring the specific content of indigenous movements and feminisms. Indeed, “assuming the inclusion of black and indigenous feminisms in the racially unmarked category ‘popular feminism’ risks assimilating them, eliding questions of race and colonialism, and erasing their specificities.”

Lebon shows that the continued primary focus on gender-class of earlier popular feminism and a concomitant race-blind legacy hampered engagement with antiracism by contemporary forms of self-identified popular feminisms, such as the Brazilian World March of Women, until very recently. In the popular feminism of the March Lebon perceives a collective identity with a strong identitarian orientation around the unitary (generally heteronormative) concept of the “popular woman.” With its focus on collective rights and livelihood issues, the March connects race-blind “women’s concerns” with those that affect “everyone” in the popular sectors. Lebon further argues that a gender-class dual-systems framework facilitates this. This race-blind legacy can be traced to the secondary status afforded race in Marxist ideologies and scholarship (Alvarez et al., 2003: 565) and reproduced in liberation theology and in popular education’s original framework, all buttressed by a race-blind hegemonic Latin American racial formation, and the Brazilian myth of racial democracy. The lack of attention to livelihood struggles by large black movement organizations in Brazil (Hanchard, 1994; Perry, 2016) and the tendency of most radical political projects to elide differences among their constituencies also play a part in weak articulations between race and class in popular mobilizations.

Racializing popular feminism as a category and a practice has been a central preoccupation of this journal issue. It has involved two operations. One of these is interrogating racially unmarked practices for their ethno-racial specificity and investigating them for their relevance to the gender-class issues, analytics, and practices that have defined popular feminism. In this vein, Arango-Vargas notes that race is persistently subsumed under the category “popular.” Popular feminists in Medellín, who are themselves diversely racialized, insist that a common experience of economic precarity transcends racial difference. They organize in coalitions with race-conscious Afro-Colombian women, yet Arango-Vargas observes that

Medellín’s women’s groups have organized primarily around gender and have grappled with the question of racial difference and inequality in specific and somewhat contradictory ways. They oscillate between recognizing race and racism as a specific form of oppression and/or couching it in the language of diversity and multiculturalism. Even as they emphasize positive difference, they maintain gender as the main axis of alliance among the movement’s different expressions.

Renata Motta, in her study of the popular feminism of the rural working women of the Marcha das Margaridas, notes similar dynamics. In the most recent Marcha, the Margaridas actively collaborated with the March of Indigenous Women but subsumed these women’s indigeneity within their shared position as “rural political subjects.” Likewise, the Marcha foregrounds shared rural territorial identities in its engagement with quilombola (women descendants of maroon communities) organizations while not otherwise politically engaging with black Brazilians. Motta notes that black and indigenous bodies are present in the Marcha but their ethno-racial identities and their differential experience of (racialized) class inequality are not politicized. In contrast, a starkly different dynamic is apparent in Barbosa’s account, in which indigenous women are the protagonists of a cross-cultural encounter (with mestiza popular feminists).

In bringing a critical race analytic to her historical study of race-blind popular feminism, Hiner reflects that, in many national contexts throughout Latin America, a hegemonic ideology of mestizaje functions to inscribe privilege by denying racial difference, eliding the specificity of Afro and indigenous experiences and their marginalized positionalities in the process. She shows that in Chile mestizo culture is assumed to be the “authentic” national (and popular) racial identity: “Both of these categories [pobladora and campesina] are explicitly classed as part of the ‘popular sectors’ and implicitly categorized racially as mestizo or not-exactly-white, although in this last case the centering of huaso [cowboy] culture as an authentically national Chilean culture elides [indigenous] and Afro-descendant cultural influences.” The ideological power of mestizaje and of the myth of racial democracy in Latin American racial formations has meant that an explicitly racialized consciousness has only relatively recently emerged among organized popular-sector women in many contexts, including among those who are themselves racialized in various ways.

The second operation in racializing popular feminism is attending to racialized women’s organizing and agency among the popular sectors in their own terms—investigating their possible interpolation (or not) with lineages of popular feminism as a praxis and as an analytic category. Several papers in this collection highlight the presence, role, priorities, and perspectives of race-conscious racialized grassroots women. Centering black and indigenous bodies, experiences, organizing, and theorizing has meant bracketing a priori assumptions about the content or modalities of gendered agency in the popular sectors and weighing the utility and appropriateness of the concept of popular feminism.

In its place, these contributors propose, respectively, racialized popular feminism (Veillette), differential feminism (Zulver), decolonial feminism (Sara Motta), and insurgent, revolutionary, rebel, and autonomous feminism (Barbosa). Some of them refract and reformulate the concept of popular feminism through intersectionality, recovering, amplifying, and pluralizing its meaning. Sara Motta works “within and beyond” popular feminisms, describing decolonial feminist practices clearly anchored in the popular but insisting on a critique of colonial logics that structure all modern politics including left-wing politics and thus popular feminism. ⁷ Barbosa employs feminismo comunitario (communitarian feminism) ⁸ to articulate a critique of the conceptual and political horizons of Western feminism, including its socialist and popular variants, but nonetheless attributes to Zapatista women an “intersectional” feminism that understands gender oppression in relation to being indigenous, peasant, and poor. She further argues that indigenous women are seeking a different gender paradigm and another form of life that is not contemplated in Western thought. Nevertheless, she testifies to the possibility of dialogue ⁹ between Zapatista feminism and other feminisms oriented to popular sectors and popular struggles.

This set of studies points to the position of racialized popular-sector communities as nonbeings/(non)subjects in the face of ongoing structural violence and dehumanization, as Sara Motta theorizes in her contribution, “Decolonizing Our Feminist/ized Revolutions: Enfleshed Praxis from Southwest Colombia.” Similarly, Barbosa writes that the “five-hundred-year night” condemned indigenous women to “sexual, physical, and epistemic violence and the denial of a dignified life as human beings.” The gendered agency of subjects resistant to coloniality overlaps with popular feminisms but also evinces specificities and tensions. ¹⁰ In the face of extreme violence and ongoing intense forms of subalternization, the problem of subjectivity here brings into view the heightened significance of infrapolitics, the home as site of resistance and healing, the particular politicization of racialized motherhood, the mobilizing of ancestral knowledges, embodied connections to territory, spirituality as a political force, and the political task of cultivating sovereignty of the self.

The deep-seated historical positioning of Afro and indigenous populations on the exteriority of modern-colonial societies has decentered the politics of demand and redistribution targeted to the modern state and so definitive of the politics of the popular (see Spivak, 2005, and, for discussion, Conway, 2018). However, the community groups and networks apparent in these studies do interface with the state in various ways. They advocate for justice and accountability in the face of police violence (Veillette), for reparations in the face of conflict-induced displacement and gender violence (Zulver), and for security, rights, and services (Sara Motta), but, as both Motta and Barbosa testify, there is also a politics of autonomy, an autonomy over selves, bodies, and territories moving beyond a modern politics of representation in relation to the state, within which popular feminism has been intelligible.

Grassroots organizing, sometimes in women-only but often in mixed-gender groups and in community-based organizations, remains an essential vehicle of these racialized women’s self-assertion, healing, empowerment, and critical consciousness—their political subject formation. Both home/family and community organization come into focus as essential to politicized subjectivity and to racialized popular-sector communities’ public presence. Interestingly, all these studies testify to endogenous grassroots feminisms but, with the important exception of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, their articulation with social movements, organizations, or political parties of the left is weaker. This may be an effect of the particular contexts of Afro-descendant communities in urban peripheries. Studies in other national contexts with strong indigenous movements would likely reveal stronger articulations with larger movement processes of racialized peoples.

Home Place, Motherhood, and Care in the Face of Systemic Violence

These contributors highlight the context of state-sponsored violence experienced by racialized popular-sector women and their communities, focusing on police violence (Veillette) war (Zulver, Sara Motta), and counterinsurgency (Barbosa). More broadly, they underline the genocidal nature of the structural violence that renders racialized popular-sectors nonbeings or “(non)subjects of modern sovereignty” (Sara Motta), left voiceless and faceless for 500 years, as the Zapatista women put it (Barbosa). In this context of violence and dehumanization, Anne-Marie Veillette, in “Racialized Popular Feminism: A Decolonial Analysis of Women’s Struggle with Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas,” reframes popular feminism not in terms of the modern politics of demand and redistribution but in terms of hidden forms of resistance. In this process, home, the scope of care work, and the relationship between public and private are resignified.

Veillette examines the resistance of Afro-Brazilian faveladas (female residents of poor urban neighborhoods) to police brutality as a fight for survival in the face of ongoing genocidal violence against black communities. She highlights the work that these women do as mothers and family members in providing their families a home, income support, protection from police brutality, and care for the physical and emotional well-being of the injured as well as in demanding justice. Much of this “unorganized, hidden, and survival-oriented” work is “easy to overlook,” since participants work to “protect their resistance from the dominants’ gaze.” This work has been discussed by Afro-feminist and decolonial scholars and activists but is largely absent from the popular feminist literature. It stretches popular feminist understandings of mothering and care work and destabilizes capital-centric theories of social reproduction.

These accounts also provoke further reconsideration of the public-private dichotomy. Sara Motta proposes nonbeing or nonsubject as an alternative starting point for the politicization of subjectivity under these conditions. In such accounts, the home place comes into view as a site of survival and resistance and of healing and regeneration in the face of relentless dehumanization. Mainstream feminism considered the home a key locus of the subordination of women, arguing that women were bound to reproductive labor and excluded from political life in the public sphere. In considerable tension with this, early forms of popular feminism politicized motherhood, care work, and the private sphere differently. Analysts further noted that, in fact, poor women were often forced to leave their homes and children in order to earn a living, frequently assuming the social reproduction tasks of middle-class women for very low pay. Marxist feminist-inflected analyses of popular feminism valorized and politicized reproductive labor, demonstrating its importance to capitalist accumulation in ensuring the reproduction and maintenance of workers and citizens.

Although such analyses clearly remain salient, as is apparent in many of the contributions here, the studies foregrounding decolonial and racialized popular feminisms politicize “home” in ways both overlapping with and distinctive from mestiza popular feminisms. Julia Zulver, for example, in “Asociación de Mujeres Afro por la Paz: Feminism with the Body and Face of a Woman,” reminds us that “if an Afro-descendant woman chooses to engage in child care and cooking, this decision must be framed in terms of an understanding of what these actions mean culturally and historically as well as from a class-based perspective” for black women who have been forced for generations to leave their families to work outside the home. Child care, cooking, and sewing also transmit their distinctive Afro-Colombian values, traditions, and cultures. Home place and family have historically been denied to nonbeings, and therefore their claiming of them is distinctively politicized (see Sara Motta in this issue). Zulver concludes that the activities of AFROMUPAZ “neither are entirely consistent with the gender-class perspective offered by popular feminism nor share the radical and transformational aspirations of some other Afro-descendant feminist organizations. Rather, they straddle the two categories.”

Healing and the Sovereignty of the Self as Resistance

Zulver’s study explores the “differential feminism” of displaced Afro-Colombian women in a “geography of terror.” AFROMUPAZ focuses on the racialized experiences of black women as survivors of sexual violence in the context of conflict-induced displacement. Through its psychosocial healing program, AFROMUPAZ builds a social base among women survivors to engage in resistance, reconstruction of community, political training, and legal advocacy. In the context of systemic violence against Afro-descendant people and its gendered manifestations, such as the hypersexualization and violation of black women’s bodies, Zulver’s account highlights the importance of reclaiming femininity and sexuality. This is expressive of “a rising political culture, which includes hair and dressing styles as sort of political performances” (Laó-Montes, 2016: 9) to reclaim physical integrity and personal agency in the wake of sexual violence. AFROMUPAZ feminism is enacted in cuerpo y cara de mujer (with the body and face of a woman), asserting an Afro-Colombian femininity and a feminine aesthetic against the continuing trauma of denigration and violation. The women of AFROMUPAZ ground their project for gender justice in their ethno-racial identity, drawing on their Afro-Colombian Chocó origins when they cook or design and produce clothes and jewelry for sale, in their psychosocial healing program, or when they contest racial stigma by promoting Afro-Colombian culture through public events.

Also based in Colombia, in the violence-torn Valle del Cauca, Sara Motta’s study of the Escuela de Mariposas de Alas Nuevas, an Afro-Colombian and indigenous women’s political school, and the Círculo de Hombres, Cali, an Afro-Colombian and indigenous men’s feminist political collective, similarly recognizes cultivating the “sovereignty of the self” as a critical political practice. The intergenerational experience of being violently reduced to nonbeing means that “individual and group healing . . . is central to the process of enabling more visible social and political agency.” These healing practices “are the space and place of an ‘other’ politics that makes it possible for racialized and feminized subaltern subjects to see themselves and one another as whole.” The work of healing and transforming the self is central to resisting violence and prefiguring an alternative affirmation of life. Motta portrays “a feminist and nonviolent politics that centers the personal and the everyday as sites of both knowledge making . . . [and]. . . a decolonizing politics of collective self-determination.” This, she argues, builds within but also clearly exceeds the conceptual framings of popular feminisms.

These organizations foster the collective transformation and recovery of the self in relation to home place, tierra, and family. Notably, in the case of the Círculo de Hombres, male participants with years of experience on the political left seek to promote “nonviolent, sensitive masculinities” to combat deep-seated machismo and gendered violence. They understand the undoing of hegemonic masculinities in the context of their rejection of colonial violence. The work of reclaiming agency, dignity, and inner sovereignty against internalized oppression is essential to individual and collective healing from the wounds of dehumanization. It is also a condition for public and political resistance to dispossession.

Ancestral Knowledges and Relations to Territory

The recovery of ancestral knowledges “as an active source of meaning and struggle” (Vázquez, 2012: 248, cited by Sara Motta) figures in all these accounts of gendered agency in the racialized popular sectors. This involves epistemological work, as Sara Motta makes explicit (see also Barbosa in this issue). The practices she describes involve recalling other knowledges and processes of knowledge creation such as storytelling and emotional, embodied, spiritual, and ancestral (black and indigenous) wisdoms.

In Zulver’s study, the women of AFROMUPAZ construct a collective identity of survivorship that draws on the cultural heritage, wisdom, and stories of their female ancestors from the Chocó. The racialized gender awareness of the Rio faveladas draws on memory of the survival struggles of Afro-Brazilian women before them. Each case is read (by Zulver and by Veillette) as an instantiation of “Amefricanidade” (Gonzalez, 1988)—an “Afrocentric epistemic category grounded in the African diaspora’s multiple traditions of resistance across the Americas” (Veillette in this issue). In varying ways and conditioned by colonial ruptures and displacements, ancestral knowledges remain in complex relation with place-based histories and memories, identities, and attachments.

The insurgent, revolutionary, rebel, and autonomous feminism of Zapatista women is steeped in their Mayan worldview and its understanding of history as cyclical, involving an effort at “taking back the past, with a projection toward a future that is constructed in the present.” Barbosa testifies to the political significance of memory, histories of resistance over many generations, and millennia-old knowledges linked to long-standing presence in a place or territorio (territory). The concept of territorio is being revived by indigenous movements as part of an “other” indigenous and peasant paradigm, “an epistemic paradigm of the countryside . . . that arises from the link with the epistemic, identitary, and political dimensions of their territorios within Abya Yala.” The “countryside” here refers to a socio-ecological-cultural space shared by indigenous and peasant peoples in Mexico. More amply, territorio evokes the space of living—sustaining and generating life over millennia—that involves millennia-old attachments to particular lands and landscapes. It centrally includes the production of food but has layers of history and meaning not present in the notion of land or rurality (Rosset, 2013). The concept is being developed in different strands of decolonial feminisms, notably linking the colonial violence to bodies and lands with the need for a politics of life in the service of healing. Territorio-cuerpo-tierra (territory-body-land) has emerged as a feminist proposal for resisting neoliberal extractivism and its violation of lands and the bodies and minds of those whose ongoing existence is inextricably interwoven with that of their territories. Barbosa attributes it to the Guatemalan Xinca theorist Lorena Cabnal (2010; see also Cruz Hernández, 2016; Paredes, 2011).

The interconnected task of healing of the individual, the community, and the land is expressed in Cabnal’s principle of sanación (holistic healing action). It evokes the work of healing of individual bodies and of individual and collective psyches and minds through the relearning of ancestral wisdoms. It also includes the need to mend the communal social fabric and to repair the territory in what Westerners would understand to be an environmental sense. Highlighting the human-nature interconnection is key to this work (Quiroz, 2020). In Sara Motta’s account of people displaced from their territories, territorio likewise denotes place-based, community-body-land connections and the care work required to “transcend the logics of death and disposability constitutive of patriarchal capitalist coloniality.”

Conclusion

With this journal issue, we reconsider popular feminism, its past(s), present(s), and possible futures. Feminist ideas are appearing, circulating, and being taken up, remixed, and resignified in popular-sector worlds differently positioned vis-à-vis modernity-coloniality— from urban poblaciones and favelas to “land, forests, and waters” and Zapatista communities. These processes are being cultivated both by small, endogenous community organizations and in more politicized forms by larger-scale social movement organizations and networks articulated to left-wing mobilizations for socioeconomic transformation and redistribution of power and wealth. Popular feminism has made it onto the policy agendas of left-leaning governments such as those of Venezuela and the Workers’ Party in Brazil.

Popular feminism continues to name the gendered agency of economically marginalized women and their struggles for dignified lives and livelihoods—for adequate resources for their families’ and communities’ safety and well-being. The gendered political economy of care work remains central to many “popular feminist” practices, especially as they interface with left-wing politics and analytics. However, as popular feminism is reconfigured in relation to rural, racialized, and indigenous popular sectors, the content of women’s care work and the politics of popular feminism shift and expand to include the defense of land, water, and ecosystems and resistance to despoliation and dispossession. In urban peripheries, racialized or differential popular feminism is centrally concerned with survival, protection, home place, and healing from state violence. Decolonial popular feminisms grounded in the lifeworlds and practices of Afro-descendant and indigenous communities and their life projects construct sovereignty of the self in relation to a communal politics of autonomy vis-à-vis the modern state.

As Conway urges, “Minimally, we need to speak of multiple popular feminisms with variable content and also of racialized and decolonial popular feminisms, and we need to inquire into what the contemporary use of the term ‘popular feminism’ enables and obscures.” Racialized and decolonial feminisms such as those presented in these pages “contribute to the plurality of feminisms, transgressions, and epistemologies in the broader women’s struggle for a break with both ancestral and Western patriarchies” (Barbosa in this issue). They contribute to what Aida Hernández (2014) has called an ecology of feminist knowledges, as noted by Díaz Alba, but they also expose the exclusions of quasi-universal categories of class and the popular and the way these categories operate on the terrain of “the modern political” as seeking representation in the modern state (Conway, 2013). Without an explicit decolonial commitment, merely appealing to the popular risks effectuating Afro-descendant and indigenous nonbeing.

The powerful denunciations of capitalist coloniality, both implicit and explicit, in racialized and decolonial popular feminisms are accompanied by alternative insights and practices forging paths forward for decolonizing broader-based social justice struggles. First, they invite pluriversal understandings of the world and “nurture a world with room for many worlds” (Barbosa in this issue; for more, see Conway et al., 2021). Second, they prefigure more holistic social relations and forms of socioeconomic organization that center “a politics of life” (Sara Motta in this issue), the Zapatistas’ “struggling for life as a revolutionary task” (Barbosa in this issue), and the agroecology framework of the Marcha das Margaridas (Renata Motta in this issue). These visions and practices resonate with buen vivir, the indigenous Andean commitment to the good life that is gaining traction among progressive movements throughout Latin America. We end by reminding ourselves of the hope-filled practice of Zapatista women, who recognize the possibility of dialogue across diverse popular feminisms embedded in popular struggles aligned with their own.