Abstract
This issue constitutes the second part of our collection “Popular Feminism(s): Pasts, Presents and Futures.” The first part appeared in July 2021, and our introduction to that issue, entitled “Popular Feminism(s) Reconsidered: Popular, Racialized, and Decolonial Subjectivities in Contention,” provides a thorough contextualization and analysis of all 12 published contributions to the double issue. We provide here only a summary of the key points made there.
The papers gathered in this collection highlight the multiplicity of subjectivities in contention in popular feminist initiatives among economically marginalized women in Latin America. Contributors tease out the dual meaning of “popular feminism” as describing, on one hand, gender-conscious agency among grassroots women and, on the other, a politicized feminist identity articulated to the broader left. They explore the ways in which the emergence of popular feminist subjects relates to other actors, organizations, and institutions, especially on the left. Finally, they lead us to reflect on the political import of continuing to name the crucial work done by (self-identified) instantiations of “popular feminism” for social justice, while also demonstrating the need to racialize and decolonize popular feminism as both a concept and a praxis. Some contributors interrogate the often racially unmarked practices of the gender-class framework distinctive of (self-identified) “popular feminism.” Others attend to rural, racialized, and indigenous women’s agency in their own terms. “Popular feminism(s)” comes to be resignified to include the defense of land, water, and ecosystems and resistance to dispossession—to be concerned with survival, home place, and healing from state violence and with tackling internalized oppression by constructing sovereignty of the self in relation to a communal politics of autonomy vis-à-vis the modern state.
Footnotes
Janet M. Conway currently holds the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. She is a full professor of sociology at Brock University and former Canada Research Chair in Social Justice. Nathalie Lebon is an anthropologist and teaches women, gender, and sexuality studies at Gettysburg College. She is coeditor (with Elizabeth Maier) of Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship (2010) and De lo privado a lo público: 30 años de lucha ciudadana de las mujeres en América Latina (2006). The collective thanks them for organizing this issue.