Re-reading LAP’s Genealogy with Feminist Eyes

Norma Chinchilla’s piece for this anniversary issue situates our collective work within the herstories of feminism and their/our relationships with Marxist lineages in LAP and beyond. It articulates a feminist genealogy of the emergence of feminist linages and their cultivation in the 1970s and 1980s and their expansion in the 1990s and 2000s. I would add to this genealogy their pluralization, including moves towards decolonization and de-statization in this last decade or more.

Feminist voices from the margins in the first decade of LAP re-read the texts of Marxism with attentiveness to questions of care and private labor within the domestic sphere and opened dialogues within LAP and beyond. Norma’s words bring to presence the struggles and processes of how these Marxist feminists learnt together to read the world from women’s experiences so as to inform these dialogues and break down the barriers of more orthodox and hetero-patriarchal forms of Marxist thought and practice.

Her feminist genealogy helps me reflect upon and re-consider within the light and learnings of these herstories of the barriers I encountered in attempting to speak from the margins of feminist Marxist theorizing in the period of 2011-2013 in relation to the feminization of resistance. The works and praxis of autonomous Marxist feminism were not those that constituted feminist Marxist and revolutionary thought within LAP at that time (for a paradigmatic example of this lineage of Marxist feminism and related struggles, see Federici, 2004; Motta, 2013).

Defense of the way theory travels and develops in the light of concrete territories, struggles and collective theorizing needed to be made so that these lineages of feminist Marxism might become legible and translatable and be recognized as valid contributions and concepts to the collective and critical revolutionary and transformative project of the journal. This enabled the foregrounding of an autonomous feminist praxis which moves prefiguratively against and beyond the state lineages of revolutionary (feminist) struggle that had dominated LAP’s feminist praxis prior to this period.

Norma’s feminist genealogy also enables me to reflect on the journey to bring together lineages of autonomous feminist Marxism and their focus on social reproduction and a prefigurative praxis of transformation and struggles in, against and beyond the state with the lineages of Black and Decolonial feminist/ized revolutionary praxis. This dialogue within feminist Marxism brings together the figure of the housewife as a communal figure of the commons and care with the figure of the racialized non-mother who enfleshes other cosmovisions and onto-epistemologies from the underside of hetero-patriarchal capitalist coloniality. These latter feminist lineages and subjects pluralize the politics of knowledge, the subjects/ivities of revolution and the very ontologies that underpin our struggles, visions and relationalities towards the body-territory, mother earth and more than human and non-human subjects.

These feminist struggles, lineages and praxis emergent from the concrete and embodied and enfleshed realities of women and feminized communitarian subjects, even if divergent and dissonant, all suggest something crucial. That the lineages of feminism that have opened invitations to re-think, expand, pluralize, feminize/make feminist and/or decolonize Marxist praxis, models and forms of revolutionary struggles within LAP and beyond are not forms of identity politics. They offer worldmaking and un-making visions, and they gift concepts, wisdoms and onto-epistemologies which deepen and pluralize our understanding of revolutionary politics, subjectivity, struggle and transformation.

I give thanks to Norma Chinchilla for sharing her reading of early feminist struggles, lineages and knowledges within LAP. I honor the multiple diverse and plural feminists and lineages of feminist Marxism as they have come to have presence within LAP. These lineages and herstories of struggle and praxis reflect, contribute, and nurture our dreams and praxis of revolutionary change in word, thought, body and practice.