Conceiving Latin American Feminist Counterpublics
This chapter traces the historical outlines of Latin American feminist counterpublics to show the kind of organizing, including alternative media use, that provided the foundation upon which more recent counterpublics would build. Through their publications and face-to-face meetings, activists during the late 19th and early 20th century developed strategies to name and claim women’s rights long before the advent of the internet. Their work served as a model for the explosion of activism beginning in the 1970s, when new regional publications enriched an unprecedented, and globally unreplicated counterpublic space, that of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters, or large regional meetings. The chapter also profiles two global communication projects in which Latin American counterpublics were embedded, and ends with an analysis of the very first computer-mediated project to promote women’s rights at the international venue of the 1975 UN World conference on women.