Latin America, Decoloniality, and Translation

This chapter reflects on the feminist decolonial turn in Latin America by taking as its point of departure the debates on the coloniality of power and of gender. It analyzes how decolonial feminisms might unsettle hegemonic feminisms through the practice of translation—based not only on a linguistic paradigm, but more importantly, on an ontological one. In applying the notion of translation as equivocation, derived from Amerindian perspectivism, to discussions of the coloniality of gender, this chapter explores how some Latin American feminists were enacting a decolonial politics avant la lettre. It argues that translation becomes a key element in forging alternative feminist decolonial epistemologies, as well as a practice enabling partial connections among the various feminist formations in the Americas.

Cámara Queer

This essay examines photographic representations of queer Latinidad. A longing to discover a photographic history of Latina lesbian desire prompts a discussion of queerness in the context of Latinx love, sexuality, and desire. By way of examples of photographic representations, queer Latinidad is presented as complex and capable of encompassing paradoxical but expansive, nondichotomous understandings of sexuality and of gender presentation. Such photographic representations also allow for disidentifications that introduce the possibility of desires that cut across races and racism. Following Muñoz, queer Latinidad is ultimately connected to a sense of longing and melancholia that is resistant in the face of the various erasures of queer Latinidad, both in the context of queer theory and in the context of everydayness.

Hallucinating Knowing

Through ancestral and submerged sensual repertoires, through healing practices, spoken word poetry, and other forms of psychic praxis, Latina and Xicana feminist theorizing resists the westernizing idioms of cognitive impairment. This chapter examines the ways that the coloniality of gender—as an injunction to inhabit heterosexualist, human-centered, notions of sanity—exclude Latina and Xicana experience and knowledge from the realm of cognitive accuracy. It suggests that heterosexualism creates conditions for hallucinations to arise within Latinx communities. Specifically, it explores healing traditions several centuries long as they shape contemporary Latina and Xicana theories and their ties to hallucinating perception. Positing that hallucinating knowing carries the healing properties of spiritual practices among mixed-race indigenous-Latinx peoples, this chapter gathers evidence of gender-nonconforming subjectivities and the more-than-human remedies that they concoct in their negotiation of perceptual repertoires. More-than-human knowing ultimately illustrates the role of perceptual cross-referencing, or transitioning, between tangible and intangible domains.

From Women’s Movements to Feminist Theories (and Vice Versa)

This chapter examines some of the substantial suggestions for antiessentialist practices that have emerged from the problematic prejudice against women’s rights. Exploring the idea of identity, as it is lived and resignified by Latin American women, offers us a set of significant ideas that provide different ways of signifying language and reality. The chapter attends critically to these ideas, confronting their historical and political contexts through decolonial thought, subalternity, and globalization. It denies an essentialist view of “identity,” appealing to the collective resignification that women have achieved individually and among each other through self-expression, revealing the democratic value of ambiguity rather than that of univocity, of mestizaje over purity, and self-identifications over essentialist hegemonic definitions.

Vulnerable Bodies

This essay examines how the Chicana feminist muralist Juana Alicia fosters environmental justice activism that values vulnerable lives in her two most famous murals, both painted at Twenty-Fourth and York Streets in San Francisco’s Mission District: Las Lechugueras (1983) and La Llorona’s Sacred Waters (2004). It explores how Juana Alicia gives visual form to an environmental ethics that prompts a politics of inclusion, equitable resource distribution, and bodily diversity. Juana Alicia’s murals remind us what antiracist, feminist, disability, environmental, and other social justice movements share: an investment in radical interdependence between different kinds of bodies and beings. They depict disabilities created by environmental hazards (including pollution, pesticide poisoning, and the privatization of water) without reducing disability to tragedy, prompting viewers to envision a world in which working-class communities of color are not forced to bear the brunt of environmental risk.

Embodied Genealogies

This chapter shows how Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on genealogy can be read critically and strategically alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s thought to develop a conception of “embodied genealogy” as a mode of critical, historical, and transformative philosophical practice. Anzaldúa’s thought resonates with Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy, a method of philosophical practice that sheds critical light on dominant ways of knowing by calling into question assumptions about historical necessity and rational progress. Reading Anzaldúa’s work through this lens sheds light on her contributions to philosophical conversations about knowledge, identity, and community. Anzaldúa’s work can also be read as a productive critique and necessary supplement to a Nietzschean conception of genealogical ways of knowing. Considering Anzaldúa’s thought and Nietzschean genealogy together yields a rich philosophical ground for thinking through questions about knowledge, embodiment, and identity in general, and the intellectual and political practice of Latina feminist philosophy in particular.

African, Latina, Feminist, and Decolonial

This essay proposes that Marta Moreno Vega’s 2004 memoir, When the Spirits Dance Mambo, is a Latina feminist narrative that foregrounds African diaspora worldviews, thought, forms, and practices as resources for cultivating a path toward decoloniality. In this memoir, Abuela’s spiritual leadership and her introduction of the young Cotito into the practice of Espiritismo become a central prism through which Cotito innovatively apprehends the links between sacred and secular realms in the burgeoning mambo and salsa music scene of New York. Even more importantly, her engagement with this diasporan worldview allows Cotito to critically apprehend prevailing gender norms and their limitations. This essay, therefore, argues that an Afro-Latina feminism emerges in this memoir from the practice of embodied spirituality that also has sonic, aesthetic, and social dimensions in everyday life.

“Remaking Human Being”

In “Remaking Human Being,” the author enumerates the decolonial elements of Helena María Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Come with Them to illustrate the importance of literature and literary criticism for a decolonial project. After defining decoloniality, the essay shows that Viramontes structures her narrative and personifies her characters to reveal the socioeconomic and ideological forces that keep Latinx and other people of color in conditions of subordination. Moreover, Viramontes’s pluralized and digressive narrative structure, together with a faithful witnessing of her characters’ daily actions and embodied subjectivities, demonstrates the importance for social justice projects of cultivating multiple and diverse perspectives on any given event. By enabling her characters—and her readers—to develop a kaleidoscopic consciousness, Viramontes effectively provides the imaginative resources to facilitate our ability to remake ourselves and their world(s) we share.

Crossroads and In-Between Spaces

The essay focuses on Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative of overcoming shame in Borderlands/La Frontera. It addresses the question of coming to terms with multiple conditions of oppression obstructing the creative agency of radical Latina subjects. The discussion occurs along two intersecting planes: (1) the existential question of self-knowledge as the self undergoes the difficult process of identifying and releasing the weight of past oppressions and (2) the situated character of Anzaldúa’s Chicana/Latina condition in light of the heteronormative and epistemic constraints she faces as a Latina writer whose work is intimately interlinked with her sense of self. Anzaldúa’s message of overcoming shame is shown to have some affinities with Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections on freedom from shame as the ultimate seal of liberation. Considered as Anzaldúa’s companion in a journey in self-overcoming at the crossroads of indigenous and Chicana/Tejana cultures, her new mestiza takes on a new significance.

Philosophical Feminism in Latin America

This chapter offers a critical survey of feminism in Latin America, highlighting the contributions of prominent Latin American feminists in art, politics, and philosophy. The essay begins with a discussion of the pioneering feminist ideas of Juana Inés de la Cruz and their reception in Latin American feminist thought; and it continues with an elucidation of contemporary feminist critiques of the neoliberal paradigm of “multiculturalism.” The chapter also discusses how, around 1995, Latin American feminism became split in the academy: on the one hand, there were those Latin American feminists who favored the strategy of diversifying the curriculum and including gender issues within the existing institutional and academic frameworks; and, on the other hand, there were those Latin American feminists who favored a more subversive strategy of ignoring traditional forms of academic recognition and privileging the engaged thought and action of the women’s movement.