Decolonizing Our Feminist/ized Revolutions: Enfleshed Praxis from Southwest Colombia

• Author: Sara C. Motta
• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211020748
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211020748

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 239, Vol. 48 No. 4, July 2021, 124–142

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211020748

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

124

Decolonizing Our Feminist/ized Revolutions

Enfleshed Praxis from Southwest Colombia

by

Sara C. Motta

An initial mapping of the decolonial feminisms emergent in Buenaventura and Cali,

Southwest Colombia, in the Afro-Colombian and indigenous political Escuela de

Mariposas de Alas Nuevas and Círculo de Hombres, Cali, shows that they move within

and beyond a politics and epistemology of representation in a return to the enfleshed as

territories of transformatory wisdoms and the embrace of ancestrality and feminist spiri-

tuality.

Un mapeo inicial de los feminismos decoloniales surgidos en Buenaventura y Cali, en

el suroeste de Colombia, dentro de las agrupaciones políticas afrocolombianas e indígenas

Escuela de Mariposas de Alas Nuevas y Círculo de Hombres, Cali, muestra que se mueven

dentro y fuera de una política y epistemología de representación y ejercen un retorno a lo

encarnado como territorios de sabidurías transformadoras a la vez que abrazan la ances-

tralidad y la espiritualidad feminista.

Keywords: Popular feminisms, Decolonial feminisms, Territories of transformation,

Enfleshed, Healing liberations, Postrepresentation

In this I article I offer an initial conceptualization of the decolonizing

feminist practices emergent in the Valle del Cauca, Colombia. I focus on two

experiences—the Escuela de Mariposas de Alas Nuevas (New Butterflies’

Wings School), an autonomous Afro-Colombian and indigenous women’s

political school, and the Círculo de Hombres, Cali (Cali Men’s Circle), an Afro-

Colombian and indigenous men’s feminist political collective—and demon-

strate how their feminisms move within and beyond popular feminisms to

express a decolonizing feminist praxis. This is a feminist politics that begins

from an experience of feminized and racialized nonbeing, develops political

projects that are deeply epistemological, and nurtures pedagogies and knowl-

edges that move beyond a representational politics (of knowledge) and center

the struggle for enfleshed sovereignty over the territories1 of the body and the

body of the land as a praxis of healing liberation.

Sara C. Motta is a proud mestiza-salvaje of Colombian Chibcha, Eastern European Jewish, and

Celtic lineages, a mother, storyteller, poet, activist-political theorist, popular educator, and associ-

ate professor of politics and political economy at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales.

She is co-coordinating a number of action research projects including “La Politica de la

Maternidad” with indigenous and black mother and grandmother militants in Colombia, Brazil,

and Australia. Her latest book, Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (2018), was winner of

2020 best book in feminist theory and gender studies from the International Studies Association.

1020748LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211020748Latin American PerspectivesMotta / Decolonizing Our Feminist Revolutions

research-article2021

Motta / DECOLONIZING OUR FEMINIST REVOLUTIONS 125

Colombian Feminist ResistanCes

Colombia and the region of the Valle del Cauca have been the site of ongoing

patriarchal capitalist-colonial violence in which a logic of “politics as war” and

“war as politics” has been dominant in both the conflict between armed gueril-

las and the Colombian state (in its formal and paramilitary forms) and the

everyday interstices of community life. A long-standing coalition involving the

United States, Colombian political and economic elites, and paramilitary forces

has shaped a political-economic terrain characterized by dispossession in

which indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and poor mestiza communities are ren-

dered disposable (Bermúdez, 2013; Hernández Reyes, 2019) and in which

attempts at popular resistance have been criminalized and associated with inci-

vility and the absence of democracy and development. Yet, in this context in the

Valle del Cauca in particular, rich traditions of feminist praxis with multiple

feminist political schools and movements have emerged (Bermúdez, 2013;

Bermúdez and Tamayo, 2017; Motta, 2017b; Motta and Bermudez, 2019). This

praxis often remains invisible in political discussion and theoretical produc-

tion. However, the decolonizing feminisms emergent from racialized and fem-

inized popular subjects who experience intersecting oppressions, exclusions,

and violences arguably provide a site of epistemic privilege from which to

expand and deepen the politics (of knowledge) of both (popular) feminisms

and emancipatory struggles more broadly.

The development of a decolonial feminist lens in my scholarship has emerged

out of a two-decade-long political engagement and dialogue with racialized

women in movement in Latin America, Europe, and Australia and in particular

collaborations and shared struggles with feminists in Cali, Colombia. These

have involved exploration of different lineages of feminist praxis to develop

transformative strategies as activist-scholars and community organizers/edu-

cators. During the time in Cali (six months in 2017–2018) out of which this

particular research emerged, we explored core themes in their (our) own praxis

through a series of eight diálogos de saberes, a number of workshops, and 10

interviews with participants in feminist organizations, including the two orga-

nizations that are the focus of this article. We dialogued with and through tradi-

tions of decolonial, black, nonviolent, and indigenous feminisms emergent

from our shared and multiple experiences and histories to bring to thought,

name, and develop our struggles for and theorizations of decolonizing postpa-

triarchal worlds. Below I bring together some of these theorizations.

Within and beyond PoPulaR Feminisms

Popular feminisms emerged parallel to and often in contestation with mid-

dle-class feminist praxis from the 1970s on in Latin America. They were the

result of the political practice of poor women who brought to the center of

feminist struggle questions of class, gender, and in some cases race (Espinosa,

2012; Lebon, 2014; Safa, 1990). Their struggles centered around two main axes:

in contestation of the brutalization of their families via disappearance, torture,

and strategies of eradication by authoritarian regimes (Caldeira, 1998; Feijoo,