Popular Feminism: Considering a Concept in Feminist Politics and Theory

• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211013008
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211013008

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 239, Vol. 48 No. 4, July 2021, 25–48

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211013008

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

25

Popular Feminism

Considering a Concept in Feminist Politics and Theory

by

Janet M. Conway

An analysis of popular feminism as a category in Latin American feminist studies from

its origins in the 1980s and its disappearance in the 1990s to its resurgence in the present

through the protagonism of the World March of Women, asks what is at stake in this con-

temporary claim to popular feminism in relation to the multiplication of feminisms. The

contemporary use of the concept specifies a feminist praxis that is contentious, materialist,

and counterhegemonic in permanently unsettled relations both with other feminisms and

mixed-gender movements on the left. Despite converging agendas for redistribution, it also

remains in considerable tension with black and indigenous feminisms. As a racially

unmarked category, contemporary popular feminism continues to reproduce an elision of

race and colonialism common to mestiza feminism and the political left.

Un análisis del feminismo popular como categoría en los estudios feministas latino-

americanos, desde sus orígenes en la década de 1980 y su desaparición en la década de 1990

hasta su actual resurgimiento a través del protagonismo de la Marcha Mundial de la Mujer

nos lleva a preguntarnos qué está en juego en esta reivindicación contemporánea del femi-

nismo popular cuando lo consideramos en relación a la actual multiplicación de feminis-

mos. El uso contemporáneo del concepto especifica una praxis feminista que es polémica,

materialista y contrahegemónica dentro del marco de relaciones permanentemente inesta-

bles, tanto con otros feminismos como con movimientos izquierdistas de género mixto. A

pesar de las agendas convergentes de redistribución, también mantiene una tensión consid-

erable con los feminismos negros e indígenas. Como categoría racialmente inespecífica, el

feminismo popular contemporáneo mantiene sus elisiones de raza y colonialismo, asunto

característico del feminismo mestizo, así como de la izquierda política.

Keywords: Popular feminism, Race, Black feminism, Indigenous feminism, World

March of Women

Popular feminism as an analytic and political category emerged in Latin

America in the 1980s as a way of naming gendered struggles against structural

adjustment and dictatorship by women of the “popular sectors.”1 It denoted

the collective agency of poor and working-class women in struggles for

communal survival and livelihoods and against myriad forms of violence.

More specifically, “popular feminism” named the gendered character of these

Janet Conway is a full professor of sociology at Brock University and former Canada Research

Chair in Social Justice (2008–2018). She is currently the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair in Women’s

Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. Her published works include Identity, Place, Knowledge:

Social Movements Contesting Globalization (2004), Praxis and Politics: Knowledge Production in Social

Movements (2006), and Edges of Global Justice: The World Social Forum and Its ‘Others’ (2013).

1013008LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211013008Latin American PerspectivesConway / POPULAR FEMINISM

research-article2021

26 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

struggles, the gender consciousness emergent in these women’s groups, their

resignification of/by feminism, and their relevance to feminism as a mass

movement for social transformation. Despite the proliferation of such gen-

dered movements since then, popular feminism as an analytic category seems

to have largely disappeared in the course of the 1990s. As a search term for

scholarly literature in Spanish or English, it yields almost no hits for work

published after the mid-1990s. As an analytic and political category, it seems

to have receded even as Latin American feminisms continued to diffuse, mul-

tiply, and metamorphose, including in and through popular sectors.

The World March of Women, a transnational feminist network that emerged

in the late 1990s articulated to the antiglobalization movement and with a strong

pole in Latin America, has nonetheless been recently described as a contempo-

rary form of popular feminism (América Latina en Movimiento, 2013). Indeed,

the March in a number of national contexts and at the regional scale in Latin

America uses the term “popular feminism” to describe the kind of feminism it

is building. It has generated a significant body of scholarship, and in this context

scholarly usage of popular feminism as an analytic category has recently reap-

peared (Conway, 2018; Lebon, 2013; 2014; Maier and Lebon, 2010; see also Lebon,

Masson and Beaulieu Bastien, and Diaz Alba in this issue).2 Thus both the praxis

of the March and the scholarship about it operate to recover popular feminism

as a political project and analytic category in the present.

This raises a number of questions for Latin American feminist studies.

What does “popular feminism” mean in this contemporary activist and schol-

arly context? What is its relation to the longer genealogy of popular feminism

in Latin America? Does its usage by the March signify a resurgence, a revisi-

bilization, or a resignification of popular feminism? What is at stake in its

claim? What is its relation to the multiple feminisms, particularly black and

indigenous feminisms, that have appeared in the popular sectors since the

1990s? What does its seeming abeyance and reappearance suggest about tra-

jectories and contestations in Latin American feminisms and in the larger

political field?

Elsewhere I have analyzed the March as a transnational instantiation of

Latin American popular feminism and its complex relation to contemporary

expressions of feminized subaltern agency arising from the popular sectors

(Conway, 2012; 2017; 2018; Conway and Paulos, 2020). I am not a Latin

Americanist, but my encounters with Latin American feminisms, from those

appearing in Peru’s popular kitchens and Christian base communities in the

late 1980s through the Zapatistas in the 1990s to the World Social Forum of the

2000s, suggested the relevance of the genealogies of Latin American feminisms

to situating and specifying the feminist politics of the World March of Women.

In this article, I am building on that empirical and analytic foundation to

reflect more historically, theoretically, and critically on popular feminism as a

political and analytic category in feminist theory and politics—as a social con-

struction that has varied across time and place and has been contested,

deployed, and shaped by polemics over Latin American feminism.3 I begin

by discussing popular feminism as an analytic category in Latin American

feminist studies and suggesting its possible relation to the notions of the popu-

lar in the Latin American political thought. I explore its strange disappearance