Popular Feminism(s) Reconsidered: Popular, Racialized, and Decolonial Subjectivities in Contention

• Author: Nathalie Lebon,Janet M. Conway
• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211021860
• Subject Matter: Introduction

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211021860

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 239, Vol. 48 No. 4, July 2021, 3–24

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211021860

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

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Introduction

Popular Feminism(s) Reconsidered

Popular, Racialized, and Decolonial Subjectivities

in Contention

by

Janet M. Conway and Nathalie Lebon

This issue is concerned with the salience of “popular feminism” as an analytic

category for naming the myriad contemporary forms of gendered awareness

and agency appearing among Latin America’s poor, working-class and racial-

ized1 communities. Although we have an analytic agenda, our underlying con-

cern here is with the politics of feminism—the construction of intersectional

feminist praxes of gender, race, and economic justice and their relation to other

projects for social justice. Our focus on popular feminism addresses the relation-

ship between the subaltern2 subjectivities of marginalized women, their relation

to feminist political agency, and the relation of both to mixed-gender efforts for

social transformation on the broader left. Although it may be a current within

them, popular feminism is distinct from the mass feminisms on the streets and

online, the “feminisms of the 99 percent,” that have gripped the continent in

recent years. It is the feminism of the poor and the subaltern, whose concerns for

gender justice are inescapably co-constituted with their collective struggles for

material, cultural and psychic survival against racist violence, land disposses-

sion, environmental despoliation, and economic deprivation. One well-known

contemporary example of self-identified popular feminism is that of the Consejo

Cívico de Organizaciones Populares y Indígenas de Honduras (Civic Council of

Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras—COPINH) whose

founder, Berta Cáceres, a recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, was

assassinated in 2016. Her assassination signaled retribution for COPINH’s hard-

fought struggle against the rapacious capitalist, patriarchal, and colonizing

practices destroying the land, rivers, and lives of the Lenca people. COPINH

activists recently participated in an International Feminist Organizing School

involving 200 grassroots feminists from around the world organized by the

World – a popular feminist initiative March of Women, among others.3

Janet M. Conway currently holds the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount

Saint Vincent University. She is a full professor of sociology at Brock University and former

Canada Research Chair in Social Justice. Nathalie Lebon is an anthropologist and teaches women,

gender, and sexuality studies at Gettysburg College. She is coeditor (with Elizabeth Maier) of

Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing

Citizenship (2010) and De lo privado a lo público: 30 años de lucha ciudadana de las mujeres en América

Latina (2006). The collective thanks them for organizing this issue.

1021860LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211021860Latin American PerspectivesConway and Lebon / INTRODUCTION

research-article2021

4 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Racializing, indigenizing, and decolonizing popular feminism as a category

and a praxis is also a central preoccupation of this journal issue, as popular fem-

inism has historically been a racially unmarked concept. Its usage in the present

can efface, for example, the indigenous character of COPINH’s praxis unless its

intersection with race and indigeneity is specified. In addition to documenting a

range of activisms emerging in different national contexts and at various scales,

this journal issue is concerned with questions of subjectivity, especially the col-

lective subjectivities of marginalized populations. These are central to the build-

ing of collective agency, to any prospect of coalitions across difference, and to any

broader politics of social transformation. The agenda of this journal issue must

be understood in the context of the historical specificity of the concept “popular

feminism” in the 1980s, its relation to socialist feminism,4 its abeyance in the

1990s, and its recent reappearance, as charted by Janet Conway in “Popular

Feminism: Considering a Concept in Feminist Politics and Theory.”

Born in Latin America in the 1980s, the term feminismo popular was a way of

naming the gendered character of the struggles for survival and against dicta-

torship by women of the popular sectors and signaled their significance for

feminism imbricated with the left in mass-based struggles for economic justice

and wider social transformation. In many historical contexts, popular feminism

has overlapped substantively and analytically with the movimiento de mujeres.

Aside from meaning “women’s (not necessarily feminist) movement,” the term

movimiento de mujeres (hereafter “grassroots women’s movement”) referred to

self-organized women working on issues affecting family and community

well-being with no necessary connection to feminismo histórico (hereafter “main-

stream feminism”). These issues included sanitation and housing, food insecu-

rity, public health, and the cost of living. In the context of dictatorship, women

protested the disappearance of their children and became actors in larger

human rights and pro-democracy movements. Originally, many claimed moth-

erhood rather than gender equity as a basis of legitimation for their public

protests and demands and not infrequently mobilized with men in common

efforts.

These grassroots women’s movements displayed significant tensions with

the demands and strategies of the mainstream feminism of the period. The

latter was composed of middle-class, educated women organizing for gender

equity under the law in education, employment, and the family, for sexual and

reproductive rights, and against domestic violence. The latter saw the former

as problematic for feminism in its valorization of motherhood and conven-

tional gendered divisions of labor. As grassroots women’s movements came

into contact with feminism and critical gender consciousness grew among

popular-sector women, they sought to claim space in the feminist movement.

Their “popular feminism” was distinguished by its anchorage in popular-

sector lifeworlds and attendant survival struggles, which also came to include

more explicitly gendered struggles such as those for child care and women’s

health and against gender-based violence. Socialist feminist activists were

often implicated in these mobilizations, and “popular feminism” also came to

be associated with their praxis (Espinosa Damián, 2011; Maier, 2010). As

Conway points out, the abeyance of popular feminism as an analytic category

maps onto the decline of socialism as a political horizon. In the decades since