Community Feminism through Body and Land

Can a community resist the appropriation of its land while allowing women’s bodies to remain controlled? Lorena Cabnal places this contradiction at the center of her chapter in ACSUR’s Feminismos diversos: el feminismo comunitario. Writing from Indigenous women’s political experience in Guatemala, she connects territorial defense with women’s authority over their bodies, pleasure and actions.

Critique can begin inside the community

The chapter is titled Acercamiento a la construcción de la propuesta de pensamiento epistémico de las mujeres indígenas feministas comunitarias de Abya Yala. Cabnal positions Indigenous women as producers of concepts who can question inherited practices. They do not need to leave their culture before acquiring the authority to oppose oppression within it.

Her account of the joining of ancestral and colonial patriarchies contests explanations that attribute every gender hierarchy to colonizers. This does not reduce colonial responsibility. It refuses to make anticolonial resistance an exemption from criticism of internal domination. She also insists on the plurality of Indigenous worldviews; the argument cannot be converted into a claim that every people shared one precolonial history.

Who defines complementarity?

The discussion of cosmology and heterosexual norms asks who assigns tasks when women and men are described as naturally complementary. Sacred relationships can also establish women as reproducers, carers and guardians of culture, making refusal appear to threaten the community itself.

The question extends to sexuality. When heterosexuality is written into a cosmic or natural order, other relationships can be dismissed as outside contamination. Cabnal connects this regulation to male authority over knowledge: who interprets tradition, and who is expected only to preserve it? Challenging tradition can be part of a community’s continued life and transformation.

Body–land is a relation of power

Cabnal describes the body as a first territory to reclaim, connecting bodily autonomy with resistance to mining and dispossession. The connection concerns who may use, control or exploit a body or a territory, who bears the injuries and who can refuse. It does not require women to be biologically closer to nature than men.

Pleasure, art, rest, healing and joy appear as practices of bodily freedom. Women become creators of desired lives, rather than appearing only as victims or keepers of culture. A territorial movement that tolerates sexual violence, economic control or the exclusion of women’s speech must also change its own relations.

Connection without a single history

Cabnal invites women in different places to listen to one another while retaining their distinct starting points. This is a political and epistemic proposal, rather than a comparative survey proving the structure of every Indigenous society. Its account of ancestral patriarchy calls for engagement with particular regional histories, rather than a choice between an innocent tradition and a backward culture.

Cabnal’s conversation about body, territory and healing carries these questions into another setting. Lugones’s Coloniality and Gender offers a different theoretical path through colonial rule and gender formation. The two can be read together while preserving their different accounts of historical starting points and relations of domination.