Feminisms in Movement

Feminisms in Movement: Theories and Practices from the Americas rejects a one-way account in which academic theory travels outward for activists to apply. Edited by Lívia De Souza Lima, Edith Otero Quezada, and Julia Roth, it places activists, artists, scholars, and community knowledge on the same plane. “Movement” means protest, organizing, and institutional change, but also the transformation of concepts as they cross borders, languages, and struggles.

The collection begins with coloniality of gender and modern patriarchy, then enters particular political sites: a Black feminist abolitionist reading of Cuba’s 11J protests, Colombia’s Truth Commission, Central American struggles, LGBTQ+ history in Nicaragua, Chilean constitutional activism, and Indigenous literature and environmental knowledge in Brazil. “The Americas” appears not as one cultural region but as an uneven field formed by colonialism, slavery, dictatorship, revolution, migration, and extraction.

Its contribution to intersectionality is to repoliticize the term beyond a list of identities. Gendered violence, racism, homo- and transphobia, capitalist exploitation, climate crisis, and coloniality do not sit beside one another; they operate together through land, policing, elections, households, and labor. Marginal perspectives do not merely add representation to theory made at the center. They change the questions of who counts as a political subject, what counts as violence, and which knowledge can organize a future.

Essays on body-territory and ecofeminism connect bodily autonomy with land defense and extractivism. When mining, agribusiness, and state violence enter a community, they simultaneously reorganize the safety, work, and reproduction of women and queer people. Indigenous women’s environmental knowledge is not romanticized tradition but political practice for resisting dispossession and maintaining common life. Climate justice therefore cannot be detached from colonial history or land rights.

The book’s form also matters. Academic essays sit beside interviews, literature, commemoration, rap, and experiences including LASTESIS, recognizing that dance, slogans, collective memory, and organizing methods can produce theory. Genealogies through Lélia Gonzalez, Sueli Carneiro, and Marielle Franco show that knowledge does not originate only in Anglophone academic centers. Translation and inter-American dialogue must preserve local conceptual histories rather than convert everything into Northern vocabulary.

Breadth brings limitations. Chapters vary in depth and method, while some countries and communities outside Spanish-, Portuguese-, and English-language circuits remain less visible. “Feminisms of the Americas” can still obscure enormous differences within nations and among Caribbean, northern Indigenous, and migrant communities. Readers should also follow political developments after publication rather than treat the movement landscape of 2024 as a static panorama.

For FemRes, the collection’s value lies in defining feminism as a collective practice of continually correcting relationships, not a fixed list of schools. It enables comparison of how movements approach state power, violence, ecology, memory, and art, while insisting that comparison preserve inequalities of power. The result should be more than the observation that many feminisms exist: it is a method for asking who produces knowledge, who carries the risk of action, and who decides the common future.