Feminisms in Movement

Feminisms in Movement: Theories and Practices from the Americas, edited by Lívia De Souza Lima, Edith Otero Quezada, and Julia Roth, is not a single theory of “American feminism” but a deliberately varied collection. Its editors propose three ways to read the material: temporality, movement, and embodied experience. Together, these unsettle a familiar map in which feminism develops first in the North and later travels south. The introduction instead describes overlapping genealogies and simultaneous geographies—a “mixed temporality” that resists linear wave histories—where concepts change through translation, political conflict, and local practice. “Movement” names protest and organizing, but also this circulation and transformation of knowledge.

That framework matters because the editors explicitly say the volume is a selection, not a complete or representative account. They use Abya Yala and Améfrica Ladina to signal histories and political vocabularies that the generic label “the Americas” can flatten. The book does not claim that colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, or feminist organizing took the same form everywhere. It asks how their entanglements differ across place and time, and whose concepts become legible as theory. Its 332 pages move through three parts—“Theorizations and Epistemic Dialogues,” “Embodied Experiences and Knowledge Productions,” and “Feminist Conversations”—rather than arranging all contributions as one linear regional history. The editors’ public introduction and the publisher’s contents provide the map for this reading. (Publisher record; open-access reading sample)

The first part stages disagreement as a method, not a flaw to be edited away. María Lugones’s “The Coloniality of Gender” is placed beside Rita Laura Segato’s “Coloniality and Modern Patriarchy.” In the editors’ account, Segato contests an interpretation that colonial rule introduced gender difference where none existed; she argues that gender relations existed before colonization but were transformed through colonial modernity, including new binaries and a public/private divide. This distinction changes the question from whether patriarchy is simply “Western” or “precolonial” to how colonial power reorganizes existing relations, imposes new classifications, and makes some histories difficult to recognize. Reading the two chapters together is therefore more useful than treating “decolonial feminism” as a settled position. The chapter record confirms Segato’s contribution and its place in the volume; the précis follows the editors’ introduction. (Chapter record)

Other contributions ask what intersectional analysis does when it leaves the abstract level. The editors describe Sandra Heidl’s account of Cuba’s 11 July 2021 (11J) protests as a Black feminist criminal-abolitionist critique of the punitive state: it connects criminalization with poverty, Blackness, non-normative sexuality, and political dissent, and considers care as part of an abolitionist response. The point is not to collapse Cuba’s context into a universal formula, but to show how race, gender, sexuality, and state force shape what counts as protest and whose dissent is punished. A chapter on the Colombian Truth Commission in the Caribbean region, by contrast, turns toward the institutional work of intersectional practice and socio-political transformation. These are distinct cases, not interchangeable illustrations of “women’s resistance.”

The collection also moves between territory and body without turning Indigenous or community knowledge into a symbolic resource for outside theory. The editors’ introduction discusses Julieta Paredes Carvajal’s body-territory approach and describes the Huizachera women’s ecological cooperative in Jalisco as a case where knowledge emerging from collective action becomes an intervention in local conditions. This framing makes environmental knowledge more than information to be extracted or cited: it raises questions of place, reproduction, collective organization, and who has authority to define a problem. A separate chapter on cuir-feminist sociology in Mexico examines the difficulty of carrying the category “queer” into a different context, asking how gender, sexuality, and bodies are socially assigned and governed. The contrast is instructive: translation can create connections, but it can also erase the political history embedded in a concept.

Form is part of the argument. Alongside theoretical essays are interviews and conversations with, among others, the Chilean collective LASTESIS and Anielle Franco; the contents also include rap, poetry, commemoration, and María Galindo’s “Intuitive Feminism.” The editors’ introduction treats these forms as ways of theorizing, not as lighter supplements to academic prose. A dance, an interview, or a political memory can carry analysis because it shows how ideas are made usable, shared, and contested in practice. That does not make art automatically emancipatory; it does challenge the assumption that theory belongs only to credentialed writers or that activism merely applies ideas made elsewhere.

The volume’s breadth is both its invitation and its limit. The editors acknowledge that the selection is neither exhaustive nor representative, and the contributions differ in method and scale. A hemispheric label can still obscure differences among nations, Indigenous peoples, diasporas, and movements; the book cannot stand in for those communities’ own accounts. Nor should a reader mistake adjacency in an anthology for consensus: its strongest passages put theories into dialogue precisely where they diverge. Readers may start with Part I to follow conceptual disagreements, move to Part II for situated practices and knowledge production, and finish with Part III to hear activists and artists address public action in their own forms.

The collection is most useful as a map for asking how feminist knowledge travels without becoming detached from the bodies, places, and struggles that produce it. It pairs well with María Lugones’s Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes for a focused route into the coloniality-of-gender conversation; that is an editorial reading connection, not a claim that the anthology is simply an extension of Lugones’s book. The catalog record here describes the transcript Verlag paperback distributed by Columbia University Press (ISBN 9783837661026; April 2024). The free open-access digital edition is listed with ISBN 9783839461020.