Popular Feminism: Considering a Concept in Feminist Politics and Theory

Popular Feminism as An Analytic Category in Latin American Feminist Studies

Popular feminism as a category in Latin American feminist studies appeared in the mid- to late 1980s. Andreas (1985: 201–202) attributes its origin to the 1984 International Women’s Day march in Lima some months after the second Encuentro of Latin American and Caribbean Feminists. Also held in Lima, this latter event had effectively excluded rural and shantytown women on the basis that they were not really “feminist.” “Popular feminism” as a slogan was a response to this controversy in favor of the inclusion of the grassroots women’s movement (movimiento de mujeres) in the feminist movement. Its appearance signaled a contest within Latin American feminism arising from poor women’s collective organizing over feminism’s character and scope and staked out a position in that contest.

The controversy through the 1980s was analyzed by feminists as one over the status of motherhood, traditional gender roles, and gendered divisions of labor in a feminist politics oriented to gender equality. In their mobilizing on the basis of their roles as mothers, these grassroots women’s movements (or, in another common formulation, feminine movements) were problematic for feminism because they were seen to be defending traditional gender roles. This led to active attempts to exclude them from consideration as feminist (Sternbach et al., 1992; see also Chinchilla, 1991). However, this controversy over who/what could be considered feminist was also the occasion for socialist, Marxist, and other feminists concerned with issues of social injustice and broad-based social transformation to theorize the possible relation between the gendered mobilizations of poor women for survival and the building of feminism as a broad-based social movement. This was the context for Molyneux’s (1985) classic argument about the relation between practical gender needs and strategic gender interests and the relation of both to critical collective consciousness. ⁵

In its most common everyday usage then, “popular feminism” denoted the emergent gender consciousness of poor and working-class women of the popular sectors as it had taken shape over a decade of grassroots mobilizations in the context of deep economic crisis and repressive regimes and in relation to the diffusion of feminist ideas and activism. ⁶ This ascriptive meaning remains the common current understanding of the term (Maier, 2010: 41, n. 14). Popular feminism is thus characterized by its demographic composition, its anchorage in the lifeworlds of the popular sectors, and its contestation, arising from this basis, over the substantive content of feminism. As a category, in many (but not all) contexts, its scope and meaning overlap substantially with that of the movimiento de mujeres, or grassroots women’s movement, of the 1980s and designate the proliferating activisms of poor and working-class women around a wide array of issues and often in close relation to mixed-gender organizations and social movements, including unions, Christian base communities, peasant organizations, and human rights groups (Alvarez et al., 2003: 544; Sternbach et al,.1992; see also Hiner in this issue).

Given the diversity of its activist subjects and their contexts of struggle, popular feminism in this sense is a capacious and malleable concept of shifting and varying content that reflects transformations in multiple popular struggles over the past quarter-century. Its specificity in the Latin American feminist field lies in its naming the multiplying and mutating gender consciousness of the grassroots women’s movement(s) in relation to hegemonic feminism in Latin America. ⁷ It has been most clearly distinguished from this mainstream feminism of the 1980s (feminismo histórico) by its wider range of preoccupations, its solidarity with men in the community and defense of family well-being, its performance of traditional gender roles and comportment, and its ambivalent stance vis-à-vis “core” feminist concerns (sexual and reproductive rights, male violence against women, women’s bodily autonomy)— thus, its reluctance to identify itself as feminist. ⁸ What makes the grassroots women’s movement feminist is not that it assumes a unitary or preassigned feminist agenda but that, from specific contexts of struggle, it recognizes the subordination of women, struggles against it in favor of greater freedom for women, and resignifies feminism in the process (Espinosa Damián, 2011).

We might say that popular feminism was a way of asserting the feminist character and significance of the grassroots women’s movement, noting its mass presence by the late 1980s in the self-identified feminist movement and its claims to a feminist identity. The meaning of popular feminism was thus forged in the foundational conflicts of the 1980s about who was a feminist and what was the proper content and focus of the feminist movement, especially as these intersected with socioeconomic concerns. This permanently open-ended, unsettled and contentious character of popular feminism is evident today in the World March of Women’s combative stance toward feminisms considered more mainstream.

Whereas “movimiento de mujeres” (grassroots women’s movement) and “popular feminism” are both capacious and overlapping concepts encompassing a wide range of nonelite women’s activism, use of the latter consistently foregrounds the socioeconomic dimensions of popular mobilizations. It has therefore been of interest to the broader left and to left-wing feminists, who theorized connections between gender and class and organized to connect popular feminist mobilizations to both mainstream feminism and the left. These Marxist or socialist feminist formulations did lend popular feminism a specific character and content. I return to this more fixed meaning of “popular feminism” below.

Because I am interested in the genealogy of the concept of popular feminism and its relation to other concepts signifying the collective agency of economically marginalized/subalternized women, I further inquire below about the apparent abeyance of popular feminism as a concept in relation to the increased visibility of black and indigenous feminisms in the region. At this juncture, I want to note that in both its open-ended and its more politically inflected connotation, “popular feminism” has been deployed as a racially unmarked category. Recently, some writers have discursively linked popular-sector to indigenous and black feminisms, gesturing to their overlapping conditions of marginalization and suggesting the convergence of their struggles. However, as a racially unmarked category popular feminism is functionally mestiza and has more often than not worked to erase the existence and the particularity of the racialized popular feminisms that were also incubating through the 1980s—for example, among Afro-descendant women in Brazil’s shantytowns or indigenous women in Chiapas (see contributions by Lebon, Veillette, Zulver, Sara Motta, and Barbosa in this issue). Overwhelmingly, popular feminism has presupposed “popular women” as a unitary and monolithic category (see Lebon in this issue). Notwithstanding its combative stance vis-à-vis hegemonic feminism, popular feminism as an analytic concept and a political position shares with hegemonic feminism a universalizing view of its political subject. ⁹

Returning now to its more politically inflected usage, “popular feminism” has been strongly associated with a class-conscious or gender-class feminism among popular-sector women in which middle-class feminist activists have often been historically implicated. Many of these activists were identified with the left, whether broadly culturally and ideologically or narrowly in terms of allegiances to specific parties or organizations. This brings us to the second and more politically freighted and analytically specific meaning of the term. Maier (2010) has observed that since its appearance in the late 1980s “popular feminism” has had a dual meaning, a more sharply defined, ideologically laden, and politically circumscribed meaning than the open-ended situated knowledge of mobilized grassroots women. It has denoted a positionality and praxis among left-wing feminist activists seeking to articulate the struggles and concerns of the popular sectors with the feminist movement (Espinosa Damián, 2011; n.d.; Maier, 2010). ¹⁰ Popular feminism as a political project was informed by a mass-movement-building orientation on the Latin American left and within feminism as it was articulated with the left as the strategy for societywide projects for democratic social(ist) transformation emerging across postdictatorship Latin America. More theoretically, it has denoted a political effort to link class struggles to those against women’s subordination (Espinosa Damián, n.d.: 296) at a time when the Latin American left was reinventing itself (Dagnino, 1998). Espinosa Damián (2011: 2), writing about Mexico, attributes a central role to the “social left” in the construction of an emancipatory discourse of the women of the popular sectors. While popular feminism was an “articulatory practice” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 120) ¹¹ between feminism and the grassroots women’s movement, it also served as such between both of these and the Latin American left. Popular feminism was a specific feminist discourse produced by a convergence of feminist activists with socially conscious feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as they engaged popular organizing processes (Espinosa Damián, 2011). Put another way, popular feminism as a political category emerged from a complex and fraught negotiation among popular women’s groups, women in feminist groups, and feminists in political parties, among others (González, 2018: 3).

Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, left-wing feminist activists of the middle classes forged groups to work with women of the popular sectors, especially in urban peripheries. Scholars referred to these activists as “popular feminists.” They were growing the women’s movement through a cross-class alliance oriented to the economic struggles of the poor female majorities (Lebon, 2014: 151; Maier, 2010: 35). This was consistent with second-wave feminist movements in Latin America, which had always viewed poor and working-class women as a key constituency (Alvarez et al., 2003: 544), at a time when mass movement strategies were central in the fight against dictatorships. Such strategies focused on popular education, women’s empowerment, and services/support for poor and working-class women’s organizations (Alvarez, 1999). These concerted efforts by feminists, as well as autonomous popular feminist organizing by popular-sector women, had, by the late 1980s, resulted in strong articulation of the grassroots women’s movements to the feminist movement and the resulting transformations in the composition and content of Latin American feminism as it entered the 1990s.

It is to the wider context of thinking on the Latin American left that I now turn to understand popular feminism as a political project of feminists who are variously described as left, class-conscious, Marxist, or socialist feminist, embedded in a socialist political imaginary in which the notion of the popular was central.

Gramscian Transformations of the Popular

Considering broader intellectual transformations on the left in Latin America can help us locate popular feminism politically at its point of origin, account for its apparent decline through the 1990s and early 2000s, and suggest explanations for its reappearance in the present. It can also suggest what is at stake in its present claim.

In the mid-twentieth century, a widespread disavowal of Stalinism provoked a crisis in Western Marxist political thought and a reconsideration of the relationship of democracy to socialism. In Latin America, this was intensified by the experience of dictatorship and a rethinking of the role of political violence in the struggle for socialism. In this context, the unexpected appearance and efficacy of myriad forms of community organizing for economic survival and resistance to dictatorship by “new actors,” among them mothers and housewives, provoked an opening to the everyday and the popular. This, in turn, led to the recognition of the possibility and desirability of autonomous organizing in civil society as foundations for a renovated left project for the construction of democracy with socialist content. Gramsci was a critical intellectual source for this rethinking in contexts where diverse expressions of popular resistance to dictatorships were everywhere apparent (Dagnino, 1998: 36–45; see also Chinchilla, 1991). This conjuncture propelled a revalorization of the popular from the perspective of the left that involved the recognition of multiple political subjects beyond the vanguard party or the working class but still held together, I suggest, in a tenuous unity through the concept of the “popular.”

Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 131) differentiate between “popular” and “democratic” subject positions. The former is constituted by dividing political space into two opposing camps and the latter by an expansion and complexification of political space that allows for many more articulatory possibilities and resists reduction to a single overarching antagonism. Along these lines, then, populism is a way of constructing the political. It is a social logic, without specific content. It is characterized by its appeal to “the people” as those excluded and subalternized, usually by processes of modernization, as opposed to political and economic elites (Laclau, 2005). The constitution of the popular as a subject is therefore plausible only in situations of extreme exteriority between elites (colonizers, occupiers, oligarchies) and the rest of the population, a condition that obtained in much of Latin America, particularly under dictatorships. Invoking the popular, then, involves a simplification of political space into two poles. In some strains of Latin American liberation thought that echo in contemporary discourses of and about Latin American social movements, this slides into a struggle of good versus evil in which the oppressed/popular is the ground of the good. There is a moral status conferred on the popular and on the popular masses/movements as the historical subject of liberation through a national-popular project against imperialism (Schutte, 1993). There has been a resurgence of the national popular in the late 1990s–2000s with the crisis of neoliberalism and the emergence of “pink-tide” regimes in Latin America (Alvarez, 2009: 179).

In its late-twentieth-century Latin American new-left variant, the “popular” (lo popular) is that which is identified with the people (el pueblo)—part of the exploited classes confronted by capitalism and in struggle for a politically independent democratizing project. From 1968 to the end of the 1980s, this alluded to a socialist political imaginary (Espinosa Damián, 2011: 32). The popular sectors (although increasingly recognized as plural and heterogeneous) share a lifeworld: the popular-sector world. Women of the people are the subjects of the grassroots women’s movement and of popular feminism, as Espinosa Damián (2009: 23) describes them (historically and currently): “women of the popular world, campesinas and residents of poor urban neighborhoods, wage workers and housewives” who share a struggle. “Popular-sector” often appears as a merely descriptive term in Latin American studies to designate working-class, working-poor, and indigent populations, but in left-wing usage it is laden with radical democratic and anticapitalist potential.

Gramsci assisted in reformulating a Marxist theory of social change based on building collective will through the articulation of multiple subjects in a long-term war of position toward democracy with socialist content. The construction of collective will or the organization of consent for a new hegemony in favor of democracy became the new revolutionary process and horizon in the context of broad-based struggles against dictatorship. The active constitution of subjects and their agency was at the heart of this process. Gramsci allowed such a renovation of left thinking in favor of democracy without requiring the abandonment of socialism (Dagnino, 1998). Chinchilla (1991) situates Latin American feminism in general and popular feminism in particular in relation to this rethinking on the left. ¹²

Although amorphous in referring to the nonelite majorities and therefore understood abstractly as internally plural, popular as a political category is majoritarian and undifferentiated. The term “popular feminism” genders the popular (in heteronormative terms) but, as discussed above, remains racially unmarked. “Popular,” as in “popular feminism,” obscures both racial difference and racialization as a determinant of subalternization.

Where Did Popular Feminism Go in THE 1990s?

In the 1987 regional feminist Encuentro in Taxco, Mexico, a feminism of grassroots activists in unions, neighborhood organizations, and peasant and religious groups prevailed, with the result that popular feminism as a perspective was attributed to Latin American feminism in general (Chinchilla, 1991: 307; Sternbach et al., 1992: 235). Given the mass presence of the grassroots women’s movements and the political force of popular feminism at the end of the 1980s, what accounts for its apparent disappearance as a category from scholarly accounts of Latin American feminism in the 1990s and beyond?

From the genealogy I am constructing here, I suggest the following: Geopolitical events within and beyond Latin America produced a profound reordering of the political context and of the discursive field in which popular feminism as a category of thought and practice had been given meaning. Related developments within Latin American feminism itself in the context of neoliberal democratization—notably its institutionalization in NGOs and in the apparatus of states and the proliferation of feminisms, particularly the increased audibility of black and indigenous feminisms—also effected a displacement of popular feminism as an analytic and political category in feminist scholarly lexicons.

The 1990s saw a global geopolitical recomposition in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and of socialism as a world-historic alternative. It was accompanied by the triumphal consolidation of neoliberal globalization. New information and communication technologies and the appearance of the Internet ushered in the information age, facilitating the transnationalization of social movements, including feminism. In Latin America, dictatorships had given way to democratic openings and then to formal democracy. All these developments changed the conditions of possibility for the left and for feminism and with them for discourses of popular feminism (Maier, 2010: 37). On the left, discourses of class and a unified struggle for power for socialism had been shifting over the previous decade but, with the 1990s, gave way to democracy and citizenship. Struggles for liberal equality and inclusion replaced those for revolution and socialism (Espinosa Damián, 2011: 16–17). The opening provided space for the appearance of plural putatively “new” actors. New citizen identities displaced those of mass popular movements. And, in any event, the protest modalities of mass movements did not have the same purchase in formal democracy as they had had under dictatorships.

Many scholars have noted the general decline of mass popular movements with the democratic opening, the loss of socialism as a utopian horizon, and the decline of the state under neoliberal globalization (e.g., Seoane, Taddei, and Algranati, 2005). Oppositional political discourses, identities, and modes of organization and representation had shifted away from the grassroots popular subject of community organizing and mass mobilizations toward the democratic citizen subject claiming economic, social, and cultural rights, organized as part of civil society through NGOs in a neoliberal context of shrunken democracy. In a story well known in feminist studies, the 1990s was the decade of feminists’ entering the institutions of the (neoliberal) state, establishing NGOs, and engaging the United Nations. What had been popular feminist initiatives disbanded organizationally as their leading activists shifted focus from organizing in poor neighborhoods to entering more formally into politics through political parties, policy work, and NGOs to interface more effectively with states and international organizations (for Brazil, see Lebon, 2013: 769; for Mexico, see Espinosa Damián, 2011: 17).

Espinosa Damián (2011: 18) argues that the concerns of popular feminism, along with the other feminist currents of the 1980s, thus diffused more widely through political society, appearing in public politics (of parties, legislative bodies, government policies) as “the gender perspective.” In this context, popular feminism seems an artifact of a bygone era, reflecting nostalgia for a unified popular subject in a struggle for its liberation. In a more complex political field marked by proliferating feminisms, including among economically marginalized actors, the notion of popular feminism seems anachronistic, its intelligibility dependent on its relation to a mass movement and a societal project, whether of revolution, socialism, or national liberation, that had everywhere been defeated.

The debates characterizing the regional feminist Encuentros of the 1990s telegraphed the wider geopolitical shift. Replacing the consternation over the resignification of feminism advanced by the grassroots women’s movements, which represented a broad popular base for a feminist movement in search of one, the preoccupations of the 1990s were with the opportunities and risks of feminist institutionalization, professionalization, and the new horizons opened by transnationalization (Alvarez et al., 2003: 547–549). The 1990s produced a new feminist generation of activists formed by NGOs and women’s studies programs rather than through the political culture of mass movements (564). By the late 1990s these debates appeared polarized between autónomas, who eschewed formal organization and institutional engagement in favor of the cultural politics of movement building, and institucionalizadas (Espinosa Miñosa, 2012).

Under the neoliberal democratization of the 1990s, widespread conditions of economic marginalization did not disappear. For many sectors of the population, they worsened. The confluence of the geopolitical shift from struggles for socialism to democratization under neoliberal conditions contributed to the development of “new” movements, among them Afro-descendant and indigenous movements, with distinct claims (Safa, 2005: 309). Within and alongside them, “new” feminisms also became more audible. Notwithstanding the foregoing observations about trends, both political and scholarly, vis-à-vis Latin American social movements, let us recall that the 1990s were also the decade of the Zapatistas and their intersectional project of gendered emancipation for indigenous women (see Barbosa in this issue), of black women’s protagonism in Brazil’s urban peripheries (Perry, 2016), and of the black and indigenous mobilizations in the context of the 1992 commemorations of 500 years since the conquest, the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, and the World March of Women.

Among black and indigenous women, mobilization went back to the 1970s and their protagonism in the mixed-gender black and indigenous movements. In the Brazilian case, autonomous organizing by black women took off in the late 1980s during the transition to democracy and was a response to the absence of attention to race and the specificity of black women’s experiences in the “mostly white, left-identified, hegemonic” feminist movement (Alvarez and Caldwell, 2016: vii). In the case of indigenous feminism in Mexico, Espinosa Damián (2011: 18, 20) locates its seeds in the 1980s popular feminism of rural women, in which the women of the indigenous movement (as they would be identified in the 1990s) organized as campesinas in processes in which their ethnic identities were submerged in favor of the class category of “peasant” (Espinosa Damián, n.d.: 288). Autonomous feminist organizing by black and indigenous women was propelled by the 1992 official celebrations of 500 years of European colonization of the Americas, which provoked the consolidation of oppositional continental networks and their organizing of the countercelebration of 500 Years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance. ¹³ For indigenous women in Mexico and throughout the continent, the 1994 Zapatista uprising accelerated their embrace of indigenous identities and indigenous feminism began to take shape. According to Espinosa Damián (2009: 19), writing about Mexico, this was an unprecedented sociopolitical project with diverse roots, some arising from Latin American feminisms and the left in the region and others from popular campesina feminism, the civil feminism of NGOs that accompanied the indigenous women’s movement, and the transnational circulation of feminist thought.

Through the 1990s and beyond, indigenous women were building their own transnational networks in Latin America and addressing the continent. These began with the 1997 Continental Network of Indigenous Women and First Summit of Indigenous Women of Abya Yala in Oaxaca in 2002 and have continued through the 2000s (Espinosa Damián, 2009: 21). These regional articulations were based in local processes of hundreds of women’s collective projects and proposals. Indigenous feminism’s proposals for gender equity developed in close relation with the demands of the mixed-gender indigenous movement, even as indigenous women claim many of the same rights as other women (Espinosa Damián, 2011). In a similar dynamic, black Brazilian women continue to identify more readily with the black movement than with the feminist movement (Alvarez and Caldwell, 2016: vii; see also Bairros, 2016). Alongside the professionalization of feminism, which exacerbated existing class, race, and other inequalities in the women’s movement, the 1990s saw autonomous organizing of women in rural and urban unions and both within and outside mixed-gender black and indigenous movements and organizations (Bairros, 2016; Lebon, 2013; 2014). While these gendered activisms were informed by feminist thought, they were also in tense relations with the self-identified feminist movement precisely over the privilege accorded to gender absent considerations of race, class, and colonialism.

By the late 1990s, issues of racism and colonialism previously marginal to the Latin American feminist agenda were penetrating the mainstream of the white/mestiza-dominated movement. Postcolonial and antiracist feminist discourses emanating from the United States of black women, “women of color,” and “Third World women,” with their deconstruction of any putatively universal subject of feminism, were circulating (Espinosa Damián, 2011; Espinosa Miñosa, 2012; Paredes and Guzmán, n.d.). The 1996 Encuentro in Chile testified to the eruption of black and indigenous feminisms at the regional scale and their challenges to the feminist mainstream, the latter (still) characterized as white and NGO-ized (Paredes and Guzmán, n.d.: 45).

During the 1992 mobilizations around the five hundredth anniversary, antiracist and anticolonial consciousness deepened and spread throughout the region but, according to Espinosa Miñosa (2012: 215), did not have widespread purchase until it was valorized by Northern white academics’ taking up antiracist and postcolonial feminism. The black women’s movement in Brazil was clearly nourished by black feminist work produced in the United States, but this did not diffuse to Brazilian feminism more generally until some of the more internationally connected Brazilian feminist organizations began to engage the question of race leading up to the 2002 UN World Conference against Racism (Caldwell, 2007; Espinosa Miñosa, 2012; Lebon, 2007; see also Carneiro, 2016; Laó-Montes, 2016). “Durban was a kind of ‘Beijing effect’ for the black movement” (Bairros, 2016: 55), but black women were particularly well positioned to seize the moment because of their prior engagement as feminists in the UN women’s conferences.

Contemporary accounts of Latin American feminism appear ambivalent as to whether black and indigenous women’s organizing within and beyond black and indigenous movements should be read as a celebration of feminism’s diffusion, an effect of neoliberal multiculturalism, and/or an indictment of color-blind mestiza feminism. Black and indigenous women’s movements are seen as one or another effect of (1) the pluralization of democratic struggle in postdictatorship Latin America, (2) the generalized diffusion and consequent multiplication of feminisms, (3) an exacerbation of preexisting race and class inequalities in the movement due to professionalization and institutionalization, with further marginalization of racialized women, and/or (4) a result of ongoing desencuentros (unintelligibility) (Alvarez et al., 2003: 566) with mestiza feminism.

In discussions of black and indigenous feminisms and of their increased visibility in the 1990s, there is hardly any reference to their possible relationship or break with what had earlier been understood as popular feminism. One exception to this lacuna is the work of Espinosa Damián (2011), who sees popular feminism as coexisting with indigenous feminism as aspects of the contemporary grassroots women’s movement (movimiento de mujeres) in Mexico. They share the same popular-sector world and therefore have much in common. She notes that all currents of the grassroots women’s movement experience ongoing tensions with mainstream feminists, with the left, and with mixed-gender movements. She does not specify, however, how these tensions are similar or different for popular versus indigenous feminism or whether there are any tensions or equivocations between these expressions of the grassroots women’s movement.

While indigenous women inhabit the popular-sector world, they are differentiated by their “ethnic belonging” and their identification with an indigenous movement calling for a new conception of the nation and a new pact (Espinosa Damián, 2011). National identity has been built on ethnic and cultural homogeneity (ideologies of mestizaje), which leads to discrimination and exclusion (Espinosa Damián, 2009: 23). Rebuilding the nation (Mexico) demands acceptance of difference, the legitimacy of other forms of life, and citizenship emerging from a civilizational matrix distinct from the West. This gives specific content to the indigenous movement and to indigenous feminism that cannot be assumed to pertain to popular (mestiza) feminism. Espinosa Damián (2011: 5) does not comment on this other than to say that various currents of the grassroots women’s movement are rooted in their own movement contexts and evince their own situated knowledges.

Espinosa Damián reports positive developments by the 2010 national Encuentro in Mexico in that indigenous women had taken on “traditional” feminist issues and made them their own in their own ethnic and class terms. She reports that what this produced was not conflict but an opening to difference and a search for convergences that would not have been imaginable 20 years before. In a counterexample, the 2014 regional Encuentro in Lima was (again) marked by Afro-descendant women’s protesting their exclusion from a predominantly mestiza space, one in which the racially unmarked popular feminism of the World March of Women was prominent. In an example of racialized popular feminism, the 2015 Black Women’s March in Brazil was a cross-class mobilization that included tens of thousands of poor women and made issues of poverty, regional inequalities, and the need for alternative development central (Alvarez, 2016: 73). It is thought-provoking that the World March of Women, with its mass popular but racially unmarked feminist base, was not engaged in this mass popular mobilization.

Notwithstanding Espinosa Damián’s more sanguine reading in the case of Mexico, race-conscious black and indigenous feminisms and race-blind mestiza popular feminism appear estranged despite their converging concerns with questions of social and economic justice. Second-wave Latin American feminisms were “tributaries of a [Marxian] tradition of interpretation of the nation that subsumed the ethnic-cultural under rigid categories of proletarians, peasants and students” that “ ‘blinded’ most white/mestiza activists to racial-ethnic inequalities among women” (Alvarez et al., 2003: 565, citing Barrig, 2001: 20). These same categories are central to conceptions of popular feminism, both past and present, and operate to obscure questions of race and colonialism and to facilitate incomprehension rather than convergences. Put more pointedly, race-blind popular feminism remains tone-deaf to the popular feminist concerns of poor black and indigenous women because these are registered in terms of racialization or colonial difference rather than class exploitation.

In the two decades since the 1990s, Espinosa Damián (n.d.: 302) concludes, popular feminism has multiplied and diffused. Although the term has been largely forgotten, she says, it continues in the myriad forms of feminist agency rooted in the popular sectors, “expressed in hundreds of processes led by women of the working people, exploited, discriminated against, excluded, and subaltern, struggling to incorporate their feminist demands into their social agendas.” This diffuse feminism is reflected in the influence of feminist discourses on women activists in popular organizations in many countries of Latin America (Alvarez, 2009: 178; Di Marco, 2010a: 54; Equipo, 2012: 428). Given such a diffuse conceptualization of popular feminism in the present, does the term retain any analytic power or specificity? More pointedly, does its revival effect an erasure of race?

Black and indigenous persons are no longer confined to the popular sectors. Indigenous and black feminisms are also marked by the professionalization, NGO-ization, and policy orientation of the 1990s characterizing feminism more generally. They are themselves multiplying and diversifying internally, as is especially apparent in the mobilizations of youth and sexual minorities (see Bairros, 2016; Laó-Montes, 2016). Nevertheless, the effects of racialization continue to consign a majority of black and indigenous people to the political and economic margins. The alignment of black and indigenous struggles with popular struggles is often assumed. Playing down the differences between race-blind and race-conscious popular feminisms on the basis of a partially shared experience of exploitation effects an erasure of race and contributes to ongoing misalignments.

The World March of Women as Popular Feminism of the 2000s

The World March of Women is the largest transnational feminist network in the world. From its inception in 2000, in contrast to many other such networks it has prioritized movement building in activist milieux over institutional engagement. Its organizing modalities, primary among them marching but including singing, chanting, and drumming, protesting, and popular education (Giraud and Dufour, 2010), aim to mobilize women of the popular sectors, who are economically marginalized and struggling for a decent life and who constitute demographic majorities in most societies. The March resists any a priori ranking of feminist issues, particularly the body politics of sexuality and reproductive rights, over questions of land, food, water, and work. The March likewise does not insist on the feminist self-identification of its member groups even as it actively works with its base through popular education processes to construct a collective feminist identity.

The March is constituted by localized women’s groups organized in autonomous national agglomerations or national coordinating bodies, of which there are 15 in Latin America. The popular feminist character of the March is particularly attributable to the influence of its massive Brazilian chapter and its international secretariat, based in São Paulo from 2008 to 2013. Its particular culture of feminist activism and organizing, its roots in preexisting feminist groups with connections to popular-sector organizing, and the socialist feminist political commitments of its influential Brazilian chapter have put popular feminism back on the activist and analytic map of Latin American feminisms as a particular political current.

In this final section, I locate the World March of Women from its historical point of origin in the foregoing genealogy of popular feminism. In this account, I tack back and forth between my perception of the March at the international scale in Latin America and beyond and published accounts about the March in Brazil, including those of its leading activists. ¹⁴ The World March of Women as an organizing proposal in the late 1990s found deep purchase in some quarters of Latin American feminism, specifically among those activists and NGOs that had maintained their connections with the popular sectors and/or were working in unions and other mixed-gender movements. It resonated with their own self-critique of feminist institutionalization and lent support to critical political-economic perspectives that had been rendered illegitimate through the 1990s under center-right regimes of neoliberal (and multicultural) democracy (Alvarez, 2013: 11). As noted above, notwithstanding ongoing grassroots organizing of various kinds, the political of the 1990s was “a new arena with new rules” (Maier, 2010: 37) in which the modalities of popular feminism (grassroots participation, popular education, protest) were a poor fit with Latin American feminism’s institutional strategies, its emerging culture of expertise, and its codes of conduct in civil society.

In context of 1990s professionalization, the Brazilian NGO Sempreviva Organização Feminista (Sempreviva Feminist Organization—SOF), which would go on to organize the March in Brazil, had kept its movement-building orientation alive. The SOF’s vision of its role was strengthening feminism among workers and popular movements in order to build a mass feminist movement. It had therefore maintained its connection to unions and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) (Lebon, 2013; 2014). Feminists of the PT (which also included some working for the SOF) were positioned outside the dominant institutionalization of feminism. According to Faría (2007: 229), they recognized the need to build a strong mass women’s movement articulated to the left (and the political project of the PT) to ensure the PT’s radicality. PT feminists succeeded in constructing a broad-based “feminist political consciousness” that created the conditions for the building of the March in Brazil as “a feminism based on a vision of the importance of mobilization, direct action, rooted in the popular sectors” (Nalu Faría, quoted in Equipo, 2012). This account of the March in Brazil immediately evokes the highly politicized notion of popular feminism as an articulation constructed by left-wing feminists between a mass popular base of women’s mobilizations and the political left. ¹⁵

These feminists’ critique of the institucionalizadas was for the latter’s putative accommodation with neoliberalism in working within the democratic state and abandoning efforts to organize grassroots women. In the latter’s turn to the UN they detected a misguided view that the nation-state no longer mattered. They also rejected uncritical celebration of the inclusion of women’s rights in international accords as a form of “feminist triumphalism,” arguing that “while the conferences speak of women’s rights, the market organizes women’s lives” (Faría, 2007: 227–228). Although the instutionalizadas themselves had shifted from neoliberal citizenship discourses to a more critical political positioning by the mid-2000s, the Brazilian March continues to differentiate itself as a feminism seeking to address the political conjuncture in alignment with progressive social movements in a broader social (anticapitalist) struggle (Equipo, 2012: 11; Faría, 2007).

Writing about the resurgence of popular feminism in Brazil in the 1990s, Lebon (2014: 149) attributes to the antiglobalization alliances of late 1990s and early 2000s a significant role in its recomposition and in reinforcing redistribution claims that had for a decade been politically marginalized in mainstream feminism. In popular feminism as a category she includes community-based women’s organizations in working-class and poor urban neighborhoods, which include some Afro-Brazilian women’s groups; women’s organizing in rural and urban unions and in peasant organizations such as the Via Campesina, the Movimento Sem Terra, the Movimento de Mulheres Componesas, the Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores, Promotoras Legais Populares, and a few feminist NGOs such as the SOF. These, along with the World March of Women, she considers carriers of a “class-based feminism” that appeared in Brazil since the mid-1990s (157).

The March (in Brazil and under Brazilian leadership internationally) supports the self-organizing of women in mixed-gender spaces such as the Via Campesina, the Movimento Sem Terra, and the CONTAG, the student movement, and the World and Americas Social Forums. Consistent with earlier expressions of popular feminism, it makes no a priori assumption about what may constitute feminist content or identity. Yet the March is a self-described feminist entity with an agenda of deconstructing prejudices and inculcating feminism in these spaces (see Tica and Malfalda in Equipo, 2012: 10, 11). It eschews talk of “gender” in favor of “feminism” and specifies women as feminism’s political subjects (11, 12).

In Brazil, the March has an explicitly socialist genealogy (Faría, 2007). It is also marked by its socialist feminist origins in Quebec in the mid-1990s, its articulation to the nationalist project there, and the influence of materialist currents in Francophone feminism (Dufour, 2008; Maillé, 2010). Both have marked the World March of Women as an international initiative. The March echoes classic socialist feminist concerns of the relations between gender and class and critiques of bourgeois feminism’s accommodation to liberal notions of equality and coexistence with capitalist logics. There is a strong commitment to a dual-systems analysis and to articulating issues of production with social reproduction and the work of women. There is a strong focus on the sexual division of labor as the material base of women’s oppression and the source of all aspects of women’s struggle: “Sexual violence was socially constructed, as were all aspects of the oppression of women, on the material basis of the sexual division of labor” (Faría, 2007: 226). In this the socialist feminism of the March tends to reproduce universalist and Eurocentric claims.

The March’s recognition and negotiation of differences among women is founded primarily upon categories of structural difference politicized in the Marxist tradition—between workers, students, and peasants, supplemented in Latin America by the popular sectors and internationally by the nation. Its prevailing analytic, which focuses on the relations among patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism, is more indebted to Marxist feminism than to postcolonial, antiracist, indigenous, or black feminisms. While it deploys discursive formulations affirming diversity among women, there is no evidence of substantive engagement with the axes of difference or inequality among women politicized by other feminist currents—race, indigeneity, sexuality, and now gender diversity. In this respect, the popular feminism of the March seems a reassertion of a classist position that, whether actively or passively, suppresses the politicizing of other differences among women. Consequently, it is not surprising that black and indigenous feminisms have not found a home in the World March of Women, even as there are occasional favorable nods to black and indigenous feminisms as sister feminisms grounded in the popular sectors. In my view, we can attribute to the March’s popular feminism a politics of diversity but not a politics of difference. Discursively, there is a political commitment to antiracism but not to an analytic of intersectionality. The March recognizes the diversity of women’s situations within a master discourse of class interpolated with nation. ¹⁶

The commonsense understanding of popular feminism as denoting the emergent gender consciousness of poor and working-class women in the course of their collective mobilizations is also strongly instantiated in the March. Its use of the term invokes, first and foremost, its own grounding in the popular sectors—demographically in terms of composition, substantively in terms of the struggles for survival and dignity that gather under the March’s banner, politically in terms of the priority lent to them by the March, and epistemologically in terms of the valorization of experiences, values, and worldviews arising from the popular-sector world. Especially in the wake of the professionalization of feminism in the 1990s and the abeyance of its movement-building orientation, contemporary popular feminism is distinguished by methodologies and modalities, especially its reliance on popular education workshops and training, that allow for active engagement by women with little or no formal education (see Diaz Alba in this issue). The March has a cross-class character, but its substantive concerns arise from proximity to the everyday concerns of poor and working-class women and to a processual and open-ended understanding of feminism that develops in contact with poor and working-class women’s self-understandings—the resignification of feminism from this reality (Maier, 2010: 36). This popular feminism is aspirational in naming what the March affirms and works toward even as its composition on the ground in different localities is uneven in this regard (Anabel Paulos, personal communication, May 2016).

This instantiation of popular feminism exists in permanent tension with its more politicized enactment and is more acute in some time-places of the March than in others. According to Paredes and Guzman (n.d.: 45), the Latin American feminism of the regional Encuentros has adopted a vanguardist attitude toward grassroots women’s movements. This tendency is also at work in the March’s project for popular feminism as, on one hand, it engages in a dialogical open-endedness in the name of cultivating popular feminist subjectivities while, on the other, it seeks to bring grassroots women into a mass movement in the service of a counterhegemonic popular democratic and (more or less explicit) anticapitalist societal project (see also Masson and Paulos, 2021, and Masson and Beaulieu Bastien in this issue).

In the March’s usage, popular feminism remains a race-blind category, reminiscent of class, that in refusing to name race excludes it even as it claims to include it. In the context of Brazil, reducing race to class interlocks perfectly with ideologies of racial democracy (Lebon, 2007: 69). More generally Safa (2005: 307) has argued that color-blindness is an implicit endorsement of mestizaje as an ideology of nation building, even in the popular democratic projects of the left. Interestingly, it is through the March’s engagement in feminist popular education that its universalisms may be troubled.

Popular education is increasingly central to the conception of popular feminism held by March activists, notably those of a younger generation (Anabel Paulos, personal communication, May 2016, commenting on Peru). ¹⁷ Interestingly, the curriculum recognizes the multiplicity of oppressions and of oppressed subjects and disavows seeking universal truths. It presents feminist popular education as an opening, even as considerations of capitalism and patriarchy remain central (Korol, 2007: 17). It remains an open question whether the participatory and processual character of feminist popular education, asserting difference as a starting point and recognizing popular feminisms in the plural, will be allowed to unsettle the mestiza feminism of the March and what new forms of popular feminism may be produced as a result.

Appreciating the genealogy of Latin American popular feminisms helps us to situate and specify the contentious, materialist, and counterhegemonic feminist politics of the World March of Women vis-à-vis other contemporary expressions of feminism in Latin America and beyond. With its claim to popular feminism, the March is intervening in the Latin American and larger transnational feminist field with regard to feminist anchorage in popular women’s struggles for life and livelihood, simultaneously valorizing women’s work and contesting gendered divisions of labor, and the open-ended, situated, and dialogical character of popular feminist commitments affirmed alongside its orientation to movement building with nonfeminist others in alliances against neoliberal capitalism (Conway, 2012). Although not always explicitly or with the same force in every context, the World March of Women’s discourse of popular feminism is also a claim about the ongoing relevance of democratic socialism and of socialist feminism.

Conclusion

In this article, I set out to critically analyze the reappearance of popular feminism as a category in Latin American feminist politics and political thought, particularly through the protagonism of the World March of Women and the scholarship about it. To do that, I revisited the historical emergence of popular feminism in second-wave feminism’s articulation to popular women’s movements of the 1980s and to the project for popular and democratic socialism of the Latin American left. With the defeat of that project and the ascendance of neoliberal democratization, the context that had largely given meaning to popular feminism waned. With the generalized institutionalization of feminism, popular feminism as a category of feminist thought and practice largely disappeared in the course of the 1990s. At the same time, the democratic opening created space for a proliferation of popular movements making citizenship claims, among them multiplying feminisms anchored in the popular sectors and reprising redistributive struggles. These feminisms largely went by other names, including, notably, black and indigenous feminisms that were propelled by the generalized reemergence of the colonial question afforded by the abeyance of Marxism, the five hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas, and the force of international demands for reparations for colonization and the Atlantic slave trade.

I have inquired into the relation between black and indigenous feminisms and the resurgent popular feminism of the March. In feminist scholarship since the 2010s, “popular” has appeared as a qualifier alongside “black” and “indigenous,” seemingly to signal the intersection of all three with the dynamics of marginalization of the poor majorities. Should black and indigenous feminisms be understood as contemporary, diversified, and race-conscious forms of popular feminism? Are they companion feminisms to an eclectic variety of others rooted in popular sectors with variable (or no) discourses about race and colonialism? Black and indigenous women’s self-organizing for communal survival and well-being, their claims on states for economic and social rights of citizenship, and their insistence that these are central to feminism are indeed in continuity with the feminism of the 1980s grassroots women’s movements and of popular feminism as a political project. But, as I have pointed out, the contemporary popular feminism of the World March remains a racially unmarked practice and thus functionally mestiza. Assuming the inclusion of black and indigenous feminisms in the racially unmarked category “popular feminism” risks assimilating them, eliding questions of race and colonialism, and erasing their specificities. Despite its recent rhetorical inclusion of race and colonialism alongside gender and class, the March’s popular feminism remains functionally race-blind, centering the relation between gender and class and subordinating other axes of inequality. Furthermore, to paraphrase Keisha-Khan Perry (2016: 106), this “absence of a class consciousness that includes the racialized poor discourages black communities [women] from organizing around a shared class position.”

Alternatively, a weak and diffuse conceptualization of popular feminism as feminist consciousness diffused in myriad ways through popular sectors, cultures, movements, and organizations does not do much analytic service unless the content and significance of claims to the popular are specified. More problematic, claims to the popular can effect an ongoing erasure of race and colonialism that reproduces a class- and capital-centrism of earlier Marxist-inflected discourses and evades questions of mestiza popular feminism’s past and present relationship with antiracist and decolonial critiques and political currents. Minimally, we need to speak of multiple popular feminisms with variable content and also of racialized and decolonial popular feminisms (see Veillette and Sara Motta in this issue), and we need to inquire into what the contemporary use of the term “popular feminism” enables and obscures.

When popular feminism is situated within its genealogy, important specificities about it come into view. As a situated feminist current anchored in everyday gendered struggles in economically marginalized communities and displaying their contradictions, popular feminism is marked by its enduring materialist concerns and its permanently contentious relationship to other feminisms. In its more organized and politicized expressions, it instantiates a gender-class feminism centered on the politics of women’s work and social reproduction and in permanently contentious relation to the larger left-wing currents with which it is allied. Conceptualized in relation to its political genealogy, ascribing popular feminism to the World March of Women critically positions its feminist practices and politics, their relevance in the context of the surging antiglobalization movements of the late 1990s and the rising pink tide in Latin America in the 2000s, their resonance with the discourses of twenty-first-century socialism, and the ambivalent relation of all of these with the decolonial, also on the rise in Latin America.