Editorial introduction: Towards a transnational feminism: Dialogues on feminisms and psychologies in a Latin American context

The context

Virginia Vargas (2003) has argued that Latin American feminism first established itself in the 1970s as a result of women’s activism against their position of subordination and exclusion. Between the 1970s and 1980s, the feminist project focused on exposing the political character of this subordination. This politicizing of the personal contributed to the understanding of phenomena such as domestic violence, sexual harassment and the feminization of poverty. At the same time, possibly more uniquely, these activists were involved in the processes of democratization underway in the region, battling against dictatorships and playing a crucial role in the reconfiguration of the political left in many nations (Castro, 2001; Richard, 2001).

From the 1980s to the 1990s, as democracy spread in the region and many of the states moved towards modernization, a new political climate was born in which there was an ‘acknowledgment’ of women in national politics. As a result, feminism(s) grew into a broad, heterogeneous, polycentric and multifaceted discursive and activist field (Álvarez, 1998). According to Vargas (2003), this diversity arose in relation to different discursive and strategic spaces (civil society, engagement with the State, participation in social movements and the academy), specific identities (black, lesbian, indigenous, young) and regional issue-based networks (health, human rights, violence, etc). Accordingly, the term Latin American feminisms comprises a great multiplicity of knowledges and practices developed to address hegemonic codes which regulate sexual identity and representations. These knowledges and practices have influenced political organizations and social relations as well as the social imaginary (Richard, 2001). New areas of research emerged: gender relations in the private realm; sex discrimination in the public realm; the use of a gendered lens in the study of agriculture; the relationship between gender and ethnicity in these diverse and multicultural Latin American environments (Herrera, 2001).

More recently, attention has been paid to the impact of globalization and national and international policies in women's lives (Stokes, 2005). The analysis of mobility of capital coupled with the historic marginalization of peasant and indigenous populations across the globe has allowed for the scrutiny of the consequences produced by the advance of neoliberal logics and demise of support services such as state subsidies, welfare and the minimum wage. The emergence of a transnational underclass who have consistently paid a price for globalization in the form of labor exploitation, de-territorialization, displacement and forced/coerced migration has a particular impact on the women, families and communities of Latin America along with marginalized populations in other parts of the world (Sampaio, 2004).

Critical analysis has been undertaken from a transnational feminist strand because of the awareness of the interrelated character of economic, social and cultural phenomena affecting particular sites and the need to develop understandings of gender justice as a global dimension (Smith, 2008). In a theoretical frame, gender inequalities are recognized as being collectively constructed and therefore changeable, and analysis is drawn to highlight the global historical conditions informed by postcolonialism, racism and capitalism as the context in which feminist struggle should be developed (Ramamurthy, 2000).

The specificities

At the heart of the diversity of developments in the region, the controversy that has most clearly marked Latin American feminism has been the institutionalization of feminist political and academic organizations. The rise of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working with groups of women within the population (largely financed by international development agencies), political lobbying for the inclusion of women in the public sphere, and the ‘transnationalization’ of Latin American feminism at the United Nations International Conferences on women are examples of this process. This tendency is in stark contrast to what has been referred to as ‘autonomous’ feminism within Latin America. Autonomous feminism is characterized by the critique of the economic determinism of women’s lives and the authoritarianism of the masculinized left often expressed through radical political activism, far from the precepts of international cooperation agencies or the institutional language of the United Nations (Castro, 2001). For some feminists, the institutionalization of feminist initiatives represented greater influence with respect to public policy, professionalization and, to a certain degree, within the State than had previously existed. For autonomous feminism, however, it also signified the waning of the bolder and more innovative proposals that arose from the street protests and community initiatives more representative of previous decades (Vargas, 2002):

Both positions – institutional and autonomous – possess their own risks. If one position risks isolation, the other risks what many authors have considered to be the depoliticization of feminist strategies in the displacement and replacement of the militant by the professional and in granting the operational more urgency than the discursive. (Richard, 2001: 230)

Although this distinction remains to this day, the focus of concern has had to open itself up to the debates around emerging themes. Vargas (2002) asserts that one of the these areas of theoretical development in Latin American feminism is the acknowledgment of diversity in women's lives, taking into account the multicultural and multiethnic character of Latin American societies. This has generated intersectional analytic perspectives which incorporate diverse axes of differentiation such as class, ethnicity/culture, localization, sexuality and age. She further argues that there is an incursion into new themes and dimensions which incorporate a transversal view of contemporary phenomenon. A transversal view is one that looks to the lines or paths through which spaces can intersect. An example of this would be an analysis of the consequences of the processes of globalization in contemporary contexts.

According to Radcliffe et al. (2003), the analyses of globalization, which primarily followed androcentric logic, have failed to recognize the gendered nature of these processes. These analyses, thus, do not account for how transformations in the global economy and, in particular, those that have affected Latin America, such as the imposition of Structural Adjustment policies, affect women in these regions differentially through the changes to home maintenance, precarious forms of employment, the reduction in public spending on health services, etc (Benería, 1992; Lind, 2002; Menjivar, 2002; Rosenberg, 2006).

This view, which focuses on transnational relations and their effect on local contexts, also serves to generate support for the formation of alliances around shared values with feminist movements outside the Latin American context (Álvarez, 2003). Álvarez argues that the transnationalization of feminisms requires local knowledge and experience in order to establish those commonalities upon which these alliances may be built. The condition of life for women, the place of feminism in political struggles, the role of feminist practice in the current global context and the effects of discrimination and oppression, although specific to local spaces, are objects of critical theory and practice globally. These issues are transversal as, although local and contingent, they resonate throughout the contemporary world.

Nonetheless, for Mendoza (2002), a transnational feminism which understands women as a homogenous group, thereby basing its politics on the shared oppression of women, would fail to acknowledge the asymmetry in power between women in the ‘first world’ and those in the ‘third world’. ‘Instead of ignoring differences between women, romanticizing feminist global relationships (as global feminists would do) or assuming “essential” distinctions between First and Third World women, feminist transnationalists depart and theorize from these differences’ (Mendoza, 2002: 304). For Mendoza, if we do not question current geopolitics and pay close attention to the different axes of oppression which position women in vitally different conditions and situations, the activisms of a transnational feminism could make the same mistakes as those of the ‘global sisterhood’ which argued that the starting point of a feminist identity was the recognition that women shared a common condition of oppression, whatever their differences in age, education or income. This perspective was criticized because of the disregard for divisions of class, race, sexuality and national origin between women and the differentiated effects of these conditions on their lives (Mendoza, 2002).

In order to conceive a transnational feminism it is necessary to acknowledge the conditions of possibility for feminist academic work around the globe and the tangible ways in which a dialog between diverse sensibilities can be conducted which can serve to unite feminism and psychology (Sampaio, 2004). Nonetheless, this bringing together of positions cannot be based on a naive belief in any sort of ‘equality’ in life conditions and knowledge production of different feminist developments, but rather needs to be aware of the vast differences between women around the world. For according to Mendoza (2002), we must question the knowledge which underpins feminism in the context of the asymmetrical relation between North and South. Thus, in order to understand and debate the ways in which common interests could be linked, a transnational feminism should take into account the different contributions of different local contexts. The articles in this Special Issue anchor and analyze women’s experiences in specific contexts and, we believe, in doing so make visible this diversity.

The articles

The contributions to this Special Feature touch on a multiplicity of questions in relation to feminism and psychology from differing perspectives. Although the topics that are addressed are situated in specific contexts, these are interwoven with theoretical approaches from other geographical areas, exemplifying the international character of current feminist developments in the Latin American region. Illustrations of this can be seen through the inclusion of work that makes use of poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives to study phenomena, for instance the effects of migration processes, the implementation of affirmative action programs, the analysis of historical memory through monuments and the contributions that critical approaches to scientific knowledge can make to feminism as well as to psychology.

In her article, ‘What is missing in the transnational migration literature? A Latin American feminist psychological perspective’, Debora Upegui-Hernandez explores the phenomenon of transnational migration from a feminist perspective in order to make visible the inequalities that specifically affect women immigrants in a global context. Resonant with the literature on the impact of current global phenomena on women in the Latin American context and in order to avoid the androcentric logic that has dominated such studies (see also Radcliffe et al., 2003), Upegui-Hernandez invites us to produce forms of knowledge and praxis to combat the exploitation to which Latin American women who migrate to ‘northern’ countries are subjected. They find themselves both vulnerable and with few guarantees in terms of human and social rights. The author focuses on the migratory process itself as a space where the violation of rights takes place for these women. They are made vulnerable on one hand because the areas they must travel through (e.g. the Mexican–US border) present a variety of dangers and, on the other hand, because the restrictive policies of their main destinations, the European Union and North America, criminalize undocumented migrants. Upegui-Hernandez’s discussion emphasizes the need to generate critical approaches to these forms of exploitation in global migration circuits, using a gender lens which, whilst visibilizing their vulnerability, takes into account migrant women’s agency in the processes of social transformation.

In their article ‘“Race”, class and affirmative action in Brazil: Reflections from a feminist psychological perspective’, Ilana Mountain and Elena Calvo-Gonzalez analyze affirmative action policies (quotas) implemented in some public universities in Brazil. They examine the naturalized discourses around ‘race’ differentiations in the Brazilian population which, whilst conforming to the requirements of these affirmative action programs designed to reduce inequalities, function to reproduce asymmetrical categories. With a focus on the performative aspects of the deeply rooted notion of race, they examine how racial differences are constructed within existing power relations which serve to naturalize these differences and produce them as irrefutable. In this way, these policies which aspire to equality have the paradoxical effect of reproducing, and thus naturalizing, those discourses based on ‘race’. Moreover, these affirmative action policies obscure the relationship between ‘race’ and other markers of difference such as class, gender, age and sexuality (and many others) which can then function to perpetuate these inequalities. The article argues, thus, that a reading that draws on both feminist and postcolonial studies should inform strategies for intervention in Latin America.

Isabel Piper, María José Reyes and Roberto Fernández similarly draw on poststructuralist approaches to analyze a public monument intended to make visible the experiences of women who fought against the dictatorship in Chile. Whilst there is a substantial amount of research in Latin America analyzing the relationship between human rights violations and gender, as well as that which focuses on the role of women in the fight for democracy in this region, there are very few that have brought together work around gender and memory. In their article, ‘Women and public space: A psychosocial analysis of the monument “Women in Memory”’, the authors propose that monuments be approached as performances of memory: as normative practices that promote ideologies, affect, behavior and subjects, instituting identities without determining them, given that they can also produce deviations and transgressions. The monument, they argue, constructs the subject category of ‘woman victim’ in particular ways. In spite of the importance of the visibility of these women during and since the dictatorship, the authors illustrate that a consequence of this construction of the subject is that women become invisible as political subjects, with their political agency being obscured by their positioning only as victims rather than as fighters.

Gloria Anzaldúa has been a major influence on current postcolonial perspectives in Latin America and abroad. In her article ‘Knowledge from the borderlands: Revisiting the paradigmatic mestiza of Gloria Anzaldúa’, Liliana Vargas analyses the author’s work in relation to that of US authors who have been inspired by Anzaldúa, specifically Donna Haraway. Vargas’ point of departure is the comparison between Anzaldúa’s ‘Mestiza’ and Haraway’s ‘Cosmic Mestiza’, the latter inspired by the former. In the process she demonstrates how each of these figures responds to different trajectories of knowledge. The latter she sees as continuing within the scientific tradition, albeit responding to and diffracting it, and the former as positioned within ‘border thinking’. This approach understands borders as spaces of transition, of indeterminacy, a place for those who are unclassifiable.

In consonance with the other contributions to this Special Issue, Vargas asserts that perspectives that destabilize the binaries within modern science and colonial thought inform Latin American psychology as much as they do Latin American feminism because of the subversive potential of this approach for thinking critically about knowledge production and social transformation. Together these four contributions present a myriad of themes and perspectives which deepen the connections between feminisms and psychologies in Latin America, presenting them as interwoven with wider debates around asymmetrical gender relationships and uniting them with other social categories that become relevant to the various social phenomena addressed. We hope you will enjoy reading this diverse set of contributions by feminists working within the Latin American context and that they serve to widen access to a few of the reflections and debates taking placetherein.