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Feminismos latinoamericanos: una mirada panorámica

manzanadiscordia.univalle.edu.co

Abstract

This paper corresponds to a talk given by María Luisa Femenías, transcribed and reworked by the author, which was a videoconference given on March 22, 2011, in an event preparing for the Doctorate of Humanities, emphasis on Gender Studies. Femenías postulates three levels of feminism, (a) a theoretical level, (b) feminist militancy, and (c) spontaneous women's movements. On the theoretical level, the author recognizes the need to place our knowledge and retool foreign categories with regard to our own problems and experiences, our historical and social situations and geography. The author recognizes that the history of our movements has mostly responded to local events, giving rise to autonomous women's movements. In this sense Latin American feminist thought is original, for it obeys our own characteristics, such as our ethnic and cultural plurality, which makes it imperative to take into account the intersections among gender, class and ethnicity. Femenías invokes the concept of subalternity,