COMMUNITY CHALLENGES AND URGENCIES OF FEMINIST, TRAVESTI-TRANS AND ANTICOLONIAL STRUGGLES FOR RETHINKING THE PRESENT IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN.
Our continent is currently undergoing processes of political and economic reconfiguration led by a series of neoliberal coalitions that gained access to government apparatuses in various countries of the region following the COVID-19 crisis. The intensification of dispossession and structural violence has given rise to various narratives. We can identify diverse ways of naming and understanding the present in dialogue with the past. Within the field of political practices, we could point to at least three protagonist forces of recent decades in Abya Yala, namely: progressive-leaning governments, openly anti-rights fascist-leaning governments, and a heterogeneous field made up of different ways of life and experiences of struggle from the popular, community-based world. Within this latter field, we propose to center various cartographies of travesti-trans, feminist and/or anticolonial struggles from each body-territory.
This symposium proposes to share emerging analytical keys from completed or ongoing research addressing and accompanying the webs currently in motion and the questions we have posed. The richness of this symposium’s dialogue lies in its diversity of perspectives and readings of different struggles, offering a critical lens on our present and history, marked by patriarchal colonialism. The objective is to place at the center of reflection the popular-community challenges and urgencies in Latin America and the Caribbean surrounding these struggles.
The vast body of theory produced on the continent regarding these modes of politicization, their experiences, and their production of knowledge reveals important accumulated insights for understanding the current political moment. A shared particularity of these accumulated bodies of knowledge is that they are positioned from an explicit political commitment, and indeed strong intersections can be observed between activism, the emergence and deployment of political action, and developments in the intellectual or academic field. As a counterpart to this, increasingly strong conservative reactions can be observed, in an alliance between right-wing forces and religious groups mounting a fierce “anti-gender” offensive. Such responses place the demands of feminist, travesti-trans and antiracist struggles at the center of persecution and violent actions.
In this sense, it can be observed, from the breadth of struggles, that they warn us of a political context that increasingly confronts us with the need to rethink the theoretical frameworks that have until now been used to analyze social movements and their struggles, collective action, and thought around the pressures we seek to reflect on, as well as to revalue our own production in terms of research-outreach and teaching-learning experiences.
In this way, the symposium proposes to establish points of connection as alliances that strengthen an articulated view of oppressions, from different territories, that help enrich academic dialogue on the characteristics of the webs unfolding at this historical moment, the intersections and political alliances generated, and to trace the new horizons of problems and challenges that arise for the thought and action of social movements and their reconfigurations.
