US Latina Feminism

In the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State while exploring productive spaces of coalition. To explore such spaces, we reframe Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. This is done, in part, through an analysis of the philosophical role “method” plays in MacKinnon’s argument, (...) and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. In the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on MacKinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda la prominencia de las actitudes colonialistas en tradiciones anti-coloniales, observando la capacidad del racismo sexista para adaptarse en la filosofía política Mexicano-Estadounidense. Señalo un paralelo entre el uso de universales culturales en el pensamiento hermenéutico y la continuación de mecanismos interpretativos colonialies en los debates centrales de la filosofía política Mexicano-Estadounidense. Basándome en pensamiento comparativo indígena de resistencia anticolonial, advierto contra tales tendencias excluyentes y mimetismas en un momento tan crítico de la formación de campo, mientras resaltando (...) la existencia de una larga tradición teórica producida por mujeres Mexicanas-Estadounidenses. (shrink)

Latina feminists like Gloria Anzaldúa and Mariana Ortega have developed anti-essentialist accounts of selfhood that are responsive to the problem of alterity and hermeneutic alienation experienced by multiplicitous subjects, understood as those who must navigate between multiple cultural norms and often conflicting interpretive traditions. These accounts can be fortified by examining the sense of inarticulacy that arises from having to name conditions of existence undergirded by social and historical contradictions and ambiguities—especially under the experiential stress of gendered social violence, cultural (...) trauma, and state terror. To address phenomenological accounts of “linguistic terrorism” and the role language plays in multiplicitous accounts of selfhood, I turn to a strategic reading of Nietzsche's existential conception of the self as a living multiplicity, and to his related account of the impoverishment of language. In doing so, I argue more generally that philosophies of agency that critique agential narratives of rupture, instability, and interpretive loss often do so without sufficient attunement to the ways concepts of alterity and liminality operate in North–South contexts or Latina feminist thought. I end by highlighting the critical, decolonial impetus of these concepts as responses to cultural violence. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it (a) points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and (b) critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which (...) takes insights from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

“The authors argue that queer, black, brown, and foreign bodies, and the so-called threats they represent, such as immigration reform and same-sex marriage, have been effectively linked with terrorism. These awful conflations… are enduring and help to explain the contradictions of contemporary U.S. politics. We are far from a post post-9/11 world.” Ronald R. Sundstrom, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, The University of San Francisco,United States“If you want to understand how a new biopolitics of citizenship is containing bodies of the (...) nation by re-inscribing sex and race into it and how this new biopolitics is being resisted you must read this book.” Engin F. Isin, Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, The Open University, United Kingdom. (shrink)

This book addresses “containment” as it relates to interlocking discourses around the “War on Terror” as a global effort and its link to race and sexuality within the United States. The project emerged from the recognition that the events of 11 September 2001, prompted new efforts at containment with both domestic and international implications.

Tras un paneo por el diccionario sobre los conceptos en juego en este artículo, afirma que el feminismo sigue teniendo razón de ser y que su desaparición, nombrada ya como el tiempo del posfeminismo, es una falacia; y que éste como ningún otro movimiento ha comprometido tanto la dimensión subjetiva del ser humano. Recuerda que el feminismo no encontró solución en la perspectiva de la lucha de clase, y revisa la crítica que se hace al discurso de género, a la (...) que califica como constructiva y deconstructiva a la vez. (shrink)

This autobiographical essay addresses the author’s evolution as a Latin American/Latina philosopher in the United States, focusing on a shift of perspectives she undertook through the 1970s and ’80s as she gradually became more engaged with her own Latin American cultural roots. She traces the complex conditions that allowed her to pursue a systematic interest in Latin American philosophy and to defend the philosophical methodologies needed to sustain it. Showing how philosophical dialogue across cultures can break down at times but (...) also how it can overcome its ruptures, she argues that thinking critically at the limits means enacting the possibility of listening to underrepresented or ›new‹ speakers. She claims that this involves the ability to cross the gap between the conventional and the new and that a far richer philosophical life is possible when full attention is given to the voices of women, underrepresented others, and philosophers from the global South. (shrink)

En este artículo se analizarán las claves para comprender la encrucijada actual de la Teoría Feminista y poder así entender los retos del futuro a los que se enfrenta el pensamiento feminista. Inmersa durante largo tiempo en un debate centrado en una dualidad ficticia entre feminismo de la igualdad y feminismo de la diferencia, la teoría feminista se encuentra en la actualidad con nuevos retos que superan tal simpleza dicotómica. Podemos decir que la teoría feminista hoy está embarcada en una (...) tarea masiva de desactivación de tópicos. (shrink)

This article draws from Chela Sandoval's typology of forms of oppositional consciousness taken up by social movements of the last half century to analyze key strategic questions facing transgender liberation movements today.

This article explores the implications of adopting decolonial love as a theoretical and practical model for healing the wounds of coloniality by contrasting its revolutionary potential to the damaging effects of its opposite, colonial love. The latter, based in an imperialist, dualist logic, dangerously fetishizes the beloved object and participates in the oppression and subjugation of difference. Decolonial feminist theorist Chela Sandoval's concept of decolonial love, by contrast, originates “from below” and operates between those rendered other by hegemonic forces. In (...) its acceptance of fluid identities and a redefined but shared humanity, decolonial love promotes loving as an active, intersubjective process, and in so doing articulates an anti-hegemonic, anti-imperialist affect and attitude that can guide the actions that work to dismantle oppressive regimes. Literature that makes central the lived experiences of female subaltern figures works to theorize new ways of being and offers feminist philosophy a different way to understand intersubjective relation that challenges hegemonic thinking. To this end I offer a close reading of Gabriel García Márquez's underexplored Of Love and Other Demons, a novel in which the subversive power of decolonial love challenges Christian, imperialist love to foreground black lived experience and knowledge over and against the Eurocentric. (shrink)

In this project, I combine theoretical resources from metaethics and philosophy of language with contemporary issues in critical philosophy of race. Drawing from these literatures, I examine the nature of racial norms by developing a non-ideal, situated, and intersectional approach to second-personhood. Second-personhood, as I propose in the first half of the dissertation, serves two explanatory functions with respect to the nature of racial norms. First, second-personhood highlights how manifestations of moral and political agency are embedded in interdependent forms of (...) I-you and we-you relationships. Second, with respect to language, second-personhood provides an account of how speech acts, when understood as a subset of embodied action, come to bear normative force. These features of second-personhood then undergird the three distinct sites of analysis that I examine in the latter half of the dissertation. There, I propose that we can examine collective, interpersonal, and personal levels of racial discourse to see the functioning of racial norms through second-personhood. (shrink)

This article considers María Lugones's concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and resistance despite the lack of institutional endorsement. I engage the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Denise Oliver, and other scholars who offer methodologies and discourses on recognition, witnessing, and resistance. (...) I argue that the feminist philosophical concept of faithful witnessing is a critical element of reading decolonial imaginaries. The article undertakes close readings of two novels in the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic tradition: Donato Ndongo's Shadows of Your Black Memory and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In these readings, the concept of faithful witnessing enriches the analysis of religious colonization and the gender violence inherent to coloniality. (shrink)

In this essay Maureen Ford examines a selection of situated knowledges discourses in order to make explicit their attention to political effects. She contends, first, that the “epistemic public” constituted through these discourses are multiple, interactive, performative, and layered, and further that they are explicitly political in ways that are denied by standard epistemological approaches. Furthermore, Ford maintains that the political effects circulated within standard and situated knowledges are epistemologically and educationally significant. Attending to the work of Donna Haraway, Patricia (...) Hill Collins, and María Lugones, she teases out some of the various strategies through which their texts explicitly invoke politically salient, multidimensional, embodied engagement with spaces, people, and discourses in order to make sense. Ford explores the ramifications for educators and educational theorists of addressing such epistemic publics, noting that they are complex and almost inevitably uncomfortable. Taking up discourses of situated knowledges, she suggests, proliferates the avenues through which educators and educational theorists can contribute to the creation and contestation of “public” truths. (shrink)

This essay examines liminality as space of which dominant groups largely are ignorant. The limen is at the edge of hardened structures, a place where transgression of the reigning order is possible. As such, it both offers communicative openings and presents communicative impasses to liminal beings. For the limen to be a coalitional space, complex communication is required. This requires praxical awareness of one's own multiplicity and a recognition of the other's opacity that does not attempt to assimilate it into (...) one's own familiar meanings. Refusing the assumption of transparency and operating with relational identities, the complex communication that occurs in the limen-often invisible to dominant groups-can enable genuine coalition and effective resistance to domination. (shrink)

María Lugones, one of the premiere figures in feminist philosophy, has at last collected some of her most famous essays, as well as some lesser-known gems, into her first book.

This review considers the process of expansion of subjectivity that María Pía Lara introduces in Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. As the complexity of Lara's understanding of multiculturalism is exhibited, the process of achievement of self-realization and autonomy is critiqued as inconsistent with the hidden transcript/public transcript distinction. The "we" to be fashioned intersubjectively in the dialogical process of subjective expansion cannot countenance that crucial distinction to the understanding of those narratives.

Any theory incorporating 'identity' as a central concept must respond to the criticisms of identity posed by postmodernists. For feminist theorists, the most complete articulation of such criticisms has been developed by Judith Butler. Butler focuses on gender identity at the level of subjectivity, how the individual is constructed as a gendered being. The conception of subjectivity Butler criticizes is one that legitimates the social order by masking the power dynamics involved in the construction of subjects. ;In this dissertation, I (...) argue that the construction of subjectivity developed by Maria Lugones engages the criticisms of identity raised by Judith Butler. Furthermore, mestiza, or multiplicitous subjectivity, on Lugones' account, can be the basis for political action. To illustrate this, I analyze the construction of gender identity and racial identity. Finally, I show that mestiza subjectivity as a ground for politics, provides a means for constructing a sustained coalitional identity politics. (shrink)

In Spoils of War, a diverse group of distinguished contributors suggest that acts of aggression resulting from the racism and sexism inherent in social institutions can be viewed as a sort of "war," experienced daily by women of color.

This dissertation outlines the forms of oppositional consciousness generated in reaction to U.S. social hierarchy by analyzing the ways in which these forms of consciousness have been theorized by prominent contemporary cultural critics. My thesis argues that U.S. "liberation" movements of the post WWII era generated five principle forms of consciousness in opposition, ideologies which then are unfortunately comprehended by movement activists as antagonistic to one another--a social and psychological fact which serves to divide movements of resistance from within. I (...) demonstrate that U.S. third world feminism comprises a specific form of consciousness in opposition which takes into account the social struggles over race, class, sex, and gender justice which mark U.S. history during the twentieth century. This form of oppositional consciousness I term "differential," but Gloria Anzaldua has recently named it "la conciencia de la mestiza;" while differential consciousness and/or its specific technologies are variously described in contemporary works of cultural theorists as "differance," "world-traveling" "strategic essentialism," "signifyin," or "deconstruction." The overall effort here is directed toward developing this notion of oppositional consciousness as a methodological and theoretical tool which will make certain "minority" approaches to academic and political practices more visible and available within studies of "minority" discourses in particular and Cultural Studies in general. ;Chapter One provides a close reading of Fredric Jameson's position that form of consciousness in opposition are no longer possible under "postmodern" cultural conditions. Chapter two identifies five modes of social movement and consciousness operative under contemporary cultural conditions: the "equal rights," "revolutionary," "supremacist," "separatist," and "differential" forms. Chapter three is an in depth analysis of the differential form. My argument is that this form of resistance is only brought into being through the self-conscious enactment of what I call "the methodology of the oppressed" which is comprised of five different "technologies:" "semiotics," "deconstruction," "metaideologizing," "democratics," and "differential movement." When gathered together and self-consciously performed by a group in resistance, this methodology becomes the differential form of oppositional social movement. The last chapter demonstrates how this differential form is arising all over the first world and from differing locations. (shrink)

Political concerns about the importance of social identity are voiced equally across left, liberal, and right wing perspectives. Moreover, the suspicion of identity is not relegated to the discourse of intellectuals but is also manifest in the mainstream as a widespread public attitude, and not only among white communities.

In this paper I make a preliminary analysis of Western (or global North) discourses on sexual violence, focusing on the important concepts of “consent” and “victim.” The concept of “consent” is widely used to determine whether sexual violence has occurred, and it is the focal point of debates over the legitimacy of statutory offenses and over the way we characterize sex work done under conditions involving economic desperation. The concept of “victim” is shunned by many feminists and nonfeminists alike for (...) its apparent eclipse of agency. Putting these concepts into a global framework sheds light on their limitations. Bringing in the debate over the concept “honor crime” reveals contrasting assumptions about the nature of sexual violence. The comparative analysis used in this paper shows how we can avoid universalizing from specific frameworks, but also how we can learn from the discourses elsewhere toward developing an account of commonalities across contexts. Ultimately I argue that in applications to sexual violence, “consent” has intrinsic limitations, “victim” has context-based dangers, and “honor crime” makes both correct as well as incorrect assumptions. (shrink)

In a reading of René Descartes's The Passions of the Soul, Luce Irigaray explores the possibility that wonder, first of all passions, can provide the basis for an ethics of sexual difference because it is prior to judgment, and thus nonhierarchical. For Descartes, the passion of generosity gives the key to ethics. I argue that wonder should be extended to other differences and should be combined with generosity to form the basis of an ethics.

"Identity" is one of the most hotly debated topics in literary theory and cultural studies. This bold and groundbreaking collection of essays argues that identity is not just socially constructed, but has real epistemic and political consequences for how people experience the world. Advocating a "postpositivist realist" approach to identity, the essays examine the ways in which theory, politics, and activism class with or complement each other, providing an alternative to the widely influential postmodernist understandings of identity. Although theoretical in (...) orientation, this dynamic collections deals with specific social groups—Chicana/os, African Americans, gay men and lesbians, Asian Americans, and others—and concrete social issues directly related to race, ethnicity, sexuality, epistemology, and political resistance. (shrink)

Using narrative descriptions of the author's own lived-experience of her ethnic heritage, Martinez offers a systematic interrogation of the social and cultural norms by which certain aspects of her Mexican-American cultural heritage are both retained and lost over generations of assimilation. Combining semiotic and existential phenomenology with Chicana feminism, the author charts new terrain where anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work may be pursued.

In this article, I examine the relationship between self-knowledge practices among women of color and structural patterns of ignorance by offering an analysis of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's discussions of self-writing. I propose that by writing about her own experiences in a manner that hails others to critically interrogate their own identities, Anzaldúa develops important theoretical resources for understanding self-knowledge, self-ignorance, and practices of knowing others. In particular, I claim that in her later writings, Anzaldúa offers a rich epistemological account of (...) these themes through her notion of autohistoria-teoría. The notion of autohistoria-teoría demonstrates that self-knowledge practices, like all knowledge practices, are social and relational. Moreover, such self-knowledge practices require contestation and affirmation as well, including, resistance and productive friction. (shrink)

This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking (...) on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. (shrink)

Through an analysis of the interconnections or lack thereof between gender and epistemology, I present Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters as a text of Latina feminist philosophy. First, I use the works of Linda Alcoff and Walter Mignolo to illustrate the political nature of epistemology and how women and people of color in particular are disenfranchised from such a political endeavor. Then I examine the connections among the concepts of origin, absence, inheritance, and knowledge-construction in García's novel to further a (...) critique of standard epistemology and point to an emphasis on reconnection with feminine and maternal knowledge for this text's female characters. Moreover, a depiction and elaboration of María Lugones's ideas of the “coloniality of gender” and “decolonial feminism” in this novel augments this critical examination of epistemology and places emphasis on women as knowledge-producers. (shrink)