Latin American Feminisms

In this course we will explore feminist thought throughout Latin America through an interdisciplinary and decolonial lens. The goal is to understand how Latin American feminisms contribute to global debates on gender, race, colonialism, and ecology. We begin with the pan-Indigenous framework of Abya Yala—the Indigenous name for the American continent—to rethink the relationship between gender, coloniality, and power. Topics include the coloniality of gender; Indigenous Andean thought; epistemic violence; the nexus of race, empire, and extractivism; gore capitalism and economies of violence; body–territory as a site of struggle; and environmental justice. Theoretical and activist perspectives are placed in dialogue with contemporary visual art and cinema, offering students tools to analyze how feminist struggles are expressed across different media and contexts.