Call for papers
Constructing Transnational Feminist Resistances in Times of “Crises”
Convened in September 2023, IFJP collaborated with FLACSO-Ecuador to host the annual conference in Quito, Ecuador. In this special issue, we turn to the Américas as an important anchoring for global feminist conversations about the current hegemonic hold of the Global North and imperial nation-states in shaping the trajectories – and indeed, the futures – of Global South regions, including Latin America and the Caribbean. We note how global financial and security architecture, combined with populist-nationalisms and rising authoritarianisms, shape regional and local political economies and forms of governance, and the kinds of feminisms and activism that we have witnessed in response to ongoing forms of colonialist, racialized, and gender-based violence. During the rich discussions held at the 2023 conference, we discussed the significant (re)activation and multiplication of feminist struggles throughout Latin America and the Americas more broadly; a region which currently exemplifies, in many ways, fierce feminist responses to multiple forms of “crisis,” a term often challenged and resignified through these contemporary political movements given its connotation as exceptional and temporary rather than as normative and permanent. These struggles have focused on “classic” feminist issues such as gender-based violence and abortion rights, yet feminists have also been protagonists in other forms of resistance, including in movements against narco- and political violence, militarization and the (in)securitization of daily life, and extractivist development and coloniality, and in anti-racist struggles, mobilizations against newly-formed or reconfigured authoritarianisms, anti-carceral movements, challenges to neoliberal and “postneoliberal” forms of governance (AKA Latin America’s Pink Tide), memory politics, queer/cuir and trans movements, migrants’ rights movements, and redistributive and social justice struggles. In the process, these intersectional forms of feminist protest have helped resignify the political and the global, in part through their feminist interrogations of racialized, colonialist heteropatriarcal practices in multiple spaces and on multiple scales. Importantly, these struggles have involved critiquing hegemonic forms of knowledge production and ways of knowing, linking epistemic and material violence in expansive new ways, and offering us new epistemological approaches and forms of praxis that, taken together, help us think more critically and creatively about a more just decolonial feminist future.
Possible questions or themes include the following:
How have these forms of mobilization helped chart new feminist trajectories, demands, and strategies over the past decade?
How have (re)activated forms of feminisms helped reshape a “feminist internationalism”? Likewise, how have they contributed to new forms of knowledge production about the political, the transnational, and the global?
What connections, des/encuentros (encounters and missed encounters), and forms of dissent do we see among feminist movements and other forms of spontaneous protest and movements in the past ten years?
What are the transnational dimensions of feminist protest, and the scales of protest we are witnessing more broadly?
What contributions have Latin American feminisms made to broader discussions and framings of transnational feminist solidarities, global hegemonies, postcolonial/decolonial struggles, environmental justice, and political, social, and “everyday” violence, to name only a few?
How have queer/cuir/trans struggles shaped public forms of protest and challenged nation-states and forms of global governance? What is the role of global governance in shaping queer/cuir/trans responses and forms of protest?
How have feminist, indigenous, and queer/cuir/trans interventions helped resignify borders, (im)mobilities, migration, and displacement?
We are proposing to publish a special issue on this general theme in the International Feminist Journal of Politics in English, and a special issue in Íconos in Spanish. Submissions may be made in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, although final publications will be in English (IFJP) and Spanish (Íconos). Amy Lind (IFJP) and Virginia Villamediana (FLACSO-Ecuador) are the guest editors, and will work with an editorial committee and the journals’ editorial teams to prepare this issue. We seek submissions that address political, economic, and creative responses in times of “crises,” and we encourage traditional journal article manuscripts as well as creative submissions, book review essay proposals, and Conversations pieces that align with the themes of this special issue.
Submissions should be sent to Amy Lind (amy.lind[at]uc.edu) and Virginia Villamediana (vvillamediana[at]flacso.org.ec).
Submission deadline: May 1, 2025