Transatlantic divides in feminism
Any anthology introducing Latin American feminist thought to English readers runs the risk of becoming a catalogue: a sequence of writers and positions laid side by side. La Lucha (which can be translated as “the struggle”) does something else: organized into three sections – Intersectional, Territorial, Personal – it moves the reader from structural analysis to questions of land and extractivism, and only then to lived experience. By the time the personal essays appear, they can no longer be read as private testimony: they are animated by the histories of violence, dispossession and inequality that precede them. Edited by Carolina Orloff, the volume brings together thirty contributors from seventeen countries, including activists, academics, journalists and novelists such as Isabel Allende, Valeria Luiselli and Claudia Piñeiro.
The first section gathers essays that read feminism through the overlapping pressures of race, class, colonial history and gender. The Dominican philosopher Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso challenges Euro-American feminism’s universalizing assumptions, and Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, a Mixe linguistic rights activist, questions whether Indigenous women’s struggles can ever be understood through western categories such as “feminism” or “Indigenous”. “Territorial” moves from body to land, linking gender violence to broader political and economic conditions. Selva Almada’s account of pandemic lockdowns in Argentina, for example, shows how measures designed to protect public health intensified domestic confinement, trapping women with abusive partners and exposing the limits of state responses to gender-based violence.
In the personal section, María Moreno’s essay on consent discusses Judith Butler, Antonio Gramsci and Virginie Despentes, but her invocation of “consent” assumes a reader already familiar with the term’s feminist and legal meanings. Other contributors are more direct. Claudia Piñeiro’s “Feminism Pills” offers a quieter but no less telling account of her own experiences in workplaces where the contribution of women is often derided or neglected. Isabel Allende’s piece, from her memoir The Soul of a Woman (2021), offers reassurance and orientation rather than argument. “Feminism often sounds scary because it seems too radical or is interpreted as hatred of men”, she writes, her pedagogical tone a little out of kilter with the greater risks taken elsewhere.
The introduction to La Lucha invokes “all feminisms”, but this volume’s scope is really more specific. The essays are by Indigenous, Black, queer, activist, academic and literary authors who largely share a set of assumptions about the limits of European or North American feminist traditions. Latina feminism, they point out, is shaped by colonial histories, by state violence, extractive economies and the conditions of collective survival. What is at stake is not simply the inclusion of women within existing frameworks, but the inadequacy of those frameworks to include lives that have been shaped by dispossession, environmental devastation and racialized inequality.
As a Latin American woman myself, what struck me was the book’s insistence on difference. For European readers, “Latin America” often appears as a coherent entity; La Lucha instead reveals a landscape of uneven and sometimes mutually unintelligible worlds, some of them as distant from my experience as from any European reader’s. The struggle of a Black or Indigenous woman, or of those working in communities in Guatemala, bears little resemblance to that of an urban, middle-class professional fighting for parity in a salaried job. Even apparent victories, such as Argentina’s legalization of abortion in 2020, mean little when broader conditions – recognition, safety, material equality – remain elusive. At the same time, the book captures something that many of us recognize with gratitude: how profoundly feminism has altered our sense of dignity, expectation and entitlement over recent decades, even as those gains remain fragile and unevenly distributed. What emerges is not triumphalism, but a sober awareness of how much has changed – and of the associated costs.
