29641

Feminism Without Borders: Journeying With Southern Feminists

Rosa Cordillera Castillo

Comments

Taking inspiration from Chandra Talpade Mohanty's book Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, this seminar critically engages with gender and diversity in an entangled world through the lens of decolonial feminism. Placing gender in relation to global and national colonial, racial, and class formations, we ask along with Mohanty, "What does it mean to think through, theorize, and engage questions of difference and power?” (2003: 191). Journeying with Southern feminists espousing a decolonizing agenda within and outside anthropology, such as Argentinian/Brazilian anthropologist Rita Segato, Afro-Dominican anthropologist Ochy Curiel, Kahnawake Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson, Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónk?´ Oyewùmí, Black poet, writer, and philosopher Audre Lorde, Argentine philosopher Maria Lugones, Jamaican writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter, Chicana poet and feminist theorist Glora Anzaldúa, and Indian sociologist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, we respond to this provocation in three parts. Part I tackles their criticisms of white feminism and Eurocentrism from their particular Southern positionalities. Part II centers their 4 conceptualization and practice of feminism within and outside academia. Part III reorients feminism as a decolonizing framework and movement for addressing and redressing persistent inequalities in an entangled world. Southern positionality is here deployed as a metaphorical concept rather than geographical, such that those inhabiting this positionality include people who have been marginalised, erased and silenced in the North and who resist this oppression and coloniality. We journey with these thinker-doers in the sense that we not only engage with their works cognitively but also bodily, feeling with their writings and reflecting on our own positionality, complicities, and solidarities. Through this seminar, we expand the canon of anthropology and feminism beyond the global North and respond to Mohanty's challenge to "diversity" discourse "to understand our collective differences in terms of historical agency and responsibility so that we can understand others and build solidarities across divisive boundaries” (Mohanty 2003: 191). close

Additional appointments

Tue, 2025-04-15 14:00 - 16:00

Lecturers:
Prof. Dr. Rosa Cordillera Castillo