Feminisms

Latina feminism offers  an  intersectional  approach to understanding and combating the relations of domination and subordination that structurally disenfranchise Latina/o communities, broadly conceived. Like the Latinas who developed its primary conceptualizations, theories, and practices, Latina feminism has been  shaped  as  much  by  experiences of colonization and U.S. imperialism and of diaspora and border-crossing, as it has been by day-to-day lived experiences of heterosexism,  racism,  and  classism in the United States. Indeed, contemporary Latina feminists—from academics to community organizers— have charted a genealogy of praxis that reaches beyond national borders and deep into history, recuperating    a set of feminist practices that articulate the complex intersections of identity and subjectivity.

Figures like La Malinche / Malintzin Tenepal (Hernán Cortés’s translator in the Conquest of Mexico) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (a seventeenth-century Mexican nun and author of “Hombres necios,” a poem that exposes the contradictions of colonial patriarchy) offer key …