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An Autonomous-Feminist Statement: The Challenge for Developing Community in La Casa de las Diferencias

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2022

Abstract

This autonomous-feminist statement is a collective work born from a gathering at the Autonomous Feminist Encounter [Encuentro Feminista Autónomo] in Mexico City in 2009. This piece gives a historical review of so-called autonomous feminism in Latin America and poses a definition and vision of its praxis, taking into account the socio-political-economic context in Latin America in the early 2000s. This article also recognizes feminist groups that started the critique of hegemonic feminist praxis in the region.

Type
Feminism in Translation
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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Footnotes

This article was first published as: Encuentro Feminista Autónomo. 2010. “Una Declaración Feminista Autónoma El Desafío De Hacer Comunidad En La Casa De Las Diferencias.” Debate Feminista (41): 202–07.

References

Notes

2 Consciousness-raising or awareness-raising was a form of political activism pioneered by New York Radical Women as part of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s. It originally consisted of a group of women who met up in a space, such as a library or a living-room, in order to call attention to and discuss a struggle or concrete issue in their lives. Such encounters were meant to help one another to become politically conscious and to get a better understanding of their oppression by meeting without interference from the presence of men.

3 Affidamento, or entrustment, is a practice started by the Italian feminist movement from the 1970s (within which the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective had a central role) that draws attention to the relationship between women. Affidamento is about building trust, supporting, counseling, and guiding one another, but also about sharing personal dreams and projects in order to achieve political aims and face patriarchal power. This practice recognizes that, rather than the process of identification, it is the differences between women that are the most generative qualities of their personal and political relationship.

4 The term Abya Yala, from the Guna language: “land of fertile blood,” is used as an alternative name to refer to the territory named (Latin) America by European colonizers.

5 From the Spanish “traer al mundo el mundo,” a phrase whose origin within difference feminism highlights the feminine experience, with the aim of including it in the universal understanding of the world.

6 Create while acting at the same time.