“The only thing that matters is that you are a human being and that you came to this planet to dance and to fight for badass things—like freedom, like love for others, like the right to your own life. That’s what we should strive to preserve” (interview with Delia, Mexico, August 7, 2022).
In the current conjuncture, feminist hope is both urgently needed and increasingly difficult to sustain. Across many parts of the globe—and especially in Latin America—feminist movements confront rampant gendered violence, including feminicide and sexual assault, alongside structural impunity and the rollback of rights once thought secure, such as abortion access. These conditions signal more than a political crisis: they constitute an affective impasse that brings the very possibility of hope into question. How do we (re)learn to hope under these circumstances? What does endurance look like when the future has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises? These questions are not only urgent for feminist movements but also raise broader concerns for political theory and the study of democratic resilience.
Scholarship has begun to revisit the meaning of hope in dark times, yet much of this work remains centered on texts and representation, rather than on practice. Feminist and critical theorists have illuminated how hope is entangled with loss, disappointment, and mourning but have paid less attention to how hope is enacted and sustained through embodied, collective struggle. We address that gap by developing a feminist, embodied account of hope grounded in Latin American protest movements. It speaks directly to conversations in democratic theory, protest studies, and affective politics by showing how collective practices of resistance and care reveal hope as an embodied democratic capacity for endurance, rather than a deferred ideal.
As Alex Zamalin (Reference Zamalin2024) has argued, hope carries a dual legacy: it is not only indispensable to the imagination of political alternatives but is also entangled with problematic narratives of progress, transcendence, and redemption. Critics have warned that hope can obscure conditions of oppression, loss, and suffering; foster complacency; or impose impossible expectations that later collapse into despair. Yet, as recent works in critical and feminist theory have underscored, rejecting messianic or linear hope does not mean abandoning hope altogether. Instead, it demands reorientation. Theorists of this turn—such as Zamalin, Joseph Winters, David McIvor, Katie Stockdale, Joan Haran, Mariela Solana, and Nayla Luz Vacarezza—invite us to see hope as inseparable from disappointment: as a practice forged in conditions of violent loss, oppression, and failure, not their denial (Haran Reference Haran2010; McIvor Reference McIvor2016; Solana and Vacarezza Reference Solana and Vacarezza2020; Stockdale Reference Stockdale2021; Winters Reference Winters2016; Zamalin Reference Zamalin2019).
We open a new line of inquiry by asking what feminist hope looks like when theorized from embodied practice and then developing new conceptual frameworks for theorizing hope in dark times. How do women and gender dissidents continue to hope amid repeated betrayal? What forms does endurance take when utopian visions no longer hold? Although existing scholarship has powerfully theorized hope through narrative, memory, and affect, less attention has been paid to how hope is lived through the body—in gestures, rituals, demonstrations, dances, and practices of co-presence. We take seriously the claim that politics is not only spoken but also felt, touched, and moved, and so, we ask: What does feminist hope look like, and what does it feel like?
Drawing on a feminist interpretive methodology, our engagement with these movements is based on 48 in-depth interviews with feminist activists and members of feminist organizations in Colombia and Mexico conducted between March 2022 and April 2023, as well as ethnographic and visual documentation of protest repertoires. This methodology allows us to theorize with activists’ practices, rather than applying theory to them, and to emphasize the epistemic and affective dimensions of feminist struggle. We approach interviews as situated knowledges—expressive of emotional, historical, and bodily truths—rather than transparent reflections of experience.
We put the activists’ practices in conversation with feminist scholarship on the body as a site of resistance and feminist accounts of affect (Belfrage Reference Belfrage2024; Butler Reference Butler2018; Gago Reference Gago2020; Macón Reference Macón2020; Moro Reference Moro2022; Segato Reference Segato and McGlazer2024; Solana and Vacarezza Reference Solana and Vacarezza2020; Sutton Reference Sutton2021). We argue that feminist activists in Colombia and Mexico enact what we call an embodied politics of hope. In these movements, hope is not a psychological state or abstract ideal but an embodied practice. Further, the body is not only a site of harm or vulnerability; it is also a site of political production and transformation.
We suggest this embodied practice of hope takes the form of political endurance in the face of structural abandonment that reshapes the conditions of collective life and prefigures a different future. We develop this claim in two steps. First, we show how embodied hope is enacted through choreographies of presence, by which we mean collective acts of public visibility, collective mourning and joyful refusal.Footnote 1 Second, we show how these choreographies of presence reframe feminist hope as a form of reiterative endurance: the collective practice of returning to sites of loss and sustaining political life without the promise of resolution.
Our analysis refigures the relationship between hope and disappointment. Feminist hope does not move linearly from despair to optimism; it moves in loops and returns, through repetition, ritual, and affective surge. Hope is not what comes after disappointment—it holds it, emerging within and through it. Thus, it offers a way of staying in the world with others that does not rely on fantasies of progress or redemption—a way of returning to spaces of loss without surrendering to them. It is about collectively holding pain, transforming it into momentum, and fostering a shared experience that roots sisterhood.
This refiguring of the relationship between hope and disappointment is significant both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, it presents a new avenue for research in political science, feminist, and critical theory by bringing attention to the corporeal dimensions of political endurance. Practically, it invites us to see feminist hope as a generative space in which new temporalities, solidarities, and forms of political life are being enacted—often in the very sites where life has been most threatened.
Our analysis proceeds as follows. The first section outlines our methodology and explains the differing legal, political, and organizational contexts that shape feminist mobilization in the cases of Colombia and Mexico. The second section situates our contribution in the existing critical and feminist theory literature on hope, embodied protest, and affect. The third and fourth sections are dedicated to the analysis of the two analytical pillars of embodied hope: choreographies of presence and reiterative endurance. The conclusion recapitulates our argument and reflects on its broader implications for political theory and democratic life under conditions of disappointment, abandonment, and harm.
Methodology: Embodied Knowledge, Situated Narrative, and Comparative Insight
This project uses interpretive feminist narrative inquiry to examine how hope is embodied, performed, and sustained in feminist protest movements across Mexico and Colombia. Grounded in 48 in-depth semi-structured interviews, visual documentation, attendance at demonstrations, and observations conducted between March 2022 and April 2023 (see appendix B for the interview guide in English), our analysis centers on how feminist activists articulate and enact hope amid ongoing experiences of grief, violence, and state abandonment. Our protest observations encompass marches and demonstrations held during International Women’s Day commemorations on March 8 in both 2022 and 2023. Our interviews capture feminist activists’ reflections on their participation in feminist movements, the movements’ demands and grievances, forms of protest, and their interpretations of unfolding events. Visual documentation is provided by photographs taken by the first author during public demonstrations and is used to analyze protest aesthetics and embodied practices.
Our approach does not treat theory and practice as distinct domains, nor do we view feminist activists as passive sources of “data.” Rather, we understand activist practices—and the embodied, affective, and interpretive labor they involve—as sites of theoretical production in their own right. Our feminist methodology builds theory with and through practice, engaging protest repertoires, interviews, and visual documentation as affective, situated texts shaped by memory, emotion, and the embodied labor of protest. This means we do not apply existing theories to our material; instead, we use the material practices and reflective insights of activists to develop new conceptual frameworks, such as embodied politics of hope, choreographies of presence, and reiterative endurance.
The first author, who is fluent in Spanish and English, conducted all the interviews and completed all transcriptions and translations. These interviews were conducted both in person and online (due to COVID-related restrictions during fieldwork). We recruited participants through purposive and snowball sampling via feminist movements and organizations in Mexico and Colombia. The aim was to capture diverse roles, organizing histories, and movement locations. In Colombia, we engaged activists and leaders from at least eight departments (national territorial units), whereas in Mexico, participants came from four states.
The activists we interviewed were affiliated with a range of organizations and collectives with diverse interests, which enabled us to examine how hope features in activists’ narratives beyond any single grievance. In Colombia, interviewees were involved in movements addressing sexual violence, reproductive rights, and political inclusion. A smaller number were leaders in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian collectives focused on territorial autonomy. In Mexico, interviewees belonged to organizations focused on women’s rights and gender justice, using advocacy, digital activism, art, and music to confront gender violence, impunity, and broader forms of social injustice.
Ethical approval, consent procedures, and confidentiality protocols are detailed in appendix C. All participants provided written informed consent before participation. Interviews were recorded only with explicit consent, and participants were informed of their right to withdraw at any time. Audio and video recordings were stored securely in accordance with IRB protocols, and pseudonyms are used throughout to protect identities and confidentiality.
We selected Mexico and Colombia because they represent distinct but analytically productive sites within the broader transnational feminist “green and purple” wave. Both countries have a long history of feminist movements comprising multiple waves and groups involved in discussions about physical autonomy and political inclusion. Currently, both are symbolically important because of their active and continuous feminist mobilization around issues of human rights, gender-based violence, reproductive justice, and government accountability. In Colombia, feminist organizing has been shaped by the enduring civil conflict, peacebuilding efforts, and recent victories around abortion. In Mexico, mass mobilization has been fueled by high rates of feminicide and a deep distrust of state institutions.
Despite these different sociopolitical paths and influences, current mobilization in both countries is driven by experiences of violent loss, structural violence, and persistent threats to women’s lives (Marino et al. Reference Marino, Torres, Esparza and Romo2021). This makes Mexico and Colombia especially generative sites for tracing how hope is sustained amid disappointment.
Colombia: Renewed Confidence after Decriminalization
Since the late 1990s and the beginning of this century, the emergence of several women’s and feminist organizations in Colombia has been closely linked to peace efforts (Arce Reference Arce2017; Céspedes-Báez and Jaramillo Ruiz Reference Céspedes-Báez and Ruiz2018; Velasquez Ocampo Reference Velasquez Ocampo2024). The 2016 peace agreement with Colombia’s largest guerrilla organization opened opportunities for women’s and feminist organizations to focus on economic autonomy, gender violence, and political participation.Footnote 2 Consequently, Colombian feminism is strongly connected to civil society efforts and territorial initiatives that aim to shape institutional frameworks. It focuses on the need to address structural violence and emphasizes sexual and reproductive rights and gender parity in post-peace agreement politics.
Furthermore, after two decades of efforts to secure access to sexual and reproductive justice, particularly concerning the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, the Constitutional Court’s 2022 decision to decriminalize abortion marked a turning point for the feminist movement. This victory was the result of sustained coalition-building by Causa Justa, which framed abortion not only as an individual right but also as a matter of human rights, public health, social justice, and democratic equality.Footnote 3 This legal rupture catalyzed a surge of public visibility and national mobilization (Fundación Heinrich Böll and Causa Justa 2024). The feminist activists we interviewed, several of whom are members of the Causa Justa coalition, described the ruling as both a juridical breakthrough and a milestone—one that placed renewed confidence in embodied presence as a form of democratic claim-making.
These two milestones—the 2016 peace agreement and the 2022 court ruling—have also revealed the state’s shortcomings and limitations, prompting feminist movements to continue sustained actions. On the one hand, several organizations, such as the Madres de Soacha, have questioned the ability of the state to guarantee human rights following the peace process.Footnote 4 Their interrogation of the state’s role in perpetuating violence and committing crimes against civilians led to an emphasis on the importance of continuing to demand justice from the state, especially on issues related to sexual violence, feminicide, and extrajudicial killings.
On the other hand, feminist activists highlight the urgency of protecting the legal mechanisms created to defend sexual and reproductive rights. After the court decision, feminist movements have had to continue the fight and focus on monitoring law enforcement, ensuring effective implementation and territorial access, and applying ongoing public pressure in rural regions and impoverished neighborhoods with limited institutional presence where legal change does not automatically turn into lived rights.
In other words, the violence women continue to face despite the positive court ruling and the peace agreement demands a persistent labor of organizing and activism. This awareness was evident in our interviewees, who emphasized the importance of protest choreographies grounded in joyful, defiant visibility: dancing in green scarves, allegorical processions before courts, and enacting rituals of grief and remembrance.
Mexico: Persistence amid Friction
In Mexico, contemporary feminist mobilization unfolds in a context of feminicide, machista cultural narratives, legal inconsistencies across states, distrust of state institutions, human rights abuses, and heated debates over the meaning and limits of feminist protest. Despite this challenging context, feminist mobilization has grown since the 1990s and has relied on public protest as a crucial site for demanding justice, mourning victims, and contesting state inaction.
Three elements shape organization networks, demands, and repertoires in Mexico. First, feminicide has become a systemic issue. In 2024, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, known in Spanish as CEPAL) reported that Mexico had 853 feminicides, ranking second in Latin America after Brazil. The cases of feminicide in Ciudad Juárez’s maquilas—assembly and manufacturing plants that employ a large number of women— became emblematic of the extreme violence faced by women and the failures of state institutions to investigate, protect, and deliver justice. In response, feminist and human rights movements have organized around public mourning, visibility, and anti-impunity claims, including through international legal arenas such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ 2009 ruling in the “Cotton Field” case (González et al. v. Mexico). This history explains why feminist protest in Mexico—as we see in the later discussion—often operates through the public transformation of grief into presence and a refusal to disappear.
Second, Mexico’s federal system generates a terrain of legal unevenness (Sovilla and Morales Velasco Reference Sovilla and Velasco2025), with abortion rights and institutional presence varying drastically by state (Beltrán y Puga Reference Beltrán y Puga2025). As a result, activists navigate a patchwork of reform and retrenchment, giving rise to ambivalent feelings toward the law and the state. Internal tensions—around trans inclusion, generational identity, and protest choreographies—further shape the movement’s modes of presence and endurance. For example, during the demonstrations on March 8, 2023, there was a noticeable split between groups advocating for the inclusion of trans women and those opposing it. In addition, some activists in the interviews rejected dance and music, emphasizing that the event was a solemn remembrance, not a celebration.
Finally, Mexican feminist mobilization is characterized by the proliferation of mutual aid and care networks as responses to burnout, repression, and internal tensions (Pérez Domínguez, Palma López, and Godínez Mejía Reference Pérez Domínguez, Palma López and Mejía2024). These networks—such as the Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres, the organizations that initially formed the Okupa action analyzed in the following sections, and other anonymous groups that were interviewed—have created stronger connections between organizations and strengthened the sense of women’s shared fate in the context of high levels of violence.Footnote 5 As such, they foreground hope not only as unity but also as the stubborn work of persisting amid friction.
Cross-case Synthesis: Embodied Politics of Hope
Although this study is not comparative in the traditional sense of a variable-based analysis, it is multi-sited. We treat Colombia and Mexico as contexts that inform interpretation and allow us to situate the activists’ narratives, rather than as cases for systematic comparison. The differing political trajectories in the two countries allow us to trace how embodied practices of hope and endurance emerge under distinct affective, sociolegal, and institutional conditions. By foregrounding embodiment and contextual difference, our method surfaces hope not as a singular ideal but as a situated practice shaped by legal openings, institutional distrust, violence, and movement tensions.
From Melancholic Symbolism to Embodied Endurance: Rethinking Hope through Feminist Praxis
Feminist scholarship in Latin America has long treated the body not only as a site of injury but also as a terrain of collective struggle. Across movements responding to feminicide, territorial dispossession, sexual violence, and reproductive injustice, scholars and activists alike have theorized embodied presence and collective performance as forms of political resistance and world-making (Belfrage Reference Belfrage2024; Gago Reference Gago2020; Macón Reference Macón2020; Moro Reference Moro2025; Segato Reference Segato and McGlazer2024; Sutton Reference Sutton2010; Vacarezza Reference Vacarezza2025). In this respect, Latin American feminist scholarship is in dialogue with the insights of feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (Reference Butler and Athanasiou2013; see also Butler Reference Butler2018), who have explored how bodies gathering in public contest conditions of precarity and unequal vulnerability. Yet it also extends these insights by showing how collective performances of vulnerability, care, and co-presence are mobilized not only to protest injustice but also to prefigure alternative futures and sustain political life under conditions of abandonment (Belfrage Reference Belfrage2024; Gago Reference Gago2020; Macón Reference Macón2020; Moro Reference Moro2022; Segato Reference Segato and McGlazer2024; Sutton Reference Sutton2021). This tradition provides the conceptual grounding for our analysis of embodied hope in feminist protest.
Although this literature foregrounds embodied endurance as a material and collective practice, Anglophone critical theorists have largely reconfigured hope at the level of representation and narrative form. Winters, McIvor, and Zamalin each break with teleological models, highlighting instead hope’s melancholic, agonistic, and speculative dimensions.
Together, these theorists powerfully reject sanitized accounts of hope. Yet they also remain largely within a representational paradigm. The feminized or racialized body in their frameworks tends to appear as symbols or literary depictions. Winters (Reference Winters2016, 13–14, 17, 230) conceptualizes hope as “draped in black,” arguing that it must be understood through mourning and the historical injuries of Blackness, particularly as carried by the Black feminine body. Drawing on literary texts such as Toni Morrison’s Paradise, he presents melancholic hope as a refusal of closure: an insistence that grief and joy remain entangled. In this account, the feminized body functions as a symbolic site through which unresolved history is borne and reimagined.
McIvor (Reference McIvor2016, 17–19, 37–65) similarly reworks hope through what he calls “agonistic mourning,” turning to the figure of Antigone to theorize grief as public defiance. Mourning becomes political when feminized bodies refuse privatization and challenge the state’s authority over whose lives are grievable. As with Winters, however, this account remains anchored in literary representation, rather than in sustained collective practices of embodied protest.
Zamalin (Reference Zamalin2019, 121) likewise reconfigures hope as inseparable from loss, memory, and refusal. Turning to the Black utopian tradition, Zamalin (123–36) finds some of the most compelling expressions of hope in Octavia Butler’s utopian novels. Drawing on speculative fiction, he foregrounds embodied protagonists whose adaptive capacities sustain possibility amid despair (129–34). Yet this embodiment remains situated within imaginative and narrative form, rather than in material, collective enactment.
Winters, McIvor, and Zamalin thus foreground feminized and racialized bodies as symbolic bearers of grief and imagination. Yet in each case, embodiment remains largely representational. The emphasis falls on narrative and symbolic disruption, rather than on the material, affective, and repetitive practices through which hope is enacted in collective protest.
A similar turn away from theorizing hope as an abstract ideal characterizes recent feminist accounts of hope. Katie Stockdale (Reference Stockdale2021; Reference Stockdale, Scioli and van den Heuvel2026) theorizes hope not as an abstract mental state but as a collective practice that emerges from and can be cultivated through solidarity and joint action against injustice. Yet her account of collective hope and solidarity is grounded in a shared conception of justice as a “guiding ideal,” rather than embodied practices of endurance (Reference Stockdale2021, 12). She focuses on how those living under oppression may be able to reclaim some margin of hope amid despair but does not explore those embodied practices that may help activists nurture and sustain hope in the face of failure, disappointment, and violent loss. Rebecca Coleman and Debra Ferrenday (Reference Coleman and Ferreday2011) in their edited collection are also interested in ways of reinvigorating a praxis of feminist hope, yet they look for resources in feminist theory and literary practice. Joan Haran’s (Reference Haran2010) “Redefining Hope as Praxis,” for instance, asks how hope is renewed and deployed despite repeated disappointment in a post-apocalyptic novel The Fifth Sacred Thing; she explores how the novel identifies women’s common vulnerability as a resource for the praxis of hope. The focus thus remains on the symbolic, discursive level, rather than on embodied feminist practice.
In contrast, we suggest that feminist hope, as practiced by activists in Colombia and Mexico, is not only entangled with disappointment but is also enacted through embodied protest. These movements perform hope not through discursive rupture but through choreographies of presence: the rhythmic, often improvised, acts through which collectives sustain one another in the face of unrelenting violence. These acts—dancing in the street, lying in silence wrapped in black cloth, engaging in ritualized performances of grief and joy and collective mourning, painting slogans on bodies, building mutual aid networks, and protecting one another—are not metaphorical. They build relations and infrastructures of reiterative endurance that ground hope in practices of return, rather than linear progress, and allow people to stay in the world amid loss and disappointment.
This perspective also revises how political science might understand protest. Where Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow (Reference Tilly and Tarrow2015, 61–85) offer a model of contentious repertoires emphasizing institutional signaling and strategic adaptation, feminist movements foreground affective labor and bodily improvisation. Similarly, Francesca Polletta’s (Reference Polletta2006) work on narrative and identity formation in protest can be extended—feminist protest narrates through bodies, not just words. Songs, chants, and visual gestures are not illustrative: they are the form that embodied hope takes in conditions of violent loss.
We explicate the political potential of embodied hope in conversation with feminist accounts that explored the affective dimension underpinning, mobilizing, and sustaining practices of embodied protest and showed how this affective dimension disrupts linear temporality (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014a; Gago Reference Gago2020; Hemmings Reference Hemmings2011; Macón Reference Macón2022; Vacarezza Reference Vacarezza, Vacarezza and Sutton2021; Reference Vacarezza2025). This scholarship theorizes hope as not only oriented toward what is to come but also as enacted through repetition, insistence, and return—through practices that make futurity felt as a present demand (Macón Reference Macón2020; Solana and Vacarezza Reference Solana and Vacarezza2020; Vacarezza Reference Vacarezza2025). It cautions that hope can become harmful when it renders the present bearable only through an investment in a better future. What matters here is not only imagining a different world but also sustaining the embodied conditions of possibility for continuing to gather, mourn, dance, and care under conditions of violence. At the same time, these accounts leave undertheorized how exactly hope can be embodied and lived as presence—through practices of care, joy, and collective being together in the street, rather than solely as labor oriented toward a future ideal.
We argue, then, for a shift in focus to center on women’s resistant bodies not as literary depictions but as collective agents of reiterative endurance enacted through choreographies of presence. This shift opens a new conceptual framework for understanding hope. Hope, in this feminist praxis, is not a horizon: it is a rhythm. It is not deferred until the violence stops. It is what enables life to continue amid that violence. This shift allows us to see that the choreographed, embodied practices of women protesters do not resolve grief or disappointment. Rather, they hold onto it, staying with their sorrow together, reimagining hope as the reiterative practice of enduring in contexts of disappointment, suffering, and violent loss.
Choreographies of Presence: Dancing, Mourning, and Staying Together in Joy
On March 8, 2023, thousands of women filled Mexico City’s Plaza de la República (Square of the Republic) to celebrate International Women’s Day. They sang, wept, danced, and held banners and signs with the names and photos of the disappeared. The air was charged with both grief and anticipation. In one corner, women sold feminist apparel to fund their work. In another, they embraced and sang. As music filled the square, protesters proclaimed, “We remember, we are here, we are alive.” They chanted the names of those who could not be present—those murdered or disappeared by patriarchal and state violence—while risking their own safety to speak what institutions have sought to silence.
We call these feminist protest practices choreographies of presence that enact a collective and embodied form of hope—one forged not from optimism but from the practice of showing up in grief, rage, and joy. In the streets and plazas of Colombia and Mexico, feminist bodies make public what the state seeks to erase. Their demands are performed through singing, dancing, crying, and lying down—ritualized choreographies that reconfigure power by asserting physical presence. A crucial element of their demands is to be visible and legible on their own terms, not those of the state. We argue that these choreographies of presence are not only about traditional resistance but are also about collective presence: the ongoing work of making oneself politically visible through remembering, grieving, surviving, and insisting on life.
Claiming Space through Embodiment and Collective Presence
Choreographies of presence reveal embodied hope in practice: women remaking public space through bodily presence, movement, and collective appearance. Feminist protest in Latin America does not enact hope through force or institutional control. Instead, during the March 8 demonstrations of 2022 and 2023, women collectively occupied the streets through acts of mourning, bodily display, silence, song, and movement that transformed public space into a site of memory and resistance. In March 2023, Mexican women marched from Avenida Reforma to the Plaza de la Constitución; mothers held photos of their murdered daughters and sang songs naming the disappeared, protesters painted their skin with slogans, and others walked and wept in silence. Women attending the March 8, 2022, marches in Colombia carried placards stating, “We are the scream of those who are no longer here” (photos 1 and 2) or “Today we march for those who are not present” (photo 3). Moreover, activists used their naked bodies to display painted demands (photo 4) that declared “my body, my decision” (photo 5). They engaged in performative acts wearing black bags on their heads and sitting together in silence around a poster saying, “One by one, we are hundreds of women dead—who will answer for us?” (photo 6; all photos are in appendix A).
These visceral performances relocate politics from speech and institutional demand to embodied action, movement, and public exposure. Feminist activists across Latin America often use the phrase poner el cuerpo or “poner la cuerpa” to underscore that the body in question is female, thereby expressing the embodied dimension of such practices of public presence and visibility (Martin Reference Martin2023, 29). As Barbara Sutton (Reference Sutton2010, 130) explains, poner el cuerpo, which literally means “putting the body on the line” or “giving the body,” conveys a deeper commitment to put “the whole (embodied) being into action,” to “be committed to a social cause, and to assume the bodily risks, work and demands of such a commitment.”
For feminist activists, bodily movement is not secondary to politics but is constitutive of political action itself. As Alicia explained “mobilization arises from that, meaning mobilization comes from movement, and movement is bodily” (interview, Colombia, August 12, 2022). Through movement, feminist activists enact a politics grounded in bodily presence, rather than institutional authority (Segato Reference Segato and McGlazer2024, 94). As one activist put it, “public space is the terrain where we [women] can put forward these demands and make them public, because as we often say, the personal is public, the intimate is political” (interview with Felicia, Mexico, August 9, 2022). By putting their bodies on the line, feminist activists emphasize that resistance is not only about great ideas or the spoken word but also about the embodied labor of appearing and caring (Sutton Reference Sutton2007, 144). In oppressive contexts, where women are required to sacrifice their bodies as “reproductive machines, sexual objects, or commodities,” practices of poner el cuerpo allow women to reclaim their bodies’ transformative and resistant potential (155).
Because embodied protest exposes women to risk, feminist activists cultivate collective practices of protection and solidarity. Choreographies of presence involve a collective dimension, connoting an embodied process of creating solidarity and building power “from the bottom up” (Sutton Reference Sutton2007, 143). In this respect, a key form of claiming presence is acuerpamiento, a feminist practice rooted in Latin American activism, which roughly translates to being held by and holding others. It connotes the embodied refusal to stand alone. It is protection, solidarity, and defiance made real. As a feminist grassroots organization recounted on its social media site, “we come together in solidarity and sisterhood in order to heal ourselves. It is a fact that together we heal and move forward; acuerpar means to back, support, or defend someone” (Galeana Reference Galeana2019, para. 4).Footnote 6 A feminist network of ancestral healers states, “We come together in solidarity [acuerpamos]—that is, we are present with and feel the injustices and indignation experienced by other bodies and by nature as a result of patriarchy; we unite and act with full awareness to collectively defend our bodies” (Cabnal Reference Cabnal2017, 100).
This collective dimension allows activists to transform vulnerability and exposure into agency, solidarity, and power. In protests against sexual violence and impunity, activists invoke chains, masks, naked bodies, and choreographed stillness to stage women simultaneously as targets of violence and agents of resistance (interview with Lorena, Colombia, April 13, 2022; interview with Felicia, Mexico, August 9, 2022). Silent walks, bodily arrangements simulating death, and masking rituals during the March 8 demonstrations, as well as on other symbolic dates such as November 25, the day of nonviolence against women, publicly dramatize forms of violence often rendered invisible. By mobilizing “vulnerability in concert,” as Butler (Reference Butler2018, 99, 13) reminds us, women protesters can demonstrate the condition of unequal vulnerability and demand, with their bodies, a life free from patriarchal violence. They expose the conditions that make collective action impossible for women (22). Yet, in doing so, they also escape the ontological trap of defining women by their vulnerability and bring into existence a new form of solidarity that is based on interdependency and that enacts “persistence and resistance” (22).
For instance, feminist activists strategically mobilized women’s vulnerability in the 2020 Okupa (hub of political action) in Mexico City, occupying a federal building and engaging in communitarian relations and practices to protest the structural impunity regarding rising rates of feminicide and sexual and domestic violence (Guzmán Reference Guzmán2022; Wattenbarger Reference Wattenbarger2020). They disrupted the physical flow of business and the temporal rhythms of everyday existence; work, commutes, and court hearings were dislodged from their normal routines. Beatriz, who participated in some of the Okupa actions and spaces, explained that differently situated women built a community of solidarity (interview, Mexico, May 27, 2022) and reclaimed their vulnerability as a source of power and resistance.Footnote 7
This transformation of vulnerability into power is especially visible in activists’ use of naked protest. Carmen notes, “The personal is also political, and if you go and undress, and that makes you feel emancipated, and that makes you feel free and empowered with your body, then hey, how cool that society starts to understand that this is how it should be” (interview, Mexico, May 30, 2022). Or, as Fernanda explained, “getting undressed—choosing the color of my lips or nails, whether I have tattoos or not, and what my tattoos represent—is significant.… I think it’s all about letting your body speak… It seems very empowering to me; it recharges me and fills me with strength (interview, Colombia, March 25, 2022).
These statements show how activists’ use of naked protest can disrupt dominant meanings associated with women’s bodies, sexuality, and vulnerability (Sutton Reference Sutton2007, 151; 2021, 28). Although such bodily tactics may risk reinscribing oppressive norms, feminist protests have relied on the security of their collective presence to challenge the hegemonic norms of feminine appearance (Sutton Reference Sutton2021, 28, 43).Footnote 8 As Sutton observes regarding abortion rights activism in Argentina, women’s collective embodied presence—their dancing, singing, and displaying their naked bodies—transformed the streets into “feminist-territory” where women could experience “a sense of embodied freedom” and move without fear (43–44).
These choreographies of presence do more than claim visibility; they also generate forms of knowledge rooted in bodily experience. One Colombian activist stated, “I recognize sexual violence in every cell of my body—my entire body is filled with sexual violence, the experiences of my hands, my face, my whole body” (interview with Jenny, Colombia, April 11, 2022). This formulation resonates with Gago’s (Reference Gago2020, 60) analysis of the body as “an entry point” that allows the activists to understand the phenomenon of patriarchal violence, how it is expressed, as well as how to fight it. Violence is not external to the body; it is embedded within it. Bodily presence, then, also represents a source of collective power. Gago describes how the feminist strike transformed violence and pain into a “vibrating sound,” a collective shout that is “made by moving one’s hand over one’s mouth,” a “pack’s howl” that produced a “massive resonant body” (29). In this embodied collectivity, the singular becomes plural: “the body of one woman [becomes] the body of all” (9). Choreographies of presence thus begin with the body, but they also generate new epistemic and political possibilities grounded in collective experience, movement, and ritual.
Unequal Risk, Relational Solidarity and Networks of Care
Choreographies of presence reveal embodied hope as a collective practice through which women make themselves present—visibly, vulnerably, and together—in public space. By mobilizing dance, ritual, and embodied performance, feminist activists reclaim public space as pluriversal—a place where many worlds fit (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional 1996). Yet the risks and possibilities of embodied protest are unevenly distributed. Intersectional histories of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy shape who can appear publicly, how they appear, and the vulnerabilities attached to that appearance (Belfrage Reference Belfrage2024, 540–41; Martin Reference Martin2023; Sutton Reference Sutton2010, 26).
In the interview materials from both Colombia and Mexico, Indigenous, Afro-descendant and trans activists speak of their bodies as doubly at risk—from state violence and from racism within feminist movements themselves. Mourning, particularly among Indigenous and Afro-descendant women, is often marginalized or romanticized. Appearing, for them, becomes political not just as a claim to justice but also as a demand for recognition within feminist struggles. One Colombian activist reflected, “Without a doubt, we share oppressed bodies, and in that sharing of an oppressed body, you connect. And when you arrive in a region, you understand your privilege, but you can also understand that realities are vastly different” (interview with Alicia, Colombia, August 12, 2022).
In response to this recognition, feminist activists’ practices of acuerpamiento are meant to be both protective and world-making: shielding each other from harm while expanding the boundaries of feminist space. Flora, for instance, explained why, as a Black woman in Colombia, it is necessary to form a collective with other women facing the same experience. It is “one thing to create public policies and laws aimed at benefiting Afro-Colombian and Black people in general, and another thing to seek benefits for women in general. But I feel that the violence experienced by women—by us Black women—is particular and requires that kind of specificity” (interview, Colombia, April 4, 2023). We also see this idea in the popular slogan used by Colombian trans feminists in demonstrations, virtual activism, songs, and visual materials: “The state doesn’t protect me — my friends do” (Rocha, Ruiz, and Salamanca Reference Rocha, Carlos and Salamanca2022). Feminist movements have used this slogan to expose the state’s failure to protect their lives (Traficantes.net 2022) while also expressing the need to protect the most vulnerable and marginalized bodies during public protests and demonstrations.
Feminist activists also address the conditions of unequal risk and vulnerability through internal infrastructures of care, such as mutual aid networks, emotional support collectives, community defense workshops, and memorial projects. Several activists we interviewed explained that resistance extends beyond street demonstrations to include developing networks of local and community-based support, like care groups or information campaigns. These practices are not auxiliary to protest. Care is protest. Moro’s (Reference Moro2025, 810) notion of “choreographies of vulnerability and care” coined in relation to the Ni Una Menos movement in Argentina foregrounds the transformative potential of such networks and practices of support and care. By practicing relations of mutual care, as she elaborates, the feminist protesters start from “the diverse experiences of oppression among its members” and thus “performatively transform the public space” into “a more inclusive and diverse space” (810).
In centering historically marginalized bodies then, these networks challenge not only state neglect but also exclusions within feminism itself. As one Colombian activist notes, we want to give “voice to Black women—not just the ones living in the center of the country or in the main cities, but to those Black women who have never spoken, who don’t have access to social media or education. Yes, to those we’ve never heard from” (interview with Flora, Colombia, April 4, 2023). Alicia, an activist in Bogota who is affiliated with a national organization, similarly explained that their care and support network emerged from the need to allow women from different regions of Colombia to connect and recognize that they are not alone (interview, Colombia, August 12, 2022). These relations of solidarity forged through recognizing and sharing the members’ different vulnerabilities act as a corrective, however imperfect, to the unequal risks of public exposure. They highlight the labor of protecting the most vulnerable as an essential aspect of the practice of embodied hope.
Mourning, Rage, and Joyful Defiance
Our argument draws attention to how hope does not emerge solely or even primarily from optimism about change. Rather, it is forged in the interplay of mourning, rage, and joy. These affective registers do not appear separately, nor are they mutually exclusive. As Butler (Reference Butler2018, 22) argues, they coexist in embodied assemblies, where the body becomes both a site of grief and a vector of resistance. If in Butler the dynamic interplay of these affects in practice remains undertheorized, the feminist protests in Colombia and Mexico show how mourning flows into rage, rage into joyful defiance, and joy into renewed grief—often within a single collective performance (89). These affective performances enact collective forms of political presence in which contradictory affects become publicly visible.
This affective dynamic is particularly clear in the common practice of naming the disappeared. In these ritualistic events, women sing the names of feminicide victims aloud in the streets. This practice insists that those rendered invisible by the state are worthy of being mourned and grieved. The act of naming the disappeared transforms grief into collective public presence. By invoking those erased by the state, activists insist on the continued visibility of lives deemed ungrievable, making mourning itself a demand for justice.
Rage and joy are not opposing emotions in these movements but interconnected choreographies of presence. In Colombia, one protester described a “collective rage, that there are things happening to women in the world and in Colombia that shouldn’t be happening” (interview with Ofelia, Colombia, May 24, 2022). This rage is not destructive; it transforms grief into protest, making visible the state’s failure to act. As Gago (Reference Gago2020, 12) discusses in relation to the Ni Una Menos movement and the practice of the feminist strike, shared rage translated into solidaristic action and showcased the collective power of bodies in the street. Similarly, Macón (Reference Macón2022) and Vacarezza (Reference Vacarezza, Vacarezza and Sutton2021) demonstrate how the use of protest songs, collective gestures and symbols, laughter, and irony in abortion rights activism in Argentina and Chile brought together the contradictory affective registers of joy and disappointment, mourning and defiance, hope and rage. These symbols and choreographies bring grief, rage, irony, and joy into public circulation, allowing these emotions to coexist within collective protest (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014a, 174; 2014b; Vacarezza Reference Vacarezza, Vacarezza and Sutton2021, 70, 88; 2025).
Although this feminist scholarship foregrounds the coexistence of opposing affects, it does not fully account for the centrality of joy amid mourning and anger or theorize it as central to the affective life of feminist protest itself. Our interviewees, in contrast, consistently described moments of celebration, laughter, and corporeal expression not as secondary or episodic but as central to their organizing. As one activist in Colombia put it, “We take that song [Infiltrao song by Edson Velandia] to the streets and we all sing it in the streets—it fills the movement with energy and strength” (interview with Nadia, Colombia, May 6, 2022). Drawing on the long tradition of “festive commoning” in radical movements, feminist activists reclaim public space through laughter, rhythm, and shared presence—performing acts that are deliberately political and expanding the power of bodies to resist and connect. In marches and sit-ins, songs like the Vivir Quintana’s 2020 “Song without Fear” have become transnational anthems that transform grief into defiance and generate what Weir (Reference Weir2017) calls “collective joy” (Ehrenreich Reference Ehrenreich2007).
This joy is embodied, public, and shared—it is situated within la cuerpa, the feminized body that moves, risks, dances, and sustains others. In contexts where state power marks these bodies as disposable, joy becomes a way of asserting livability, visibility, and collective presence. For Latin American feminists, to appear joyfully in the streets is to assert life in the face of a regime that would rather see them disappear. One participant reflects, “The only thing that matters is that you are a human being and that you came to this planet to dance and to fight for badass things—like freedom, like love for others, like the right to your own life. That’s what we should strive to preserve” (interview with Delia, Mexico August 7, 2022). Embodied joy, then, is not an escape: it is insurgency, a way of keeping the political alive through pleasure and presence.
Importantly, these expressions of joy amid grief are shaped by and filtered through intersectional experience. Afro-Colombian and Indigenous activists stressed that their collective celebrations in activism are deeply rooted in their cultural traditions, including music, rituals, and communal storytelling. Ursula, a member of a women’s organization in the Pacific region of Colombia, notes that resistance happens “with our traditional instruments, with our folk verses, our lullabies, our praise songs—that’s already a way for us to express ourselves” (interview Colombia, 2022). She explained that “it has a lot to do with the purpose, the reason behind what one wants to express, and also with the cultural background that each of our ethnic groups carries” (interview, Colombia, 2022). These acts are not only celebratory but restorative—insisting on the presence of racialized, rural, and Indigenous bodies in feminist resistance and bringing with them distinct modes of joy and healing.
Choreographies of presence, then, reveal embodied hope not as a singular emotion but as a complex affective formation in which grief, rage, and joy coexist. Hope emerges through bodies moving, mourning, singing, and appearing together. This layered affectivity does not overcome pain so much as render it collective, visible, and politically meaningful.
Reiterative Endurance: A Feminist Refiguration of Disappointment
These embodied choreographies of presence show that feminist hope in Latin American protest movements is not a rupture with disappointment or loss. Rather, these movements stay with broken promises and inhabit grief, failure, and historical violence. Building on our discussion in the previous section, we theorize how these choreographies of presence transform disappointment into a generative source of collective, reiterative endurance: a form of hope grounded in return, persistence, and the refusal of closure.
Choreographies of presence break with linear conceptions of time. Feminist activists in Colombia and Mexico do not measure time by policy victories or institutional reforms but by return: return to the site of loss, to the day of disappearance, to the same chants, to the same rituals. March 8 and November 25, for instance, function as recurring temporal anchors of remembrance that activists commemorate again and again, refusing to forget.
These ritualized, reiterative acts refuse the state’s demand to “move on,” to let grief and injustice recede into the past. They challenge the fantasy of neat reconciliation or temporal resolution. We see this in the March 8, 2022, demonstrations in Mexico in which signs say, “May our cries for justice keep them awake” (photo 7, Mexico) and “When my sisters return, I’ll be back to paint your wall” (photo 8, Mexico; photos are in appendix A). The feminist activists do not allow their claims to be silenced. As such, they constitute a feminist temporality that centers endurance over achievement and closure, and repetition over rupture. Annual marches and vigils do not simply commemorate past injuries; they enact a temporality of reiterative endurance. Each repetition is an insistence on being seen and remembered—an act of persistence that keeps hope alive not by transcending disappointment but by returning to it together.
Feminist accounts of affect and temporality help explain how returning to these spaces of disappointment and loss challenges linear notions of progress and closure. As Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2010, 50–87) reminds us, refusing to “move on” from pain is not regressive but politically necessary; remaining attached to injury can itself be a form of critique. This looping temporality allows activists to sustain presence and endure even when transformation is slow or deferred. In this sense, feminism’s future orientation is sustained only through a passionate relationship with the present and the past (Solana and Vacarezza Reference Solana and Vacarezza2020, 8). As Macón (Reference Macón2022, 356) argues with regard to the way feminist activists in Argentina and Chile linked their activism to the recent past of state repression during the dictatorship, it is “the enduring wound” that drives action in the present. This affective connection between the past and present—the intergenerational holding onto the violent and painful past—sustains agency and collective practice in the now (364–65). In this sense, the work of “holding on”—of not giving up—becomes an affective infrastructure of reiterative endurance (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014b, 174; Vacarezza Reference Vacarezza, Vacarezza and Sutton2021, 70, 88).
This reiterative temporality is especially evident in the way feminist activists center joy, even amid grief, disappointment, and mourning. Centering joy amid mourning produces a nonlinear temporality grounded in shared rhythms, ritual repetition, and an openness to spontaneity. Where institutions demand closure, reform, or resolution, feminist joy loops and returns. The demonstrations of March 8 in 2022 and 2023 in Mexico and Colombia exemplify how protest and demonstration exist in a continuous loop of festivity and grievance. Even when policy violations and setbacks occurred, many women in the streets continued to dance and make their presence visible. These acts disrupt not only the spatial control of state institutions but also the temporal norms of politics—what counts as action, success, or forward movement. Within these disrupted temporalities, hope is not deferred to a distant future. It is practiced now, in the present, through bodies moving together in pleasure, joy, and celebration.
In this way, joy coupled with endurance prefigures a different future. Through shared rhythm, repetition, and openness to spontaneity, activists enact livable futures in the present. Joy is not a consolation or escape from violence and disappointment; it is a form of persistence—a declaration that we are still here and not done living. It allows movements to persist not only by opposing what is but also by feeling toward what could be. Joy sustains the difficult work of survival, organizing, and refusal. It is a fragile resource, sometimes fleeting but often palpable. In this sense, joy is a feminist tactic, a prefigurative method, and a declaration of reiterative endurance.
Similarly, the feminist activists’ practices of acuerpamiento and the internal networks and infrastructures of care and support cultivate hope as a form of reiterative endurance that prefigures a different future in the here and now. This is not a hope that waits for justice; it is a hope that builds new infrastructures of solidarity, support, and care in contexts marked by impunity, state abandonment, disappointment, and violence. For instance, the earlier mentioned popular slogan used by Colombian trans feminists, “The state doesn’t protect me—my friends do,” reveals how the absence of institutional guarantees does not produce apathy but instead a recalibrated political logic. The feminist capacity to persist and endure is rooted in relationality and solidarity rather than triumph. Hope becomes the capacity to keep acting, not because victory is assured but because being together in action matters. One activist shares, “We’re not just isolated people confronting the system, the world, whatever, but that there are many of us. It feels really good—it feels like we’re achieving things” (interview with Raquel, Colombia, June 10, 2022).
Likewise, the internal infrastructures of support, solidarity and care prefiguratively create a new kind of feminist community.Footnote 9 As Moro (Reference Moro2025, 810) argues, networks and practices of support and care that are rooted in the sharing of different vulnerabilities and risks embody in the present the idea of community they want to create in the future: “a community of care.” As such, networks and infrastructures of care are not only responses to the pressures of activism and unequal vulnerability: they are assertions of survival and futurity. They insist on the right and capacity of all bodies, even those most vulnerable and marginalized, to persist, to keep appearing and giving voice to their grievance—to endure despite crushing disappointments and overwhelming odds. Women sing the “Song without Fear”: “They planted fear in us, [in response] we grew wings.”
These infrastructures of care are oriented simultaneously toward past injury, present survival, and future possibility. They emerge from the past; that is, from the accumulated experiences of violence, grief, and abandonment that continue to shape activists’ lives in the present. Yet they also create spaces of mutual support, protection, and collective endurance in the here and now while prefiguring more livable feminist futures. Importantly, these practices do not assume that violence or disappointment will disappear. Rather, they sustain political life amid the recognition that harm may persist. In this sense, feminist care practices hold together memory, survival, and futurity without resolving the tensions among them.
The choreographies of presence thus capture the essence of feminist temporality: the future is not transcendent but enacted in repeated chants, in affirmations of joy amid mourning, in the everyday practices of care. Through repurposing disappointment as a source of reiterative endurance, the feminist practice of embodied hope keeps people alive, visible, and present in conditions of violent loss.
Conclusion: Embodied Hope beyond the Horizon
Feminist movements in Colombia and Mexico enact an embodied politics of hope, which we theorized as a collective practice of reiterative endurance. Against the weight of structural violence and state abandonment, activists create political possibility not through institutional access or narrative resolution but through what they do together in space: through choreographies of presence such as dancing, chanting, mourning, gathering in joyful defiance, and refusing to disappear.
If recent work in critical and feminist theory investigates hope on the level of representation or future ideal, our analysis reframes it as an embodied, material, and relational practice. Feminist hope, as practiced in these movements, is not a horizon deferred but enacted through touch, care, and collective exposure. It is not sustained by the expectation of progress but by a stubborn refusal to disappear, a collective insistence that life continues and solidarity endures. It does not wait for the desired feminist community but prefigures it through practices, relations, and infrastructures of care and support.
By rethinking hope as a reiterative practice of endurance, these movements recast the relationship between hope and disappointment and offer a new conceptual framework on how to sustain hope and solidarity amid conditions of violent loss. Feminist hope as an embodied practice of reiterative endurance does not move on from and dissolve disappointment; it emerges through it and repurposes it as a source of joyful defiance and sisterhood.
This reconceptualization has broader implications for political theory and democratic life under conditions of disappointment, abandonment, and harm. In contexts far beyond Latin America, where despair and disillusionment threaten collective life, such reiterative endurance offers a lesson in how freedom, political action, and politics itself can persist—through presence, care, and the insistence on appearing together.
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592726106434.
Acknowledgments
We are deeply grateful to the activists and participants who generously shared their time, experiences, and reflections during the data collection process. We acknowledge support from the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, the American Political Science Association Latino Fund, the Empirical Study of Gender Research Network, and the National Science Foundation. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2025 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Vancouver. We thank all participants for their valuable feedback.
In accordance with the journal’s AI-use disclosure policy, we want to clarify that the authors used AI-assisted tools only in a limited capacity for language polishing, copyediting, and organizing revision materials. AI tools were not used to draft the article, generate arguments, conduct analysis, interpret data, or produce findings. All substantive content, analysis, interpretations, and final wording were developed, reviewed, and approved by the authors, who take full responsibility for this article.
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