The three volumes I am considering in this review essay constitute a living archive of the political and epistemic movement called decolonial feminism. Together, Tejiendo de Otro Modo: Feminismo, Epistemología, y Apuestas Descoloniales en el Abya Yala, Feminismo Descolonial: Nuevos aportes metodológicos a mas de una década, and Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala, collect the principal contributions to the profoundly important production of critical theory and radical politics. The editors and contributors include a diversity of key figures in decolonial feminism, reuniting intellectual-activists mostly from Latin America and US Latinxs, a geohistorical landscape denominated Abya Yala, an Indigenous Kuna category that stands for “the territory of all of us.”Footnote ¹ The publication of this review essay as part of a special issue of Hypatia is a meaningful move because it was in this journal that María Lugones published her foundational articles on what she termed “the modern/colonial gender system,” as well as an invitation to cultivate decolonial feminism.Footnote ²

Instead of carefully summarizing each book, I will first highlight key features of each volume, and then engage in a more analytical discussion of their overall meaning for feminist critique and politics. I present the books in chronological order to follow the trajectory of decolonial feminism, its historical conditions of possibility, political and epistemic antecedents, and key interventions.

Tejiendo de Otro Modo: Feminismo, Epistemología, y Apuestas Descoloniales en el Abya Yala, the first published of the trio, is the product of a conference held in 2013 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, co-sponsored by its Latin American Political Imaginaries Group and the Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudios, Formación y Acción Feminista—GLEFAS.Footnote ³ The event convened an outstanding group of feminist intellectual-activists from across the continent and from a diversity of academic, social movement, and community sites. The intergenerational collective engaged in a rich dialogue to address the main themes and principal debates in the developing field of decolonial feminism. The volume is the offspring of this enabling encounter.

Tejiendo De Otro Modo was conceived partly as a chronologically organized reader that represents a genealogy of decolonial feminisms of Abya Yala. As such, it is a selection of “necessary texts to trace the history of ideas, concepts, analyses, and debates that structured the specific domain where decolonial feminist proposals were produced” (41). It is divided into five parts, each with several chapters. I will address a selection of the chapters that illustrate the principal arguments, case studies, and empirical referents of the book.

It presents a sort of genealogy of “the feminist production of Abya Yala that had been generated between the margins of the academy and political activism during the last few decades” (13).Footnote ⁴ In the introduction, co-editors Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Gómez Correal, and Karina Ochoa Muñoz characterize the collection as “a feminist genealogy committed to the critique of coloniality” (14),Footnote ⁵ “a historic cut of the intellectual contributions of activists, thinkers, and academics from Abya Yala [who] generated political-epistemic ruptures . . . critical of modern (hetero) patriarchy in its intrinsic connection with racism, capitalism, and coloniality” (13).

The editors contend that such a “political-epistemic rupture of the Western rationalities of Eurocentric feminism” should “prioritize systematically relegated and ignored voices” of subaltern women—Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, popular sectors—by “white bourgeois feminist discourse.” The collection traces a path of “autonomous, radical, and antiliberal currents of feminism [linked] to counterhegemonic social movements of the continent,” constituting “a memory to document the voices and experiences that had taken an agonistic turn . . . producing unprecedented fractures in the hegemonic order and episteme” (20). The volume itself is an important source for constructing a countercolonial feminist archive from the multiple locations of Abya Yala.

The genealogy that shapes the collection begins in the 1980s, highlighting the historical conditions of possibility of a wave of antisystemic movements that facilitated “emerging voices and processes of political action [of] ‘other’ women who vindicated and problematized their racial, ethnic, class, and sex-gender condition . . . challenging hegemonic Western discourses [and their] ethnocentric, racist, misogynist, heterocentric, colonial logics” (20). The editors lay out a repertoire of key struggles and events, including: the continental campaign of “500 Years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance,” the Zapatista insurrection in Mexico, protests headed by the National Indigenous Confederation in Ecuador, land struggles in Brazil, Indigenous movements defending territories and ecology in Argentina, Bolivia, Central America, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela, and the rise of Black movements through the whole region. This opened up a contested terrain of collective action and contentious politics, of “encounters and dis-encounters between feminists and women within other social movements such as Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and popular sectors,” vis-à-vis mainstream feminism of mostly elite white women, enabling “slowly but surely [the weaving of] possibilities to open paths of communication between feminism and other social movements” (21). More than “mainstreaming” or “sidestreaming” of feminism, the chapters show the rise of a political and epistemic movement that grew within a process filled with challenges, quests, contradictions, and debates.

The editors argue that since the 1980s, “a consciousness of gender oppression had been socially extending, reaching our communities thanks to the ample work by feminists,” while critiquing the so-called “gender perspective” of the neoliberal gender establishment—funders and international institutions—who pursue a developmentalist politics of rights in complicity with “processes of occidentalization and loss of community autonomy” (22). The authors celebrate the rise of Black and Indigenous voices and their cross-fertilization with women from peasant and urban popular movements in feminist summits such as the “Third Feminist Encounter of Latin America and the Caribbean,” held in 1985 in Brazil, where “Black feminists became visible as a group” and fought for a “critical discourse against racism” as a pillar of feminist critique and politics (24). This entailed a double critique of racism in feminist movements and sexism in Black movements. Arguably, this should account for revisiting genealogies of Black feminisms and the moment characterized as “second-wave feminism” by recognizing Afro-Latin American feminist theory and politics, and particularly contributions of figures like Lélia Gonzalez and Sueli Carneiro.Footnote ⁶ Tejiendo de Otro Modo also underlines the importance of emerging Indigenous feminisms, especially “communitarian feminisms” in Bolivia and Guatemala, the two countries in the Americas with an Indigenous majority.

The her-story in Tejiendo de Otro Modo is also told through the lens of a trajectory from autonomous to decolonial feminism. The authors assess the 1996 “Declaration of Autonomous Feminism” as a “proclamation that articulated efforts and the counterhegemonic perspective of a whole current of radical feminists during the decade of the nineties” (25). They affirm their will to construct feminist theory and politics from Latin American locations. They highlight the principle of autonomy from state and transnational institutions as well as the critique of “development” as distinctive postures of the autonomous current. In that vein, they see autonomous feminism as a predecessor of decolonial feminism vis-à-vis the institutional feminism headed by white elite women. However, they also point out that by 2009, in a gathering of autonomous feminists in Mexico, it was clear that such a current was overcome by the more substantive analysis and more comprehensive proposal of decolonial feminism. It became evident that decolonial feminism has a deeper analytics of the matrix of domination and a more robust, pluriversal, intersectional politics of liberation.

Hence, the rising political and epistemic position represents “an epistemological change in the analysis of oppression . . . in the type of politics to affect (how, from where, with whom) and a gradual transformation of the horizons of utopia: what change, in favor of what kind of society and what conception life” (27). In this terrain, the evolving movement of decolonial feminism became a pivot in the emergence of a new common sense for reinventing liberation by means of refashioned political subjectivities, critical discourse, and ways of doing politics.

Upon examining decolonial feminism's sources and coalitions and the relationship between what Arturo Escobar calls the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality group (MCDG) and women of color/third-world women feminisms, Lugones shows up as a foundational figure and connector between both, as the three volumes argue.

The editors contend that she was the first to articulate a decolonial feminism, coining main categories such as the modern/colonial gender system and the coloniality of gender, tenets of the modern/colonial matrix of power. In this way, Lugones engages in a dialogue with the modernity/coloniality critique of the MCDG, as well as the “matrix of domination” and the “radical intersectional politics of Black feminisms and in women of color/third-world women.” In such dialogue, Quijano's concept of “pattern of power” was enriched with Patricia Hill Collins's concept of “matrix of domination,” thus establishing the conditions for a more nuanced notion of power and praxis of politics.Footnote ⁷

Tejiendo de Otro Modo explicitly aims to intervene against the “invisibilization of the influence of processes of action and thought of nonwhite feminism in the development of decolonial ideas” because of the lack of recognition of “the feminist authors who opened the gap in the debates today in vogue within decoloniality.” They conceive such critical labor of epistemic justice as that of rescuing a “suppressed memory” (30). From that angle, we could argue that decolonial feminism constitutes a feminist shift within the fundamental ethical-political and onto-epistemic transformation called the decolonial turn.Footnote ⁸

The critical dialogue between feminism and decoloniality enriches both, producing a qualitatively different theoretical and political position. It contributes more complex and concrete analyses “not only of gender and patriarchy . . . but also of power, democracy, the state, subjectivities, economies, spiritualities, and modernity itself” (35), as demonstrated throughout the book. Hence “decolonial feminism opens a fertile field of unmatched theoretical production . . . that will surely leave important fruits for our own reconceptualization of oppression and a politics more akin to the interests of the majority of the women and communities of Abya Yala” (35). The authors point toward several quests and moves that frame the principal political-epistemic contributions of decolonial feminism “in this shift,” of which we can underline: 1) acknowledging the contributions of Black and Indigenous feminists to critical theory and radical politics; 2) theorizing the modern/colonial matrix of power as articulations of capitalism, colonialism/imperialism, patriarchy, and racism, meaning that class, gender, race, and sexuality are “co-constitutive categories of the modern episteme” (which also implies a radical critique of the identity politics predicated on the universal category of “woman”); 3) a historically grounded critical revision of the very category of patriarchy, whose temporality and universal applicability is a matter of debate within what we can describe as the contested terrain of decolonial feminism.

The first part of Tejiendo de Otro Modo, titled “Debates about Coloniality of Gender and (Hetero)patriarchy,” puts “at the center of debate the categories of patriarchy and the sex-gender system” (42) and their histories in Abya Yala. It starts with Lugones's “Coloniality of Gender,” a classic that “inaugurates the proposal for a decolonial feminism” (42). Lugones critically engages Anibal Quijano's analytics of coloniality for undertheorizing gender and argues that “both race and gender were simultaneously produced in the process of conquest and colonization” (42). She coined the concept of the modern/colonial gender system and centralizes the category of “intersectionality” to analyze the matrix of domination Quijano (Reference Quijano2000) characterizes as the “coloniality of power.” Lugones sees this as a foundation for a radical intersectional politics of liberation against the entangled chains of coloniality that constitute interweaved forms of oppression. She questions the universality of patriarchal power, arguing that the category of “woman” is guarded for the “light side” (whiteness) of the modern/colonial gender system, while denied to those on the “dark side,” namely nonwhite. She contends that patriarchy is a modern/colonial phenomenon that signifies primarily white, imperial, heterosexual, male power over his racial-sexual-colonial others. According to this logic, gender was conceived as a modern/colonial category reserved to white women because nonwhite female bodies did not fit occidental definitions of womanhood.Footnote ⁹

In turn and as a counterpoint, Rita Segato, in her “Coloniality and Modern Patriarchy: Expansion of the State Front, Modernization, and Women's Lives,” investigates the links of “modern/colonial patriarchy and the coloniality of gender” (42) through the study of how colonial encounters affect the lives of Indigenous women, focusing on their societal exclusion and subordination to the modern nation-state. In contrast to Lugones, she contends there were gender relations before European colonialism, and formulates an argument of a “low-intensity patriarchy” as distinct from modern patriarchies. Segato seeks to “give gender a theoretical and epistemic status in decolonial critique” (43), in counterpoint to other theorists, such as Espinosa and Ochy Curiel who, like Lugones, challenge the universality of the very category of gender.

The other two essays in the first part of the book are by Breny Mendoza, a founder of GLEFAS, and Karina Ochoa, an editor of the volume. By placing Abya Yala's decolonial feminism within “epistemologies of the south,” Mendoza posits the concept of “the coloniality of liberal democracy” (91) to analyze how entanglements of racism, capitalism, the modern/colonial gender system, and heterosexism underpin liberal democracy. In turn, Ochoa centers a feminist decolonial critique of conquest, arguing that the feminization of the colonial other and the misogynist-genocidal violence it entailed should be “the point of departure as well as a constitutive element of colonial modernity and its universalizing ethos” (106).

The second part, called “Constitutive Processes of Colonial Modernity and Experiences of Resistance,” includes a variety of studies that challenge the foundations of modernity/coloniality, signified by key categories like “the nation, law, democracy, capitalism and its development paradigm, and the Catholic Church.” Here, I highlight the particularly political dimensions of decolonial feminism as critique and as practical politics. The article by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui digs into the question of law as a domain of colonial capitalist patriarchal power, arguing that “occidentalization” and “patriarchalization” are two parallel processes that account for the construction of modern/colonial patriarchal hegemony. This match of coloniality and sexism permeates politics and society from state institutions to the partial colonization of Indigenous communities. In turn, Mendoza works with the concept coloniality of democracy, which can be traced to sixteenth-century debates between Las Casas and Sepulveda as the origins of modern/colonial notions of human rights and democracy. She contends that this rationality informs a long history of dehumanization of racialized peoples and particularly of women as constitutive others. Mendoza applies this lens to the analysis of “mutilated bodies of women in Ciudad Juarez” today to show the “fundamental immorality of neoliberal democracy,” which implies the imperative of transcending Western reason and its discontents (141).

In “Women and Indigenous Spirituality in Mesoamerica: Decolonizing Religious Sciences,” Sylvia Marcos argues that Indigenous women fight for social justice at the same time they affirm their spirituality as a decolonial praxis based on ancestral rationalities of “fluid duality,” creative flexibility, and reciprocity. She contrasts such emancipatory epistemes and practices to the binary logics of Western logos and life that enhance domination through dichotomies like civilization/barbarism, white/black, culture/nature, and masculine/feminine.

The third part, titled “Thinking the Matrix of Oppression from a Decolonial Project,” integrates a set of writings articulated through a critique of modern/colonial domination and of mainstream feminism from diverse locations of colonial difference and resistance. It starts with a piece by Luiza Barrios, former Minister of Racial Equity in Brazil, who critiques the idea of universal woman as feminist subject. She advocates revising feminist theory and politics from the predicament of lived experience and distinctive embodied forms of oppression based on class, racial, and sexual differences. Barrios's arguments are akin to the chapters by Emma Chirix and Aura Cumes, two Indigenous feminists from Guatemala. Chirix addresses Indigenous women's oppression through a phenomenology of prejudices and affects that combines experiences of pain and trauma with healing and liberation. She links living experiences of racism with the necropolitics of anti-Indigenous genocide. Chirix concludes that in Guatemala, racism “represents the condition under which the right to kill can be executed” (220). In turn, Cumes examines the relation between hegemonic feminism and neoliberal multiculturalism from her standpoint as a Mayan woman to defend an analytics based on “diverse women” and a politics founded on “complex struggles” (237).

The last two chapters of part III are experiments beyond academic writing. An anonymous text titled “The Border Skirt”Footnote ¹⁰ demonstrates the double discrimination of formally educated Indigenous women, discriminated against in Western spaces for wearing Indigenous skirts, and also denounced in their communities for not being Indigenous enough. Dorotea Gomez's “My Body is a Political Territory” pursues, with poetic justice, the testimonial genre to tell a story of “a body marked by a history of multiple subordination, complex, but not fragmented” (263) (à la Gloria Anzaldúa), in Guatemala—a deeply racist, sexist, class society.

The fourth part, “Urgent Debates about Feminism, Women's Movements, and Decolonization,” could be described as the political-epistemic core of the book. In “Ethnocentrism and Coloniality in Latin American Feminisms,” Espinosa addresses what she calls “the coloniality of Latin American feminisms,” which she developed in later writings as a “critique of feminist reason,” as we shall see. She critically engages “the collaboration of hegemonic feminisms from North and South in complicity with the projects of recolonization of the subcontinent by countries of the center” in reproducing intertwined oppressions in the name of women's liberation.

In the same beat, Curiel, a principal figure in the growing movement of decolonial feminism, argues for “the construction of a decolonized feminism,” and for “making community in the house of differences” (51). She analyzes the 2010 encounter of autonomous feminism in Mexico and contends that the gathering reunited “the most critical postures in Latin American and Caribbean feminism, not centered on gender and/or the state” (326). Nonetheless, she also claims that the meeting proved that there was a need for a move toward decolonial feminism. In that key, Curiel advocates for a revisited radical feminist politics grounded in an analysis and critique of the modern/colonial matrix of power.

Betty Ruth Lozano, in tune with the Afro-descendant beat of Espinosa and Curiel, writes to build “a decolonial Black feminism from the experience of Black women of the Colombian Pacific.” Lozano theorizes “from the diverse processes of resignification of categories of gender and patriarchy proposed from Black women's feminism” (335). She shows how Black women had elaborated their own vernacular critical theories and decolonial politics within a longue durée tradition from modern/colonial racial slavery to today's grassroots struggles against the lethal effects of neoliberal capitalist globalization.

Positioned from a standpoint of identification and solidarity with resistances and movements of Indigenous women, the chapters by Rosalva Aída Hernández, Rosalia Paiva, and Francesca Gargallo advance a critique of hegemonic feminism with substantive arguments to redefine feminist theory and politics. Hernandez maps the domain of Indigenous feminism in Mexico in terms of a tension “between feminist ethnocentrism and ethnic essentialism” (279). She contends that Indigenous women are situated in a “double struggle”: on the one hand, for recognition and representation in the nation-state, vis-à-vis hegemonic feminism, and, on the other, to overcome practices of subordination within their own communities.

On the same note, Paiva counterpoints Western conceptions of gender, based on binary logics of linearity, to the fluidity and reciprocity of “Indigenous cosmic parity.” She argues that they constitute distinct formations of gender, a matter not sufficiently considered, in both feminist theorizing and politics. Paiva frames her argument about Indigenous feminism from the Andean region in terms of a twofold struggle: as a “critique of the kind of feminism that homogenizes women,” thus undermining the significance of particular spaces for Indigenous women and, as “the struggle of Indigenous women within their communities to transform elements of ‘tradition’ imposed by Western patriarchal colonialism” (307).

Last, Diana Marcela Gomez's “Feminism and Modernity/Coloniality” addresses the very question of modernity and how to interpret it through a decolonial feminist lens. She “draws a map of actors, themes, and proposals” and posits four sets of challenges for feminism in Colombia concerning: 1) conceiving and enacting universality and equality; 2) conceiving of democracy and relations with the nation-state; 3) the question of power and feminist politics; and 4) constructions and meanings of identity and subjectivity.

The last part, “Aims for Other Possible Worlds: Pronouncements, Declarations, Manifestos,” is a set of key historical documents of grassroots women's organizations and radical feminist groupings associated with social movements from across the region, ranging from Zapatistas in Mexico, Mayan feminists in Guatemala, to Afro-Colombian women's webs, and Mapuche Indigenous feminists in Chile.

In sum, Tejiendo de Otro Modo can be read as a genealogy of the critical perspectives, key debates, and principal contributions to feminist theory and politics from Latin American locations, by means of a narrative from autonomous to decolonial feminism, highlighting the rise of Black and Indigenous feminist voices and the decolonial critique of hegemonic feminist “common sense.” It gathers visions and projects from a variety of feminist subject positions to map the emergence of decolonial feminism as a diverse yet robust political and epistemic field.

I will present the other two books—Feminismo Descolonial: Nuevos Aportes Teorico-Metodologicos a más de una Decada and Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala—together, because several chapters overlap, and they were published within three years of each other.Footnote ¹¹ In her introduction to Feminismo Descolonial, “A Wound to Eurocentric Feminist Reason: What Feminist Thought and Struggles Have Done to Feminism,” Espinosa claims that “after more than a decade of the call by María Lugones to construct a decolonial feminism . . . it is necessary to evaluate the roads traveled . . . [and] harvest some of the cultivated fruits [and] the variety of spaces, themes, and problems to which today we apply decolonial feminist critique” (11). In turn, the introduction to Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala begins by stating that “It has been more than a decade since the emergence of decolonial feminism and much has happened since then.” In that key, in Feminismo Descolonial, Espinosa presents a twofold project seeking to “help transform the feminist movement from within and from below,” while “deepening the meanings, project, and praxis of the decolonial” to “revitalize the groundings of the movements [to which] we belong.” She launches a critique of occidental feminist reason, with the will to de-Eurocenter and decolonize feminism. Espinosa explicitly aims “to dismantle the plot that sustains feminist reason in its commitment to coloniality,” which entails challenging “the most precious theses that constitute a common ground of diverse feminisms,” including key categories such as gender and patriarchy, as well as main arguments like “woman” as the universal subject and agent of feminism (12). Such political and epistemic moves represent a fundamental critique of actually existing feminism that also sets the stage for a feminist shift within the decolonial turn.

Playing that drum, Espinosa defines decolonial feminism as “a space of acting with certain common objectives” that gathers “many voices, duties, and increasingly diversified products,” which is “not a unified field,” but “a program that opens paths so that many can take the risk of experimenting with new ways of approaching power, ‘the woman question,’ gender, and sexuality” (12). On that note, in Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala, the editors trace its history from a small group of “racialized and mestiza women who were committed to antiracist, anticapitalist, Indigenous, and anti-forced heterosexuality struggles,” who were “accused of dividing the movement, of being a danger to feminism, and of falling into essentialism [and] labeled a transient trend.” But now, “more than ten years after the call to shape decolonial feminism, the movement has increased exponentially.” The editors assert that “we can start to see the specific impact of the movement in new generations and in the construction of new forms of leadership,” and conclude that “decolonial feminism today is more valued internationally and has an impact on the feminist movement inside multiple nation-states and at the international level. In that key, decolonial feminism signifies a dynamic space in process, a political and epistemic movement that entails a praxis and project of decolonization and liberation that provides the analytical and pragmatic framework for its common ground as critique and politics.”

Feminismo Descolonial has three parts that together gather the key categories, main themes, principal concerns, and fundamental theoretical and methodological tenets of the movement. The first part, “Methodological Contributions for Overcoming Epistemic Fragmentation,” starts with chapters by three protagonists of the decolonial position and perspective: Lugones, Curiel, and Espinosa. Lugones's “Steps toward a Decolonial Feminism” proposes key questions and tasks to move ahead in the collective agenda, beginning with unveiling colonial logics informing white occidentalist feminisms. This kind of critique is not simply of mainstream neoliberal feminism, but also of the most critical and radical versions, including some socialist, postmodern, and lesbian feminisms that converge in covering up, through epistemic blindness and/or lack of political will, the coloniality of gender shaped by the modern/colonial gender system. In turn, “Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology,” Lugones's chapter that opens the first part of Feminisms of Abya Yala—itself titled “Decolonial Feminism: A Critique of Eurocentered Feminist Reason”—contends that beyond valid critiques of “categorical thinking” of universal womanhood, advanced by Black and women of color feminisms, we need to critically engage the very category of gender. She argues this is needed to unpack the myriad ways in which gender is intertwined with capitalism, racism, and heteronormative power, or it could end, perhaps unwittingly, by reproducing the modern/colonial matrix of domination, even in feminisms identified as anticolonial or decolonial.

Lugones contends that gender is “a temporary, inconsistent, and conditional attribute of colonized subjects” and concludes that decolonization does not imply gender equality, but more profoundly “the overcoming of the gender system as a central attribute of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being.” In short, she calls for an analytics that enables us to unpack the coloniality of gender as well as to fully explore its epistemic and political implications.

In tune, Espinosa's chapter in Feminismo Descolonial, also translated and published in Decolonial Feminisms of Abya Yala, lays out “a methodological proposal for a genealogy of experience to approach and develop a critique of what I call at the outset the coloniality of feminist reason.” Espinosa argues that “hegemonic feminisms of the Global North have needed the complicity of the hegemonic feminisms of the Global South to give continuity to the history of colonization and dependency,” a historical process that involved “symbolic and material violence to those whose bodies are marked by processes of racialization and continued exploitation—what I have called la otra de la otra, or: the other of the other (woman).” It is from such locations of radical alterity or deep subalternity that Espinosa enunciates a genealogy of experience, to “embrace developments within feminist, Black feminist, and feminist of color epistemology in the proposal for situated knowledges grounded in experience.” Her argument entails challenging the very idea of Latin America as an occidentalist white-mestizo geohistorical category that reproduces the entangled oppressions and entwined violences (racial, class, sexual, ecological, epistemic) composing the modern/colonial matrix of power we call coloniality.Footnote ¹² In that line of reasoning, she develops a critique of a categorical defense of a “Latin American feminism” that, insofar as it is derivative of Western feminist reason, is complicitous with coloniality.

Curiel, one of the key intellectual and political figures of decolonial feminism, in “Constructing Feminist Methodologies from the Perspective of Decolonial Feminism,”Footnote ¹³ addresses two key quests in decolonial theory in general and feminism in particular: What are decolonial methodologies? and Should we make sharp distinctions between postcolonial and decolonial theory? Curiel addresses both questions with a proposal for “decolonial feminist methodologies” as fully participatory processes grounded in the lived experiences, needs, aspirations, and modes of production of knowledge of Black and Indigenous peoples and particularly of women. She contends that generally speaking, the difference between postcolonial and decolonial critique is that whereas the former tends to rely mostly on postmodern Western critical strategies of the “linguistic turn,” the latter is grounded primarily in subaltern experiences, knowledges, and collective actions.Footnote ¹⁴ Nonetheless, she warns against absolutizing arguments distinguishing the postcolonial and the decolonial, and brings the example of Stuart Hall's notion of “disengagement” as a bridge to vernacular knowledges in postcolonial theory. She also posits an important critique of the dangers of conventional uses of “intersectionality” without a world-historical analysis of the modern/colonial matrix of domination, without grounding it in coloniality, that banalizes its critical edge as well as its radical political potential.

The second parts of both books focus on analysis, critique, and reformulating categories of the political—states, law, democracy, citizenship, movements—from the position and perspective of decolonial feminism. Mendoza's “The Question of the Coloniality of Democracy”Footnote ¹⁵ unveils the colonial underpinnings and violent side of “Western democracy” as rooted in settler colonialism, white imperial heterosexism, and global capital accumulation based on exploitation and expropriation, in the longue durée of over 500 years of modernity/coloniality. She elaborates a genealogy of occidentalism, to show how the idea of Western civilization is a cornerstone in a long history from early to late modernity that constructs democracy as peculiar to “the West,” in contrast to barbaric others (“Africans,” “Indigenous,” “Oriental,” and so on), to be civilized. This demonstrates the coloniality of occidentalist notions of democracy, and therefore their complicity with modern/colonial formations of violence.

Celenis Rodriguez pursues such a critique of modern/colonial political forms, institutions, and categories, in her analysis of “public policies for gender equality” in Colombia.Footnote ¹⁶ Her analysis reveals how “institutionalized feminism” embedded in “offices, departments, and ministries for women's rights and other sites that focus on developing public policies on women and gender” reproduces subordination of Black, Indigenous, peasant, and working-class women. Rodriguez shows how hegemonic gender discourses and practices maintain imbricated inequalities—class, ethnic-racial, sexual—among women under the name of gender equality. She unveils how “technologies of modern colonial gender” create “impediments to advance decolonial responses to injustice.”

From another angle, Iris Hernandez critically engages the concept of citizenship by means of an analysis of the LGBTQ+ movement in Chile.Footnote ¹⁷ She demonstrates the pitfalls of the neoliberal politics of rights and recognition for its lack of a deeper understanding of the limits of the modern nation-state. She also shows how the incomplete and unstable character of citizenship in modern/colonial polities can entrap social movements in unwittingly reproducing the colonial order of things. In counterpoint, she demonstrates “how decolonial antiracist feminist practices and genealogies of power, gender, and sexuality in the modern world contribute to a conceptualization of struggles that avoids complicities with coloniality.”

Betty Ruth Lozano's work in both books represents an important contribution from Afro-Colombian decolonial feminism, specific from the Black Pacific. Her chapter in Feminismo Descolonial outlines a general argument of the decolonial project from the standpoint of “Afrocolombian Blackwomen,” specifically situated in the Pacific as the “other world” of Blackness. In her analysis, the Afro-Pacific becomes an ancestral territory-region for identification, community-making, cultural/epistemic production, and collective action for liberation, through a long historical process from colonial slavery until the current era of neoliberal capitalism. Lozano analyzes such a process as a “politics of place” in which Blackwomen recreate themselves through practices of appropriation, survival, reconstruction, and marronage, thus developing their own technologies to relate to nature and vernacular modes of production and self-government.Footnote ¹⁸ She also elaborates a strategy of double critique: against the “Eurocentrism of hegemonic feminism” that ignores the specificity of Blackwomen; and contra “the essentialism and sexism within our communities” (189). Lozano cultivates a world-historical method that entails a deeper and more wordly analysis of the matrix of domination, as configured by imbricated oppresions that unfold historically and at multiple scales.

“The Killing of Women and Global Accumulation: The Case of Bello Puerto del Mar mi Buenaventura,” Lozano's chapter in Decolonial Feminisms of Abya Yala, takes that kind of analysis to femicide in Buenaventura, a Black city and one of the principal ports of Colombia. She analyzes how violence against Afro-Colombian women is caused by a combination of acccumulation by dispossesion, racism, and patriarchal power that makes Black people disposable and Black women targets of a repertoire of violences that range from rape and sexual enslavement, to a pornography of killing and mutilating their bodies. Lozano argues that systematic violence against Black women should be framed within the broader horizon of the modernity/coloniality of power. This entails researching and revealing the complex network of relations of domination that acts upon Black women and the Black population in general—which is why patriarchy is also unsatisfactory as a totalizing explanation. In that light, “femicide is global capital's strategy for the deterritorialization of the Black population,” “violence against women is political violence, since its end goal is the destruction of communal power,” and “the Pacific region is a laboratory [for] the global coloniality of power.”

The last parts of both books articulate critical voices from Afro-descendant and Indigenous territories standing from and/or engaging with Black and Native American onto-existential conditions and social movements. The chapters focus on fights over land and territory, double struggles against hegemonic feminisms and oppressions endogenous to communities and movements, tensions between movements and nation-states, and efforts for combatting the destructive effects of capitalist development.

The chapters by Xochtl Leyva and Carmen Cariño in Feminismo Descolonial Footnote ¹⁹ focus on “the struggles of peasant and Indigenous women in Mexico for land and the commons [and for] epistemologies and political practices based on the ontologies of peoples strongly linked to the land” (18). This implies a move against occidentalist binary reason, as well as in favor of “an-other knowledge practices” to “decolonize and depatriarchalize our bodies, minds, hearts, and lived experiences” (199). Pursuing a similar line of argumentation, Astrid Yulieth Cuero Montenegro contends that “experience is the foundation of the feminist practices of subalternized women” (262). She explicitly builds from Joan Scott's critique of essentialist arguments about the authority of experience to develop her own argument about the importance of grounding decolonial feminist theory and politics on particular locations and in grounded practices of historical agency.

The last two chapters of Feminismo Descolonial present lived experiences from different places. Policarpa Prieto's “The Birth of the Huitaca” tells stories of birthing women by muyisca Indigenous midwives as testimony of “resistance and trangression from the spiritual” against the “hegemonic medical model of healthcare in Bogota.” Finally, the “Epilogue” is a manifesto of the “Ayllu Collective” of decolonial feminist migrants in Spain, who assert that even though “we were not expected to survive, we have been here since 1492.” In that way, the collective affirms a praxis of “going and coming in time, of moving forward with the past in front.”

Generally speaking, Feminismo Descolonial and Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala gather key voices of decolonial feminism, addressing the main arguments, themes, and debates raised by this growing political-epistemic movement, which now is one of the most important currents of feminist critique and politics in the world. The translation into English of key feminists from Abya Yala, which includes some of the principal Afro-descendant and Indigenous intellectual-activists, constitutes a meaningful intervention into feminism, critical theory, and radical politics.

To conclude, I will raise several questions and paths of investigation derived from the move I am calling a feminist shift within the decolonial turn, which can also be seeing as a decolonial shift in world scenarios of feminist theory and politics.

I start with stating some outstanding contributions of decolonial feminisms from Abya Yala to critical theory and radical politics. If we work with the premise that the analytics of coloniality, according to which a modern/colonial matrix configures formations of power, economy, culture, knowledge, and the self, the substantive contributions of decolonial feminisms are central in our critical analysis and hence our capacity for transforming (or overcoming) modernity itself. In this argument, positing a modern/colonial gender system and its concomitant coloniality of genderFootnote ²⁰ is a fundamental contribution of decolonial feminism. In that fashion, feminist critique enables us to analyze “intersectionality” (or imbrication of oppressions) as formative of a world-historical matrix of domination, conflict, and struggle that articulates capitalism, racism, patriarchy/heterosexism, and colonialism/imperialism.

This leads to my second point, which is that decolonial feminism formulates “a critique of feminist reason,” as Espinosa puts it, that reveals pitfalls and shortcomings, not simply of neo/liberal feminisms, but also of the most critical versions of feminism. Hence, decolonial feminists argue for a deeply transformative feminist theory and politics. Such a posture is based on a radical, intersectional, political-epistemic position and perspective, explicitly grounded in the lived experiences of subaltern women and embedded in struggles of a variety of antisystemic movements against multiple and entangled chains of coloniality and oppression.

Interventions from decolonial feminist standpoints can be seen from epistemic and political angles. From the epistemic angle, three points frame decolonial feminist critiques of occidentalist feminist reason, while advancing their own pathways:

1. 1) positing the coloniality and geopolitics of knowledge as shaping a divide where white elite feminism becomes hegemonic and hence representative of feminism itself, which unwittingly becomes reproductive of the modern/colonial order of things, thus marginalizing subaltern feminisms’ flourishing from the struggles of “the wretched of the earth” (as in Fanon), from the vast array of subject positions of “colonial difference.” A key political implication is the imperative for the democratization and decolonization of feminist knowledge-production;

2. 2) critique of binary logics and occidentalist categories that compose Western thought in favor of historical, relational, complex rationalities that spring from ancestral/critical ways of thinking, feeling, and doing,Footnote ²¹ which inspire and inform the logics of liberation-guiding movements—Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and so on—that are crucial spaces within decolonial feminism;

3. 3) centering decolonial feminist methodologies and pedagogies, configuring new modes of production and communication of knowledge, to deconstruct occidentalist logics and narratives, while engaging in participatory creative processes of exploring the liberating potential of knowledges embodied in the lived experiences and struggles of subaltern communities and social movements.

From the political angle, I will also present three meaningful contributions from decolonial feminism that are developed in the three books under review:

1. 1) a fundamental critique of modern/colonial political forms, categories, and institutions, revealing the coloniality of key categories like democracy and citizenship, and the colonial underpinnings of the modern nation-state, to collectively construct a postliberal political theory that articulates the political with the economic and the cultural, hence combining redistribution and recognition, while advocating for an antisystemic decolonial politics of liberation against imbricated chains of coloniality and oppression;Footnote ²²

2. 2) such a radical intersectional politics of liberation, grounded on an analytics of modernity in terms of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being, implies a dynamic politics of alliances of subjects from all the movements—feminist, black, Indigenous, peasant, urban, student, LGBTQ+, religious, ecological, and so on—that fight the entangled oppressions and intertwined violences in the modern/colonial matrix of power. Lugones theorizes the process of cultivating the “chains of equivalences”Footnote ²³ among struggles and movements as building “complex unity” to signify a pluriversal politics of decolonial solidarity that integrates equality and difference, macro-moments of geopolitical/economic and geocultural tranformation with micro-politics of decolonization of homes and subjectivities, and translocal links of the local with the global;

3. 3) a translocal politics of translation between the categories,Footnote ²⁴ critical strategies, repertoires of action, horizons of liberation, and “good living” that spring from the diversity of epistemes, aesthetics, structures of feeling, spiritual practices, and historical projects stemming from the plurality of lifeworlds—subaltern communities, social movements, academic spaces—the living forces engendering and nurturing decolonial feminism as a political and epistemic movement.

As clearly demonstrated in the three books reviewed here, decolonial feminism is composed of a polyphony of voices that correspond to a diversity of locations and perspectives. It is a space for formulating critical theory, debating epistemic lenses and political postures, articulating movements, and launching struggles grounded on critical feminist theories and radical emancipatory politics. Hence, decolonial feminism is a creolized outcome of a variety of positions from the Global South (including the south in the north), such as Black feminisms, women of color/third-world women's feminism, and Indigenous feminisms, and a process of creolization that changes over time.Footnote ²⁵ Along these lines, I will offer three scenarios of dialogue and debate that could be important for the evolution of decolonial feminism.

The first interlocutor is a critical strand of Marxist feminism, represented by intellectual activists such as Silvia Federici and Veronica Gago, who analyze historical capitalism and the current crisis of neoliberal capitalist civilization in terms of world-historical processes of capital accumulation that are not based simply in class exploitation and expropriation (Federici Reference Federici2004; Gago Reference Gago2020). Such processes are also grounded on patriarchal domination, patterning a continuously coercive process of “primitive accumulation” based on exercising violence on women's bodies to instrumentalize them as machines for value-production, reproduction of labor and society, as well as provision of care and sexuality (Federici Reference Federici2004). Such global racial/patriarchal capitalism establishes and reproduces a world division of labor, and articulates the power of transnational corporations in modern states and imperial formations that champion processes of accumulation by dispossesion of subaltern peoples and territories and annihilation of their bodies and lifeworlds.

Nonetheless, even though this line of investigation recognizes the significance of “race” and racism, it does not sufficiently centralize raciality either in their analytics or politics. As shown in several chapters of the three books reviewed here, there is a political economy in decolonial feminism that tends to frame labor exploitation and reproduction, as well as land appropriation, in relation to racial dehumanization and its forms of violence. This kind of analysis understands modernity as fundamentally racial, as embedded in white patriarchal practices of violence against racialized women and men as “the wretched of the earth.” Here my argument is that a cross-fertilization of Marxist and decolonial feminism could significantly enrich both traditions of critical theory and radical politics. The political economy of decolonial feminism can be enriched with the elaborated political-economic analyses of critical Marxist feminism, and the latter could flesh out and transform its understanding of capitalist modernity with the theories, methods, and political perspectives of decolonial feminism.

The second domain of dialogue is between decolonial feminism and a critical strand of Black feminism, a label that refers to a wide variety,Footnote ²⁶ but here I will concentrate on a particular version from the US, an influential current associated with Afro-pessimism,Footnote ²⁷ represented by prominent Black feminists like Saidiya Hartman, Joy James, and Hortense Spillers. My point here is that there are a number of elements of convergence and tension to be productively explored between decolonial feminism and this current of Black feminism that includes:

1. 1) seeing racial/patriarchal capitalism as a global process that underpins imbricated oppressions and entwined violences;

2. 2) a radical critique of liberalism as political ideology, form, and project, that hides and reproduces domination under the name of freedom, including oppression of racialized subaltern women who tend to be placed outside the pale of gender;

3. 3) a shared libertarian will for radical change and revolutionary transformation. Arguably, a dynamic dialogue between these two currents will encourage decolonial feminism to develop its critique of modernity/coloniality with a more elaborated analysis of the centrality and specificity of chattel slavery and its afterlife,Footnote ²⁸ while decolonial feminism could challenge US Black feminism to frame more substantively its theory and politics in world-historical analyses of colonial modernities and their afterlives.

Here, I want to indicate a potentially productive tension between “Afro-pessimist” feminism and decolonial feminism. The first is about the character and significance of anti-Black racism. Afropessimist feminism tends to focus on the peculiarity and incommensurability of anti-Blackness, based on an analysis of the dehumanization of enslaved female bodies, reduced to commodified “flesh,” a phenomenon continued in “the afterlife of slavery.” In contrast, decolonial feminism tends to see the common ground among Black and Indigenous women to forge a coalitional antiracist politics, without denying specific histories and differential modes of racialization and experiences of oppression. Arguably, Lugones's call for “complex unity” could be enriched by a more complex and concrete analysis of the particularities of anti-Blackness, without denying the sources of alliance on broad-based fronts (feminist and otherwise) against racism, heterosexualism, capitalism, and imperial domination.

The third arena of conversation considered here is between the decolonial feminism of Abya Yala and analogous and parallel initiatives such as postcolonial feminism and decolonial perspectives from the Caribbean and the African continent. This is an ongoing process, and it is important to acknowledge the foundational work and world influence of the decolonial feminism of Abya Yala that now is an important referent not only across the Americas but also in Europe and Africa. Indeed, the very language of the decolonial, originally coined by Chicana feminism,Footnote ²⁹ is now part of the global lexicon of academic discourse and social movements. This kind of mainstreaming is raised as a matter of concern in the three books reviewed here, facing the dangers of commodification and banalization. Hence the need to constantly interrogate and revise what are the actual meaning and the current political and epistemic values of decolonial feminism. For instance, some of the most lucid decolonial feminists have raised serious concerns about its turning into a trendy fashion, thus stripping the signifier “decolonial feminism” of its critical epistemic edge and radical political character.Footnote ³⁰

Another relevant scenario for dialogue is between decolonial feminisms of Abya Yala and decolonial feminisms from the African continent. The possible fruits of such dialogue are demonstrated in the significance of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's arguments about the modern/colonial character of gender for decolonial feminist critiques of the coloniality of gender. Nonetheless, it is a challenge, open and fertile terrain, to truly globalize decolonial feminism. Another powerful strand of Black feminism that is self-defined as decolonial is a kind of renaissance of Afro-Brazilian feminism, especially the radical, afro-diasporic arguments of Lélia Gonzalez who re-conceptualizes the Americas with her category “Amefrica Ladina”Footnote ³¹ to postulate a world-historical and radical intersectional analysis of the matrix of domination and struggle, with the same kind of epistemic and political thrust of the decolonial feminism of Abya Yala. In the Francophone Africana world, the work of Françoise Vergès (Reference Vergès2021), among others, stands out, whose book Decolonial Feminism, originally in French, was translated and published in English and Portuguese; I look forward to a Spanish translation.Footnote ³² In that vein, it is urgent to translate the work of Sylvia Wynter, one of the principal figures of Caribbean critical discourse and decolonial feminism from Afro-Caribbean locations, who is increasingly becoming a main interlocutor and key referent in the ongoing process of making decolonial feminism more international. In the middle of the civilizational crisis we are living and dying through, decolonial feminism is becoming a leading force in the collective praxis and project of decolonization and liberation in the search to forge the good life.

In 2015 there were two “Black Women Marches” in Améfrica/Our Afroamerica,Footnote ³³ one in Brazil and the other in Colombia, that had national and international resonance. The mass demonstration in Brazil was called “Black Women March against Racism and Violence, and for the Good Life,” and the one in Colombia was “Black Women March in Defense of their Territories and for Life.” These marches are eloquent demonstrations of the ethos of decolonial feminisms, a transformative radical vitalism, as enacted by their living forces. Playing this drum, on an Africana beat, Francia Marquez, a grassroots decolonial feminist from an Afro-Colombian rural community, the main organizer of the 2015 week-long Black women's march, and recently elected vice-president of Colombia, says, “we keep moving forward from resistance to power, until dignity becomes common sense,” always seeking to “vivir sabroso.”Footnote ³⁴