Bodies on the Front Lines: Performance, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean, a groundbreaking anthology edited by Brenda Werth and Katherine Zien, introduces English-language readers to the “centrality and complexity of performance practices” (3) in a full range of feminist, queer, trans, and other activist movements across Latin America and the Caribbean, deeply informed by transfeminismo and related modalities of doing and thinking. The volume is focused primarily on the consolidation of these projects in the second decade of the twenty-first century, best exemplified by the continental movement Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) that first emerged in Argentina in 2015 in response to gender-based violence and femicide. Comprising twenty essays and a field-defining Introduction, this substantial anthology is structured in four parts.

“Digital and Direct Action” explores the relation of live and digital performance in contemporary feminist activism, including the work of the collective LASTESIS in Chile and Comando Plath in Peru, the language and practice of “feminist strike” (60) in the Southern Cone, and digital activism in both Cuba and Mexico. “Beyond Bad Scripts” features performances that repurpose what Diana Taylor has called “bad scripts,” those archetypes and tropes that constrain sex/gender roles; it studies activism by or on behalf of victims of forced sterilization in Peru, Central American mothers who join caravanas (caravans) seeking missing loved ones, as well as theatrical engagements with gendered tropes—a new Desdemona in Mexico, feminist memory politics in the Dominican Republic, and a reworking of testimonio by Teatro Linea de Sombra on the US–Mexico border. “Dissident Bodies, Rebellious Objects” centers artists working in the crosshairs of environmental destruction and “necropolitical” (225) regimes, including the work of Argentine drag performer Bartolina Xixa, Peruvian travesti curator and artist Giuseppe Campuzano, Brazilian performance artist Berna Reale, playwrights Romina Paula (Argentina) and Carla Zúñiga (Chile), and Xicanx multimedia artist Debora Kuetzpal Vasquez, who works collaboratively in Havana.

“Taking to the Streets: Festive Forms and Public Protest” foregrounds the volume’s central concern as indicated in its title, with bodies literally “on the front lines” of political struggle in the streets and in public spaces. It explores the genealogy of activism from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to the young women at the forefront of the Green Tide movement in Argentina; the transloca street performance of Mickey Negrón in Puerto Rico; the teatro callejero (street theatre) of Colombian feminist collective La Máscara; an all-female murga group in Argentina; and finally, a reflection on the so-called cholitas luchadoras (Indigenous women wrestlers) in Bolivia. With most case studies focused on the years between 2010 and the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, together these essays capture a vibrant “performance constellation” (41) (glossing Marcela Fuentes’s influential 2019 book of that title) in which, in Werth and Zien’s terms, “performances compel insights and debates around identifications, rights, redress, and social change” (25). It is beyond the scope of the book to answer one of the questions that it raises: What has been the impact of the COVID pandemic in attenuating the momentum of the street-based social movements of the prior decade?

This performance constellation is no longer structured primarily around the politics of memory that defined the postdictatorship era of the 1990s and early 2000s; instead, it is structured around new forms of historical redress that engage both longstanding and emergent forms of interconnected structural and predatory violence, centrally including femicide and ecocide—what Tara Daly here calls a “decaying world” (241). If the white-scarved Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were the iconic “bodies on the front lines” in an earlier period, today it is the green-scarved pibas of Ni Una Menos (as Cecilia Sosa argues), along with a new generation of Madres seeking their dead on the migrant trail (as described by Ana Elena Puga), and a host of gender-defying trans, drag, and travesti performers working in the public sphere (for whom Giuseppe Campuzano is the inspiring antecedent, as illustrated by Leticia Robles-Moreno), among other figures. As a whole, the volume is compellingly grounded in the perspectives of leading theorists from the region, including Rita Segato (Mexico), Denise Ferreira da Silva (Brazil), Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Bolivia), and Verónica Gago (Argentina). In short, the anthology deftly defines the contemporary field of Latin American and Caribbean feminist performance and its critique for an English-language audience, and will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners alike.

While the introduction rejects “area studies” (11) as its model (referring to the Cold War origins of federally funded area studies in the United States), this book’s continental scope demonstrates the ways in which “Latin America and the Caribbean” continues to have coherence as a critical category, particularly as a place from which and for which feminist projects are created and consolidated. The book enacts the value of critical regional perspectives, especially when coupled with an ongoing critique of the geopolitics of knowledge production. Bodies on the Front Lines is subtended by solidarity between the authors (many based in the United States) and feminist projects in the region, and indeed shows the importance of feminism—as well as theatre and performance studies—to potential reconfigurations of “area studies” as a collaborative hemispheric project.

Finally, I note that a sobering divide marks a distance between the publication of Bodies on the Front Lines in April 2024 and the time of this writing one year later. In March 2025, the newly installed US administration identified a series of terms to be flagged for review, removed from use, or used with heightened caution in government-related work on the theory that they violate one of two executive orders aimed at dismantling existing approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as gender and sexuality. Among the terms identified are the very keywords that ground the conceptual framework of this book, including “feminism,” “gender,” and “sexuality,” along with a host of subsidiary words commonly deployed in contemporary feminist thought, putting them under political erasure. If the administration were to produce a comparable list of Spanish terms, then all of this book’s keywords, including transfeminismo, would likely be censured. Originally forged in social conflicts across Latin America and the Caribbean, the book’s potent feminisms thus encounter a new set of political “front lines” as they newly circulate in the hemispheric North.