Women rising in defense of life: tracing the revolutionary flows of Latin American women’s many uprisings

Abstract

We are living in an extraordinary and ambiguous moment in Latin America. In many countries, extractivist regimes—which coexist and intertwine with criminal activities—are intensifying and modernizing. Simultaneously, a massive and radical current of insubordination and struggles by diverse women—a current which flows like magma between territories and cities, expanding from one country to another—has been awoken. This constellation of struggles forcefully re-emerged as a rejection of the increase in feminicides and violence against many of us (nosotras), and gained strength from a collective and constantly escalating rejection of our historical experience of subjection and control. These rejections have come together as an ongoing eruption against the expropriation and depletion of energy from the bodies and lives of so many women. This eruption discards the notion that experiences of pain, guilt, fear, and death are spaces of isolation and victimization. Rather, the uprising against these experiences fills us with might.