Philosophy, Feminism and the Popular Field in Latin America

Abstract

In this article, I intend to provide a meta-feminist reflection on the current links among philosophy, feminism, and the popular field in Latin America. To this effect, I divide the article into four sections. First, I elaborate a reflection on the specificity of the nature of philosophical practice in Latin America and the feminist field. For this purpose, I adopt the distinction proposed by Amorós between philosophical feminism and feminist philosophy in order to support the importance of preserving both expressions. Second, I show how, through the signifier ‘woman’, both expressions are contaminated and why it is important to sustain this term from theory in its vocation to accompany the usage of language in feminist movements in Latin America. Thus, I attend to the impossibility of associating a name with an identity. Third, I reconstruct current debates in the field of Latin American and Caribbean feminist thought in order to make explicit a tension between the legacies of affirmative power and the legacies of negative thinking. I present a few limitations of the first legacy and position myself within the second. Finally, through the understanding of feminism as negative (or failure), I offer an interpretation to think about the role of feminism within the popular field and the importance of connecting with other struggles against oppression in the configuration of an emancipatory horizon.