Transcontinental reflections of feminist advocates: Embracing plurality, embodying care, and pushing forward intersectionality

Overview

This article presents a transcontinental dialogue between feminist advocates from Latin America and Europe, who critically reflect on the tensions, possibilities, and challenges of transnational feminist advocacy. It is based on exchanges between the two authors as participants and co-creators of concrete feminist advocacy networks, and is based on a collaborative research initiative with Indigenous Amazonian women land defenders in Brazil, and feminist communities of practice for gender equality in research and innovation across Europe and Latin America. The authors interrogate patriarchal and colonial conceptions of knowledge and present alternative collaborative knowledge production practices. They ask: how can ethical alliances be forged in contexts marked by deep power asymmetries? The text weaves together positionality statements, making visible the epistemic and structural power imbalances present in global advocacy spaces. It explores how ancestral knowledge systems, body-territory relations, and collective care practices shape resistance strategies against extractivism and structural violence, relevant not only to the global South but also to marginalised groups in the global North. Grounded in an intersectional feminist perspective, we propose a praxis of feminist advocacy based on the recognition of plural knowledges, contextual sensitivity, reciprocity, respect, empathy and the construction of ethical and affective alliances. The article contributes to contemporary debates on gender justice from a decolonial perspective, based on three main insights: how the very notion of ‘feminism’ is context dependent, secondly a recognition of the intense relationship between territory, community and care and thirdly how intersectionality can be operationalised in practice for justice.