Producing feminist health knowledge in Chile: Epistemic strategies from the Global South

Overview

This article examines how Chilean feminist health activists produce knowledge and reimagine healthcare by challenging dominant biomedical and neoliberal approaches. Drawing on six semi-structured interviews with feminist activists organising within the field of women’s health, the analysis is framed around three concepts: the politics of knowledge, self-determination, and contextualisation. First, the article shows that activists challenge current structures of how knowledge is produced by contesting who is recognised as a credible knower in healthcare, what counts as legitimate evidence, and how authority is distributed in clinical settings. Positioned as outsiders-within, these professionals leverage their positions as women and health practitioners to expose gendered biases, name violence in healthcare, and advocate for intersectional, feminist approaches to health.

Second, the article analyses how activists frame self-determination primarily as a claim on the State, demanding rights, legal recognition, and expanded public provision in response to Chile’s neoliberal health system. At the same time, it identifies a tension: access to services does not necessarily secure autonomy when care is organised through medicalised frameworks that intensify professional health surveillance.

Third, the article conceptualises contextualisation as a feminist clinical and political practice. Through tools such as feminist anamnesis and concepts such as gyneco-obstetric violence and violence in medical acts, activists make visible the social determinants of health, gender-based violence, and the everyday conditions shaping illness and care. Taken together, these findings show how feminist health activism combines rights-based demands with epistemic resistance, producing practical resources that challenge hierarchy and expand the conditions for self-determination through expanded access to collective, situated knowledge.