“The River Told Me”: Rethinking Intersectionality from the World of Berta Cáceres

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the spiritual and political journey of Berta Cáceres (1973-2016), a fierce Lenca woman leader from Honduras who died in defense of sacred indigenous rivers, the essay aims to rethink the frame of intersectionality that is axiomatic in feminist theorizing and activism. Against the backdrop of the January 2017 Women’s March in the USA, I interrogate inclusionary accounts that equate intersectionality with a pre-existing unity among women that leaves power differentials intact. I recover the intersection as an index of invisibility and violence by drawing on the intimate connections that Berta foregrounded between multiple structures of domination. However, I argue that attending to the relational histories and geographies of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, is insufficient for imagining more just futures that are hospitable to subaltern horizons. Feminist praxis must also interrogate the Western liberal conceptions of agency and human-nature relations that undergird its intersectional analysis. Through an exploration of the indigenous cosmovisions and transnational grassroots solidarity that coalesce under Berta’s name, I point to the importance of cultivating a disposition to listening to incommensurable worlds where rivers tell stories and call upon us. This is an ecofeminist vision capable of rooting intersectional analysis within decolonizing relations and alternatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• indigenous struggles
• feminism
• decolonization
• incommensurability

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Quỳnh N. Phạm, Himadeep Muppidi, Narendran Kumarakulasingam, Akta Kaushal, Zahir Kolia, Bikrum Gill, Michael Goldman, Raymond Duvall, Richa Nagar and Rahsaan Mahadeo for reading versions of this draft. Their fruitful insights, nurturing comments and critical questions guided the writing of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It is important to note that simultaneous women’s marches voicing distinct struggles and demands took place around the world.

2 For a critique of this inclusionary framework and its role in the historical construction of white feminist moral identity (see Davis 2008).

3 For an overview of this shift from identity towards a critique of power in the intersectionality literature (see Singh 2015).

4 I draw the phrase “decolonial elsewhere” from Tuck and Yang’s (2012) discussion of decolonization as an approach that changes the terms of the conversation and points to other horizons: “Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an ‘and.’ It is an elsewhere” (36). For instance, although the Lenca struggle for self-determination works within the state and international framework of rights, it does not take for granted the principle of nation-state territorial sovereignty. Along with other global indigenous movements, it demands a rethinking of sovereignty from the perspective of territorial plurality.

5 Singh (2015) notes that many scholars are currently building their theories of intersectionality upon a negatively defined commitment to anti-oppression, which neglects forms of difference that would exist even in the absence of oppressive structures of power.

6 Singh (2015) also points to how the anti-oppression consensus relies on particular conceptions of freedom that cannot account for the agency of religious women.

7 According to Skaria—this calculus, which hinges on the possession of reason—has historically excluded certain forms of beings, particularly nonhumans and the colonized.

8 A distinctive form of feminist theory and activism, which brings the colonial difference to bear on intersectional approaches, has been emerging from Latin America in recent decades. Building and moving beyond Lugones’ analysis of the coloniality of gender, this decolonial feminist group foregrounds the unintended negative political consequences of transnational solidarity, as subaltern women tend to be silenced in the process. For them, alliance work must confront the fact that relations of power that separate women not only play out between Northern and Third World feminisms but within the latter as well. Moreover, they problematize the strong dependency of Latin American feminisms on Northern academic production and call for grounded theoretical explorations that think subalternity out of the economic and socio-political specificities of the region (Espinosa Miñoso 2009; Mendoza 2010).

9 See Tuck and Yang (2012) on the possibility for “solidarity … in what is incommensurable rather than what is common” (28).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Witness for Peace under the 2016 Scholarship Fund.