Rooted-South Feminisms: Disobedient Epistemologies and Transformative Politics

ABSTRACT

Recent writing by Latin American feminists offers a unique political philosophy based on a novel and transformative analysis of the relationship between capitalism, coloniality, patriarchy, and terracide. Focusing on the work of Rita Segato, Julieta Paredes, Lélia Gonzalez, Raquel Gutiérrez-Aguilar, and Moira Millán, this paper introduces the term “Rooted-South feminism” and outlines its epistemic-rationality. I first show how these thinkers root their epistemological frame in the collective struggle of racialized women. Through this account I then make explicit the relational political ontology that grounds their thinking, paradigmatically expressed in the notions of “territory-body-land” and “terracide.” In describing how patriarchy functions as a system of domination that desensitises subjects to the suffering of the Other, I argue that Rooted-South feminists expose the structural relationship between capitalism, coloniality, violence against women, and the destruction of the Earth. Here, the feminine is conceived as a social function produced throughout the long histories of women. This “politics in a feminine key” uniquely understands the sphere of reproduction not simply as a vector of domination, but as the foundation for the liberation and regeneration of life in its totality. Rooted-South feminists propose an authentic historical pluralism engaged in the co-construction of an inhabited earth.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist politics
• anticolonial
• territory-body-earth
• race
• terracide

Introduction

“We are not seeking ownership of the land, what we propose is another art of inhabiting the Earth” (Millán, quoted in Gago 2019, 109). This statement by Mapuche leader Moira Millán at the feminist Assembly of the Ni una menos movement in 2017 summarizes the critical and transformative force of Rooted-South feminisms. These movements are not interested in finding a place at the table of today’s dominant social structures but, rather, in profoundly transforming these structures to open a space for other ways of organizing social relations. The approach of these thinkers – most notably Rita Segato, Julieta Paredes, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Lélia González, and Moira Millán – is twofold. On the one hand, they denounce the intrinsically deadly character of what Segato calls the “historical project of accumulation of things” on which the dominant social order rests, to illuminate the structural relationships between gender, race, class, and the destruction of the Earth. On the other hand, they propose alternatives modes of relationality whose characteristic aspect is seeing the sphere of reproduction of (human and non-human) life – which has historically been assigned to women – as a privileged space in which we find “technologies of sociability” that can teach us other forms of relating to the Other (women, racialized peoples, children, or nature) and therefore of organizing economy, politics, social relations, and desire.

To be sure, the authors examined here do not belong to a single group. Rather, these thinkers are grounded in heterogeneous decolonial, communal, and Afrodiasporic struggles and in the perspectives and practices of Buen Vivir, which translates loosely to “good living” or “living well.” These practices and struggles share the fact of producing knowledges whose aim is not the accumulation of capital (or of knowledge), but the regeneration of life through daily practices. They also share the fact of producing a politics that is focused on building the autonomy of women and their peoples regarding their capacity to decide and to dispose over the material and symbolic means that are necessary to regenerate life. Since Rooted South-feminisms theorize from and on behalf these collective practices, there are certain conceptual zones of resonance across their discourses.

In bringing these authors together, I develop an account of what I call “Rooted-South Feminisms” (feminismos del Sur enraízado). Countering the abstraction implicit in the term Feminisms of the “Global South,” this account of Rooted-South feminisms emphasizes two common concerns in their approach: first, a topological rationality at the heart of these modes of thinking where the territory-body-earth holds a central place (signaled by the term “Rooted”); and second, their situation in those geo-histories that coloniality builds as the periphery of the system through heterogenous modes of domination (the “South”). While the movements of the South have effectively created trans-regional and trans-national relations, they are characterized by their critical and nourishing – that is, living and reciprocal – attachment with their locality as a point of departure and arrival.¹

In this sense, the purpose of this article is not to offer a history of ideas that would trace the influences and actual discussions across a group of authors. Neither does it attempt to present them as belonging within a completely coherent system – as a Latin American Feminism (in the singular) – which would betray the plural character of their modes of thinking and the fact that they themselves conceive plurality as the horizon of politico-epistemic struggle. Rather, it outlines the rationality underlying these various discourses to call attention to the universal and transformative reach of their critiques.² In doing so, I seek to join the task outlined by Segato (2018b, 83) when she maintains that contemporary critical thinking must focus on identifying and naming the technologies of sociability that exist in our society – practices which are necessary for the “preservation of life” and which have produced divergent forms of happiness that depart from the project of accumulation of capital – in order to produce “rhetorics of value” with the capacity to change the directionality of our desire, opening it to other horizons. After all, it is only by doing so that we can make credible the idea that another possible is possible (Escobar 2018a).

By reconfiguring the very basis of knowing and acting, Latin American critical feminist discourses address humanity in its totality, proposing a radical change of direction, a change of historical project. For this reason, it would be a mistake to see these discourses as offering tools for the exclusive interest of a specific social group (such as women and or sexual dissidences). However, the universalizable character of these feminisms must not be mistaken for an abstract perspective. On the contrary, the transformative power of these ways of thinking comes from the fact they are rooted in the long struggle of women. In this respect, what is at stake is a proposal for all of humanity that issues from the geo-histories of women.

To maintain a coherence with the rooted character of the discourses discussed here, I employ a methodological dialogue of places (Eboussi Boulaga and Kisukidi 2014) constituted through an interpretation of rooted-feminist texts, interviews, and conferences. The concepts and discourses analysed here are not limited to those proposed by feminine intellectuals but also include masculine-identified persons and research groups. In selecting authors, I considered not the sexes of the bodies that utter these concepts, but rather the principles that constitute them and the social function they undertake. These principles are care, spirituality, rootedness, reciprocity and interdependence; and their social function is the establishment of bonds and collective emancipation.

The first part of this article discusses the rooted epistemology of these feminisms. This is followed by an analysis of the way in which Rooted-South feminists interpret the relationship between patriarchy and coloniality. In the third part, I examine the way in which these theories employ gender to illuminate the more general logics of domination that configure the contemporary colonial/capitalist/patriarchal/terracidal system. This allows me to sketch, in the final section, the proposals advanced by Rooted-South feminists to transform the patriarchal and neo-colonial structures of domination in which we find ourselves today.

A Rooted Epistemology

Rooted-South feminists propose a social theory to explain and propose alternative paths to solve the problems of human society. This means that, in this case, the perspective of gender does not focus on a single sphere of society, just as it does not have as its objective to exclusively transform the situation of one of the subjects of power (for instance, women). More profoundly, Rooted-South feminisms conceive gender as an entryway that makes it possible to analyse the situation of society as a whole (Segato 2003), while placing gender in relation to those other elements that constitute our historical scene, namely race, class, and the destruction of the Earth. Likewise, their objective is to transform social structures with the aim of enhancing the living conditions of all. As communitarian feminist Julieta Paredes puts it, “we do not want to think of ourselves as being against men; we want to think of men and women in relation to the community” (Paredes 2013, 79).

To accomplish this double operation, these feminists root their perspective in the memory of the collective struggles of racialized women, an epistemological gesture that requires analysing the dominant system from the exteriority of exteriority. The first exteriority is constituted by the perspective of communities that have been historically racialized. This is the adoption of the perspective of the wretched (Dussel 2012). The second exteriority is constituted by those subjectivities that have been rendered inferior within racialized communities themselves because of their feminine condition, yet who have historically been able to develop knowledges and ways of establishing social relations whose objective is the regeneration of (human and non-human) life. It is the perspective of the (feminine) wretched of the wretched.

In doing so, Rooted-South feminists focus their attention on (anti)colonial history, insofar as “the only thing we have in front of us is the past” (Guzmán and Paredes 2014; Segato 2022, 21–48). For them, the past constitutes the future in two senses: first, because it reminds us of the forms of oppression and of violence that racialized peoples have been subjected to. Thus, the point of departure is the colonial trauma experienced since 1492, instead of a fixed and immutable identity. Secondly, insofar as the threads of the autonomous historical projects that coloniality has endeavoured to destroy lie in the past, they must be grasped again to continue existing (Lozano-Lerma 2019; Segato 2022). The concepts of “re-existence” and “ancestralidad” (ancestral tradition) adequately incorporate this double dimension: on the one hand, they address resistance against the patriarchal/colonial/capitalist/modern project of devastation and, on the other, the daily practices invented by communities out of their long-standing cosmovisions which allow them to endure while changing.

We might say that the temporality that is here at work diverges from the evolutive notion of time that constitutes the modern episteme, thus breaking with the idea of progress. Instead of linearity and homogeneity, we find in these thinkers the idea of a circular temporality or some of its variations like the spiral, as in the cosmovision of the Misak people in Colombia (Muelas Hurtado 2018). The very form of this temporality stems from the living rhythms of daily practices and social struggles, which are also related to organic processes and rooted in them (Gutiérrez Aguilar 2014; Meneses Alvarez 2023, 75; Muelas-Hurtado 2018).

The term “rootedness” points to the zones of resonance that these approaches share with North feminist approaches that emphasize situated perspectives, while highlighting the singularity of Rooted-South approaches: their insertion in a geo-historical struggle and their relation with the more-than-human cosmos. For this reason, the term “rooted” is ideal for describing these feminisms, since the notion of “root” makes clear that these are living ways of thinking in the double sense that they are constantly in transformation and that they defend the material and symbolic conditions for the regeneration of the Earth.

Hence, a distinguishing aspect of Rooted-South feminisms is their focus on the bodies and graphemes of the Earth as the sites of inscription of history and therefore of historical memory. This is explained by the relational political ontology that such peoples have built through daily practices, leading them to think and feel the inhabited territory as an essential part of their identity (Cabnal 2019; Escobar 2016). At odds with the dualistic and anthropocentric ontology existing in hegemonic modernity, Rooted-South feminists define the body as a territory-body-earth, a relational living entity that depends on a place which is geo-historically constructed. Consequently, they argue that history must be grasped through the marks it has inflicted upon the territory-body-earth (I return to this below).

This anti-colonial perspective is directly linked to the Latin-American experience. In this continent, the European intrusion played an ontological, epistemological, and political role that cannot be ignored because, as the authors of the Modernity-Coloniality/Decoloniality project have shown, it produces geo-social identities that did not exist before (“America,” “Europe,” “Indigenous,” “Whites,” “Blacks”) (Segato 2003). Its epistemological product is Eurocentrism – a model of knowledge shared by Europeans and by all those who are educated under their model – whose principal characteristic is to elevate the European production of knowledge to the level of a standard from which to judge non-European knowledges and practices. Politically, it carries out the expulsion of the largest part of humanity into the zone of nonbeing. Colonial trauma is thus a necessary analytical starting point, given that this experience has fashioned not merely contemporary social structures but also their subjectivities, as well as the available means of relating to them (Escobar 2007). However, the decolonial approach reaches its limits here, since what is at stake is analysing the place of women and feminized bodies at the heart of global-capitalist exploitation (a limit that the decolonial approach shares with a large part of Marxist analyses). Thus, the decolonial perspective must be articulated with the perspective of gender, opening the possibility to address some of the pitfalls of Eurocentric feminisms. This critique takes the form of an analysis of the category of “woman” as a mechanism of colonial power.

For Rooted-South feminisms – as for Black American feminisms – the use of the category of “woman” in Eurocentric feminist discourses is by no means neutral. Following Kimberlé Crenshaw, Lugones maintains that the use of the term “woman” by “bourgeois white feminists” hides the position of women of colour, since “the categories have been understood as homogenous and as picking out the dominant in the group as the norm, thus “women” picks out white bourgeois women, “men” picks out white bourgeois men, “black” picks out black heterosexual men, and so on” (Lugones 2008, 4). However, modern/colonial history shows that it is not the same thing to be a “white woman,” a “mestizo woman,” an “indigenous woman,” or a “black woman,” insofar as race operates as a marker of power that serves to differentiate forms of extraction without retribution of human and natural labour. Consequently, the “colour line” determines the types of violence to which gendered bodies are subjected. The colonial dimension thus expresses itself in the fact that the crudest forms of violence – those inflicted on the dark side of the colour line – are concealed. For Lugones, such concealment takes place through various technologies of power, most importantly through language, concretely categorial language and including feminist language.

Decolonial feminist critique alerts us to the fact that being a woman and struggling for women’s rights does not save us from occupying the patriarchal site of domination. From this follows the need to cultivate a reflexive and relational critical attitude with respect to oneself through the look of the other. To do so it is necessary to effectuate a self-limiting of perspectives through rootedness in a place of life and struggle. This groundedness upon adopted perspectives enables us to counter the risk of homogenizing the lived experiences of women, insofar as it necessarily introduces plurality and politics at the heart of epistemology. From here on, it becomes possible to speak of histories of women: Black-women, Indigenous-women, campesina-women, white-women, white-mestiza-women, etc.

This is not a competition for the title of “first victims” of structures of domination, which would amount to reproducing the colonial narcissism that Rooted-South feminisms have been working hard to dismantle. In fact, limiting one’s perspective does not lead to an encroaching of identity but is rather the condition to establish an authentic relation with other, equally limited, perspectives. This crossing of situated perspectives allows for a better understanding of the ensemble of mechanisms of power, insofar as these operate in a differentiated, although interconnected manner. In this point, Rooted-South feminists agree with critical theorists such as Rosa Luxembourg who conceive the capitalist order as requiring non-capitalist modes of production to exist that imply differentiated although correlated modes of domination. Rootedness of perspectives is thus the better way to grasp both the singularities and the lines of continuity that exist among different forms of domination.

Conversely, the colonial dimension present in Eurocentric feminism (carried out, for instance, by international-cooperation aid agencies) expresses itself in the belief that racialized women of the South must follow the same paths of liberation as their sisters of the North. In such cases, racialized women are still considered as merely passive subjects of knowledge, perfectly incapable of neither comprehending their own problems nor of formulating alternatives. This reproduces the colonial “One-world” in which there is only one true way of being human, now expressed through a gendered formula, that “there is only one way to attain feminine liberation, that of the movements of the North.” It is against this way of treating racialized women as if they were passive subjects of knowledge that Rooted-South feminists revolt. But their critique goes much further since they seek to show the political inefficacy of this mode of struggle. If patriarchy itself operates in different ways according to varying geo-histories, they argue, how is it conceivable to fight against patriarchy by employing the same tools and the same strategies everywhere?

In these forms of thought, situatedness of perspectives is what enables the process of bringing into collective consciousness something that has been constantly foreclosed: the multiple contributions by wretched peoples towards the constitution of “Ladino-Amefrican” identities (González 2018) which wrongly and tragically represent themselves as White or whitened (in the case of mestizaje). This work upon the psychic life of colonial power has been carefully undertaken by Lélia González (2018) and Segato (2022, 133–159). Through an analysis of the social role of Black women in Brazil, and mobilizing epistemological tools that include popular Afro-Brazilian knowledges (such as the religion of Candomblé) and Freudian, Lacanian, or Jungian psychoanalysis, these authors bring back to the collective memory the fact that Latin American identity has an African root and not just an European one. This can be seen in the rhythms and African dances present in Latin American musics, in the Pretugués language (the Brazilian language, which includes Quimbundu as well as Portuguese), in paintings, and in quotidian life, where Black women are hired as nannies and domestic workers to provide their care and affection, thus enabling the reproduction of society even as the care they provide and their contributions to society are denied and concealed in order to ensure their exploitation.

According to González and Segato, however, it would be a mistake to see this practice as a device of power that would exclusively benefit White/whitened subjects while harming racialized subjects. In reality, they argue, what the racializing subject produces constantly is a hatred and forgetting of himself. For this reason, it is in his best interest to change the social structure. Here, the objective is not to replace one root for another or to change one perspective for another, but to weave together the different historical perspectives in order to recognize (instead of denying) the diversity that constitute us and to valorize it as a form of great wealth. This is why instead of using the term “Latin America,” which references only a European heritage, González proposes the neologism “Améfrica Ladina” which evokes, in addition, the African and (Andean) Indigenous legacies (2018, 577).

In the same vein, Rivera-Cusicanqui calls to adopt a ch’ixi episteme. “Ch’ixi” is an Aymara term that designates a colour which, seen as grey from a distance, is in fact constituted by patches of black and white. Rivera-Cusicanqui (2018b) uses the term ch’ixi to designate the heterogeneous “social patches” of “diverse historical depth” (16, 75–91), which occasionally enter in contradiction thus constituting the variegated (at once heterogenous and contradictory) identity of Latin America. Ch’ixi episteme is itself plural and considers contradiction not as a problem or as something that should be overcome or sublated in a higher synthesis (Aufgehoben) but as an element to be affirmed and that has an anticolonial potential.

Rooted-South intellectuals call on us to think and practice feminism in a decolonial way, that considers “the inclusion of multiple worlds, rather than exclusion,” (Escobar 2018b, 134) all the while recognizing that racialized women participate actively in their liberation according to their lived experiences and autonomous analyses (Escobar 2018b; Guzmán and Paredes 2014). Rooted-South feminisms consist of a shared historical attitude against oppressions, an attitude that necessarily leads to the affirmation of a historical pluralism that restores the political agency of each people towards the objective of autonomously weaving together the threads of its history (Paredes 2013, 76; Segato 2022).

The interrogation of geo-histories from a gendered-anticolonial approach leads these thinkers to expose the historico-political character, and therefore also the contingency, of patriarchal forms of domination at the heart of their own peoples. Concretely, Rooted-South feminists criticize the idea, espoused by racialized subjects themselves, that the domination of the masculine over the feminine constitutes an essential sign of the community that must be defended and maintained for the sake of the struggle against colonial power (Segato 2022, 59; Paredes 2013, 80). The politico-epistemological contribution of their approach is the critical use they give to tradition: the historical struggles of their (female) elders allow them to de-fetishize patriarchal practices. This does not mean that they fall in a ethnic closure, for to effectuate this critique they also select critical elements from other historical projects (including the modern project). In this way, the perspective of women becomes an antidote to the fetishism of the past and the idealization of cultures. Yet, the mode of conceiving the imbrication between gender and race is far from homogenous.

Gender and Coloniality or Coloniality and Gender?

While there are diverse positions within Rooted-South feminisms, two broadly divergent positions can be identified with respect to the origin of patriarchy and its relation to coloniality. To grasp the specificity of these positions, it will be useful to advance a definition of each of these systems of domination. Patriarchy is here understood as the system of power that employs gender as an instrument for establishing hierarchies between the masculine and the feminine as well as for justifying power structures. Gender is a social construction that allows for the organization of “the world of sexuality, affects, social roles, and personality” as a mechanism for extracting the products and knowledges of the body without due recognition or remuneration (Segato 2018b, 26). In the modern world, gender has been employed to classify individuals and to fashion bodies according to a binary model that identifies gender with sex while making heterosexuality into the normative standard. Nevertheless, gender is always dynamic and tied to historical context. Conversely, coloniality is the system that employs race as a mechanism for classifying people and controlling their labour and products, while producing a relation with alterity that consists in concealing the Other by presenting every difference as a sign of inferiority. The year 1492 marks the beginning of this new system. What then is the relation between these two forms of domination, and when does patriarchy emerge?

One position defended by Rooted-South feminisms is that patriarchy only emerges in extra-European societies with the arrival of colonialism. This reading is advanced by Argentinian philosopher María Lugones, who links Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyeˇwùmí’s work (Oyeˇwùmí 1997) with Aníbal Quijano’s theory of the coloniality of power (Lugones 2008). Following Oyeˇwùmí, Lugones maintains that patriarchy did not exist in pre-colonial societies. Turning to the history of slavery, she shows how gender has been employed exclusively to categorize white subjects placed on the visible side of coloniality. In the “lighter” side, white women were subjected as housewives or as salaried workers, while in the darker side racialized women were treated as load animals and subjected to extreme forms of sexual violence that result from an imaginary that reduces them merely to their sex. Thus, in the colonial side, gender has operated through its absence, as a mechanism that establishes a dividing line between human and less-than-human to guarantee the differentiated, unremunerated extraction of labour. Although gender is conceived as a European mechanism of power that was imposed on colonial geographies, it was (and still is) the way to capture the desire of the colonized male subjects.

From the perspective of the second group of Rooted-South feminists, the idea that patriarchy only emerges with colonialism has two significant problems. In the first place, this explanation ignores the historical and anthropological archive that shows the existence, at the sociohistorical level, of a hierarchy between the masculine and the feminine within pre-colonial societies. Secondly, this interpretation contributes to the production of a melancholic memory that idealizes a past whose existence is more than doubtful, thus playing the unwilling role of the colonizer who exoticizes the Other. This critique is articulated by intellectuals such as Paredes, Rivera Cusicanqui, Segato, and Zapatista women, for whom patriarchal social forms already existed within pre-intrusion societies, even if their characteristics differed from the patriarchy that would develop after the European intrusion. This difference is explained through the distinction between duality and dualism.

According to Paredes, the colonial invasion brought about an “entwinement of patriarchies” (entroncamiento de patriarcados) in which patriarchy served as a link that allowed the colonized themselves to take part in the colonial operation (Paredes 2013, 71). The patriarchal structures that existed in pre-colonial societies were mobilized by colonial authorities as part of a deliberate strategy to destroy collective resistance and turn their members against each other. The strategy was thus to make Indigenous men into the privileged interlocutors of the colonizers, producing “a tacit alliance between the men of the dominated society and those of the conquering society” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2018a).

This raises a question: why did Indigenous men allow themselves to be captured more easily than women? Far from issuing an essentialist answer, Rooted-South feminists respond by pointing to the long history of the social and sexual division of labour. While the tasks associated with displacement such as hunting, warfare, or trade with other peoples have been historically assigned to men, tasks associated with place, such as agriculture, nourishment, and weaving have been assigned to women (Segato 2016, 115; Federici 2004, 230). This division made men more vulnerable to colonial capture. With the entwinement of patriarchies, racialized men are at once emasculated by colonial power (since their subjection to colonial power “shows them the relativity of their masculine position” [Segato 2022, 63]) and launched into a position of power within their communities (since their role as negotiators with the colonizers gave them “privileged access to the resources and the knowledges of the world of power” [62]). Set within the frame of the historical project of capital accumulation, the entwinement of patriarchies opened a new way of establishing and conceiving relations between the feminine and masculine.

According to Segato and Rivera-Cusicanqui, pre-intrusion patriarchy is characterized by a dual relation between genders. As Segato explains, duality is a form of the multiple in which the terms of the relation are conceived as complementary and ontologically complete. In a patriarchy founded on duality, the feminine is not conceived as lack with respect to the masculine, despite the existence of a hierarchy between the two terms where the masculine was perceived as more prestigious than the feminine (Segato 2022, 87; Rivera Cusicanqui 2018b, 40). Consequently, there were many patriarchal elements in these societies, which were nevertheless “attenuated because of the parallelism of gender” (Rivera-Cusicanqui 2018a). Segato calls this type of patriarchy a “low-intensity patriarchy” (Segato 2022, 66), and she insists that although this form of patriarchy has been deeply affected by coloniality, it persists among certain peoples in Latin America, in “the margins and folds of colonial modernity” (53).

With the colonial intrusion, a radical transformation takes place, producing a high-intensity patriarchy. The form of the relation is no longer duality but dualism, which presupposes a binary logic. As Segato argues, “in the binarized world of modernity, the other of the One is deprived of its ontological plenitude and reduced to fulfilling the condition of alter, the other of the One as the representative and referent of totality” (Segato 2016, 92–93). From then on, those bodies and activities judged to belong to the feminine sphere cease to be considered as complementary to the masculine sphere and acquire a deficient, incomplete character lacking all rationality. Moreover, this binary logic lies at the base of the expulsion of the labour of the reproduction of life from the political and economic spheres that begin to be identified with the public space of the state and the sphere of the market. Deprived of mechanisms of social protection, feminized bodies are exposed to forms of unprecedented violence, a social phenomenon necessary to produce surplus value, as we will see. These analyses coincide with the studies of eco-feminst and Marxist authors such as Carolyn Merchant, Maria Mies, and Sylvia Federici about the transformations of the roles of women over the transformation in Europe of the notion of nature as a living organism into a dead entity, which coincides with the rise of mercantilism (and therefore colonialism) and scientific modernity.

Despite the divergences that separate these two positions, they agree that the colonial system is intrinsically patriarchal. The entwinement of gender and race is necessary for the accumulation of capital insofar as it justifies the non-remunerated extraction of labour, knowledges, and colonized territories. But more tragically, these modes of domination articulate themselves to make possible the implication of the dominated (men) into the colonization of their own peoples and thus of themselves. By shedding light to this point, Rooted-South feminists bring back to collective consciousness the most shameful part of the past, that of voluntary servitude, as a necessary step to heal the colonial trauma. Likewise, the idea that a hierarchy between the masculine and the feminine (essential to all kinds of patriarchy) was deepened and qualitatively transformed by the colonial logic (which is based on exclusion and distance) provides us with the analytical tools to illuminate the political/historical nature of gender-based violence and its relation to other forms of violence. Concretely, Rooted-South feminists evidence how the colonial intrusion produces a masculine gaze that perceives feminine bodies as ontologically incomplete and exterior to the gazing subject, which gaze enables the objectification and hence the exploitation of the other.

Violence Against the Bodies-territories of Racialized Women

Rooted-South feminists broaden the understanding of coloniality by inquiring into its constitutive relation with gender. The central thesis is that the exploitation of women and feminized bodies (such as nature, infants, and persons of non-heteronormative genders) is not just one form of domination among others. Rather, patriarchy constitutes “the basis that sustains all the inequalities and the expropriations of value that constitute the edifice of all powers – economic, political, intellectual, artistic, etc.” (Segato 2016, 19). It is upon the bodies of women and feminized bodies (including the Earth) that humanity has learned and continues to learn the inferiorization of the other, its domination, and in the capitalist/colonial epoch, its objectification.

The notion of “territory-body-Earth” advanced by Rooted-South feminists (Cabnal 2019) designates at once the relational and interdependent character of the human body with the place it inhabits, the fact that the body of racialized women has historically operated as a site of expression of patriarchal power, and the idea that it should be the point of departure for their liberation. The link with the territory must be understood as an expression of a relational political ontology, produced throughout their history, and that had led them to feel nature as a fabric in which the human body belongs and whose identity it composes. Thus, what happens to the fabric of life happens to humans themselves. In this sense, the term shows that the liberation of feminized subjects and their peoples is bound up with the liberation of the Earth. To understand the relationship between gender-based violence and violence committed to Earth we must turn to the explanation given to patriarchal violence.

According to Segato, violence against feminized bodies serves at least two functions. First, violence produces a psychopathic subjectivity, insensitive to the pain of others and capable of exercising acts of cruelty against the living. Second, particularly in colonized geographies, such violence becomes a weapon to dispossess entire peoples of their territories. Concretely, Segato suggests that patriarchy operates through a masculine mandate “that demands constant proof that one belongs to the class of men” (Segato 2018a, 199), notably by expressing their power upon the bodies of women. Violence against women works here as a statement written in their bodies that transmits a message on two axes. On the vertical axis, the message is addressed to the victim, forcing her to behave in a determined manner, to “normalize” her conduct by obeying the authority (not to dress in a certain way, not to frequent certain places at certain hours, etc.). On the horizontal axis, the message is directed to the masculine peers (present or absent from the scene of violence) signifying that “one belongs to the class of men”. To prove this belonging, men must pay a tribute that takes the form of women suffering and obedience (Segato 2018a, 199). This reading is interesting because it denaturalizes gendered violence, while shedding light to the fact that the effectiveness of masculine mandate lies in the way it uses libido and produces a sadistic desire.

While the masculine mandate may be found in all patriarchal societies, its nature is radically transformed with the process of modern conquest and colonization. This may be seen not only in the intensification of violence against women and feminized bodies in modern times, but also in the new political uses given to it. Thus, in those geographies – such as Latin America – where the war of conquest has never ended, gender violence becomes lethal, for it is employed as a weapon of armed groups to express their sovereign power, to achieve accumulation by dispossession, and to implement extractive projects. Rape, murder, or dismemberment of feminine bodies are recurrent practices used by armed groups (militaries, paramilitaries, guerrillas, drug traffickers) to demonstrate their power against enemy groups (Segato 2010). These armed groups are moved by capitalist interests, insofar as they act either as “defenders” of national or transnational enterprises operating within legal economies or as the armed side of illegal economies. Simultaneously, gender violence is used to undo the social fabric of Black, campesino, and Indigenous peoples, in order to appropriate their lands and their labour-force on behalf of extractive economies. Seen from this angle, while gender violence takes place on the bodies of women, it is not addressed to them in the first place.

To understand this, one needs to remember that, historically, Black, campesino, and Indigenous women in Latin America have always had the vital task of weaving, preserving and transmitting the practices and knowledges necessary for the survival of their peoples. Consider, for example, their role in the preservation of seeds, the transmission of languages, and practices of weaving through which peoples narrate their history. Attacking their bodies constitutes a way of interrupting the modes of life of their peoples to incorporate them into the logic of capital. Terrorized by the cruelty of this violence, communities are forced to transform their quotidian practices as their worlds are endangered or simply destroyed. On one side, these forms of violence operate by employing the masculine mandate insofar as they produce among the men of the communities a feeling of having been incapable of protecting “their women,” serving to emasculate them while de-structuring or breaking social relations. On the other side, violence induces terror within communities, leading them towards forced displacement.

Colonial patriarchy has learned to weaponize the relational dimension that each rooted community of the South entertains with the place it inhabits. This means that patriarchal violence is inscribed, at the same time, on the body of women and on their territories. As Ulrich Oslender (2008) explains, extractivism produces “geographies of terror” that transform the landscape through markers of violence (think, for example, of rivers transformed into dumping sites for massacred corpses by paramilitary armies in the Pacific region of Colombia), turning the territory of the communities into sources of terror. Three effects result from this spatial technique of power: a restriction upon the daily activities of populations, a dramatic transformation of the individual and collective perspectives upon the locales caused by traumatic memories, and ultimately the extraction/uprooting (extirpación) of peoples, whether by displacement or by limitation of the movements of society members in space. Living environments thus become environments of life and death where people are deprived of the freedom to act and to decide upon their bodies. To be sure, damage on human lives through damage on the Earth occurs everywhere in the world. For Rooted-South feminists, however, such damage takes on a particular intensity in racialized territories, where it implies the use of singular mechanisms of power and lethal forms of violence.

This violence is part of what Segato calls “pedagogies of cruelty” and is characteristic of high-intensity patriarchy. According to the Argentinian anthropologist, these pedagogies of cruelty designate “all the acts and practices that teach, habituate, and program subjects to transmute the living and its vitality into things” (Segato 2018a, 11). This produces a subjectivity that feels itself as “exterior to life, an exteriority from which to dominate, colonize, plunder, and prey upon” (Segato 2016, 80). Violence against women is not a practice whose effects only target women but is rather a means to produce a subjectivity that is insensitive to the suffering of others (racialized peoples, women, infants, and the Earth). The exploitation and destruction of the subject only becomes possible by producing in him the feelings that he is disconnected from the fabric of life and that the Other is merely an object. “With broken and vulnerable subjects, the world of things imposes itself: thing-nature, thing-body, thing-persons.” (Segato 2016, 30).

Hence, the colonial wound should not be understood as a wound inflicted exclusively upon human bodies but rather over the fabric of life as a whole, which explains the notion of “terracide” (terricidio) formulated by Moira Millán (Millán 2020; Millán 2021). With this term, the Mapuche leader designates the crime of assassination of the Earth committed by the nation-state in alliance with corporations. According to Millán, this crime impacts the three dimensions of existence that Mapuche people recognize: the first dimension is the “material world”, which encompasses the environment, the rivers, mountains, and human persons that are being destroyed by extractivist practices. The second level is that of “perception”, containing the energetic forces that compose the essence of life; these forces are found in the sacred places within the natural environments which extractivist megaprojects come to occupy. Finally, there is the level of the culture of oppressed peoples, who are being annihilated by extractivism.

Through this analysis, Rooted-South feminisms develop a supplementary axis of patriarchal/colonial violence, namely violence committed against the Earth. Its effects must be understood in a relational manner. On the one hand, the cruelty deployed against racialized women undoes the community’s fabric, rupturing the transmission of knowledges and spiritual practices that contribute to the regeneration of the Earth. On the other, the extractivist economies that poison rivers, pollute the air, turn the soils sick and destroy the forests also poison, turn sick, and destroy human bodies. This is because the human body is not merely in a relation of dependence with the Earth – it is Earth.

By grounding their perspective in the memory of bodies-territories, Rooted-South feminists expose the material and direct connection between the primarization of the economy of Southern countries, environmental destruction, violence against racialized and feminized bodies and the reproduction of a post-industrialist economy in the North. By doing so, they update the Marxist feminist formula according to which “reproduction is the transcendental condition of production,” insofar as they make evident how the use of unbridled violence against feminized bodies functions as a mechanism to articulate the reproductive and productive spheres towards the production of surplus value (Gago 2019, 126).

Latin American feminists thus help us understand that colonial patriarchy must be understood as a system of social relations founded upon the domination (whether it is exerted by men or women) and the exclusion of the Other. This system operates through mechanisms whose objective is to teach indolence and insensitivity to enable the objectification of life in its entirety. What determines whether a subject has a patriarchal character or not is the manner of relating to the fabric of life. Patriarchy is a social function based on arbitrary hierarchies and power relations. This is why there are women who are attracted by and who act under the masculine mandate, just as one can say that an economic, political or social system is patriarchal (or not). These analyses also show that the colonial trauma implies a wound on the fabric of life that has been produced through patriarchal mechanisms. Therefore, decolonization and ecological transitions necessarily require undoing the masculine mandate. The aim of Rooted-South feminisms is consequently not to empower women in order to attain the position that men have in our societies but transform such structures from a rooted-feminine logic.

“Domesticating politics:” The proposal of Rooted-South Feminisms

The question that emerges is, how to exit the infernal circle of patriarchal, colonial, capitalist and terracidal violence? Rooted-South feminists affirm that the key is to be found in the geo-histories of women and consequently in the sphere of reproduction, historically assigned to women. On this regard, Gutiérrez-Aguilar, undertake the challenge posed by Marxist feminists like Federici to “think about the possibilities of social transformation beginning from the reproduction of material life, not through other forms of managing the accumulation of capital” (Gutiérrez-Aguilar 2017, 70). From this rooted perspective, the racial and sexual division of labour is not solely a vector of domination. Through their political intelligence and the deployment of collective strategies of survival, Rooted-South women have developed specific “technologies of sociability” as well as non-patriarchal “styles of negotiation, representation and agency,” which constitute true alternatives to the patriarchal logic of state-centered politics and economic laws of exchange value (Segato 2016, 25). In Segato’s words, the project consists of “domesticating politics,” instead of “politicising the domestic sphere” (Segato 2018b, 204) and, together with Gutiérrez-Aguilar (2017, 67–87), they call on us to build a “politics in a feminine key.” Such a project implies, necessarily, a process of disarticulation of the masculine mandate while simultaneously rearticulating social relations on the basis of six principles: 1. Care of the necessary material and symbolic conditions of reproduction of human and non-human life; 2. interdependence; 3. reciprocity; 4. spirituality; 5. rootedness in the living environment; 6. the affirmation of plurality as a fact of life, necessary for knowledge, politics, and economy.

The path to accomplish this task is not that of a revolution that replaces one totality for another with a single blow (Gutiérrez Aguilar and Salazar Lohman 2019). As in poststructuralism, Rooted-South feminists argue that the transformation of the colonial and patriarchal matrix must come from a movement that is undoubtedly more modest, yet more realistic and efficacious, which consists in “working within the gaps and fractures of an existing social reality” with the aim of recuperating “the abandoned tracks of a different history” (Segato 2022, 40). The key thus lies in the analysis of situated and existing everyday practices, selecting the authentically transformative elements in them and grasping the alternative “horizons of desire of men and women who engage daily in the transformation of their situated and concrete social reality” (Gutiérrez Aguilar and Salazar Lohman 2019, 52). We can see in this position an authentic politics of everyday life. Such a politics necessarily involves a decolonial appeal to theory, whose task consists in unveiling those social technologies that contribute to the accumulation of social bonds and not to the accumulation of capital. By rendering visible these alternatives, they may become believable and desirable, contributing to the ongoing task of decolonizing our imagination.

This task has been taken by the research group Entramados comunitarios y formas de lo político in Puebla. According to them, life in its totality requires the formation of “biotic communities,” or forms of organization based on relations of reciprocity, mutuality, and exchange between members of a given species with others, as well as with one’s ancestors (Gutiérrez Aguilar, Linsalata, and Navarro 2016). Within this totality, the human being stands out due to its inherent politisation, such that it is “condemned to create, reinvent, actualize, modify, or permanently ratify the concrete figure of its communal sociality” (Gutiérrez Aguilar, Linsalata, and Navarro 2016, 380). This means that, in contrast to other living beings, the social existence of humans is not pre-given, instead it must be created, ratified and/or collectively transformed within a geo-historical frame. Politics is the space of collectively-construed freedom, opening the possibility of creating institutions that effectively contribute either to the establishment and preservation of ties or to their destruction.

This does not mean, however, that politics is conceived as an indeterminate or purely rational faculty. In an eminently materialist-sacramental manner, these thinkers affirm that political spaces should be built in relation to those material, symbolic, and spiritual conditions of existence that guarantee the regeneration of the fabric of life to which human beings belong. By doing so, they suggest a material and trans-human criterion of justice from which it becomes possible to organize human institutions and social relations, namely the regeneration of natural cycles and therefore of the territory-body-Earth. What does this mean in concrete terms of political and economic organization?

Based on Amerindian struggles and communal institutions in Bolivia, Mexico, and Guatemala, Entramados comunitarios propose a theory of use value that links the satisfaction of true needs to the (re)production of a community. Widening Marx’s analyses (which focus on capital mode of production setting aside “natural economy”), they suggest that, in indigenous communal forms, the production of use value is predominant with respect to the production of exchange value. The distinctive character of this social organization is that use value is not exclusively geared towards the production of material goods of consumption for the satisfaction of purely biological needs. More profoundly, every material act that contributes to satisfy material and symbolic/spiritual needs is a means of weaving relations between (human and non-human) members of a community, and therefore to produce the common (Gutiérrez Aguilar and Salazar Lohman 2019, 25). These practices are founded on reciprocity and care for the Earth that nourishes us, and which we must in turn nourish. From this it follows that the centre of economic production and political decisions must be the regeneration of life.

This emphasis on the regenerative dimension of the living materiality that is the Earth is then linked to the problematic of decision- and participation-based mechanisms. Indeed, one of the great efforts of Rooted-South feminisms consists in reflecting on the means of regenerating wealth (understood as use value and therefore as the production of social bonds) that simultaneously contribute to the reconstitution of the social fabric and the activation of the political agency of peoples. Insofar as the patriarchal/colonial/capitalist system is based on the centralization of decision-making power in a few hands, politics in a feminine key requires practices, knowledges, and spaces where the demonopolization of the access to wealth converges with the demonopolization of the right to decide. Political agency is thus intrinsically related to the capacity “to decide on those general matters that concern everyone because they affect everyone” (Gutiérrez-Aguilar 2017, 37).

Therefore, Rooted-South feminists argue that we should focus on building alternative ways of organizing politics instead of struggling for power within the state, replacing systems based on the delegation of power, for those that keep power in the hands of the people (think for instance in assembly forms existing in Indigenous peoples). This does not imply abandoning the struggle within the state, however, for they are aware of the “limited political capacity” of this institution and, consequently, of its capacity “to partially modify some realities” (Gago 2019, 47).

Stated in positive terms, the project of Rooted-South feminists consists in pluralizing our modes of social organization, both at the level of the production of goods for the sustainment of life as well as that of decision-making. At stake is a project of building political autonomy that requires, on the one hand, the activation of the political capacity for making history and producing the common (for the commons are not given in this perspective, they are to be made through daily and collective practices) and, on the other, recognizing the Earth as a historical agent that is actively part of social organization.

Conclusions

Rooted-South feminists argue that the transformation of the patriarchal societies we live in must draw strength from the sphere of reproduction, not only to make visible the process of exclusion and exploitation to which that space has been submitted in modernity, but also and above all, to envision alternatives to this dominant system. Such a perspective is not a reification of the past, but rather seeks to activate what Fabien Eboussi Boulaga calls “a vigilant memory” (Eboussi Boulaga 2014, 142–172). At stake is the geo-historical comprehension of the causes of actual problems and a selective reflection on the tools within each tradition which might contribute to the transformation of structures that continue to generate injustices today. This explains why the objective of these feminisms is not simply to invert the patriarchal system by erecting societies in which women occupy the current place of men, as this would not escape the patriarchal binary logic of gender hierarchies. Rather, they seek the communal construction of a society based on “a different conception of life which, instead of being based upon domination and hierarchies, is grounded on the relational fabric of life” (Escobar 2018a, 32). Here, the feminine is thought as a social function rooted in the history of women who “not because of their essence but because of their accumulated historical experience” have developed a singular type of “management,” “administration of available resources,” and “conflict resolution” (Segato 2018a, 67).

These feminisms have the capacity of responding to the larger issues of the civilisatory crisis we are undergoing insofar as their proposal, already underway, is a historico-existential reconfiguration. In general terms, relationality (in place of disconnection and dualism) and disobedience (towards existing structures of domination) seem to be the fundamental pillars of this feminist rationality. Activation of political agency and the feeling of being authorized to think (oneself) seem to be its most remarkable effects. Nonetheless, it remains important to widen these reflections that have been focused on Afro-América-ladina and to engage in a dialogue of places with Caribbean and African critical feminisms. Such a dialogue may contribute to strengthening our anticolonial memories, for they will remain extremely vulnerable without weaving relations between those geo-histories that were also marked by the trauma of modern enslavement and earth-destruction.

Insofar as the construction of the domestic sphere has itself taken place within relations of power that vary with geo-histories, rooted-south feminisms adopt a situated perspective that allows to grasp gender, as an assemblage of power, which produces divergent yet interconnected forms of domination. By the same token, there are plural forms of resisting and countering such an assemblage. The idea of “politics in a feminine key” constitutes an example of a powerful counter-pedagogy of cruelty that aims to re-weave the relationship between the (oikonomic) sphere of the regeneration of the conditions of life and the (political) sphere of deliberation. Emerging from the relational perspective advanced by Rooted-South feminisms is an episteme that does not focus on the figure of Man but, instead, on the territory-body-Earth as a cluster of geo-historical relations between the human and the rest of the Earth.

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Stage d’intégration of the Master Erasmus Mundus Europhilosophie organized at the Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in September 2022. I would like to thank Daniel Villegas for his translation and careful comments, and Gwynne Fulton for her incisive comments.

Disclosure Statement

This work was supported by Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universidad de los Andes [Grant Number FAPA. PR.3.2021.8427].

Notes

1 I thank Belgian philosopher Marc Maesschalck for having brought my attention to this issue, and for having suggested the term “féminismes du Sud ancré.”

2 I employ the term “rationality” in a Foucauldian sense, namely as that which articulates power relations and knowledges in given historical moments (Foucault 2015, 6; 2001, 1646). I thank Pierre Buhlmann for having brought my attention to Foucault.