Feminist spaces: conferences, journals, community

The articles in this Special Issue testify to the power of research deeply informed by and anchored in the realities of feminist action and analysis in a region of the Global South. They also demonstrate the fruitful outcomes made possible by committed collaboration to share resources across borders and institutional venues to promote feminist international relations (IR), a central goal of this journal from its founding. In this issue, feminists again illustrate the compelling power emanating from the creation of feminist space.

In Fall 2019, IFJP co-sponsored two “polycentric” conferences in Latin America (www.ifjpglobal.org). The journal offered financial and organizational support for local coordinators within their home institutions, who took on the majority of the substantial work required to make such events successful. Beyond the pieces that appear in both this and a subsequent Special Issue (24.1), the conferences provided important opportunities to expand local, national, and regional feminist IR knowledge and networks. They are an empirical demonstration of the efficacy of feminism that is attentive to the politics of place. We are grateful to the coordinators, presenters, discussants, students and professional staff, and audience members who took part. We also want to thank those whose skills and dedication to reviewing, translating, and editing have enabled critical insights from Latin America to be brought to the IFJP community and beyond.

Since their initiation in 2012, IFJP conferences have become a mainstay of the international community of feminist scholars, occupying distinct places that enable feminist IR knowledge creation and community building. Over the last four years, we have continued to experiment with models of partnership and inclusion in the organization, timing, and location of the conference. In 2018, our first experiment was to align the conference with the International Studies Association (ISA) conference. “Feminism + Knowledge + Politics” was hosted by the University of San Francisco; 75 percent of the record number of attendees, most of whom were also first-time participants, also planned to subsequently attend ISA in San Francisco. Many graduate students and scholars from the Global South received travel funding from IFJP to do so. We assume that the enriching exchanges facilitated by the IFJP conference encouraged participants to bring feminist ideas and community into the rest of the ISA meeting.

In 2019, a “polycentric” conference call for papers resulted in the success of two proposals initiated from Latin America: “Feminisms and Conservatisms in Latin America,” September 19–20, 2019, Mexico City, co-sponsored by the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), coordinated by Gisela Zaremberg and Constanza Tabbush; and “Gender Violence and Feminist Resistance in Latin America,” October 17–19, 2019, São Paulo, Brazil, co-sponsored by the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), coordinated by Natália Maria Félix de Souza and Lara Selis. The Mexico conference was a smaller-format event building on a pre-existing network of Latin American scholars affiliated with the well-respected FLACSO. The Brazil conference was based on an open call for papers, panels, and roundtables, and created a special opportunity for mentoring and networking. These conferences took head-on a critical issue: that of language and translation. As is an evolving norm for this region, conference participants were able to present and interact in Portuguese, Spanish, or English. The resulting exchanges and enrichments of knowledge among extensive regional networks can be seen in IFJP feminist spaces: this issue, conferences, and community.

In 2020, we hosted a standalone conference underwritten by Vanderbilt University, “Subversions and Solidarities through Feminist Collaborations and Crossings.” Inspired by virtual participation at IFJP Brazil, we had planned some virtual participation from around the world. However, as it became evident that COVID-19 would impact many prospective attendees’ travel plans and just days after a tornado hit our host city, we significantly expanded virtual participation to include anyone. All three plenaries had virtual participation. Of 25 panels, 14 had virtual participation, while 23 participants joined us virtually. Our community built on that experience.

In 2021, IFJP hosted our first all-virtual conference, “Feminist Connections in Global Politics,” thanks to the initiative and forward thinking of co-coordinators Silja Bára Ómarsdóttir and Carrie Reiling, two early-career scholars attentive to all issues of physical and epistemic diversity and inclusion that are central to IFJP’s mission. While the meeting did not have as much of the social and interpersonal dimensions of conferencing, it still made it possible for attendees to forge new connections and the format (and outreach) resulted in participants in this conference being the most diverse on all measures: geography, languages spoken, stage of career, range of family obligations, and so on. As we wrote in a previous Editorial (23.3), “With greater exchange of ideas and politics and more possibilities for scholars to interact via blogs and other online platforms, the academic world will hopefully be able to bridge the distance between scholars located across starkly different contexts.” Feminist use of online space, deliberately if always imperfectly designed with the “master’s tools” of the internet, has expanded the possibilities for epistemic and other communities.

These conference opportunities remind us of the power of opening spaces for feminist work: spaces that – enmeshed though they always will be within interlocking power hierarchies – feminists have deliberately designed, continually building on past experiments while reaching for new facilitating materialities and ideas. Such spaces have been fundamental to the work of feminists around the world, and nowhere more visibly than in Latin America, the region covered in this Special Issue. At the regional level, the cross-pollination of feminist advocacy arguably emerged at the 1910 International Feminist Congress in Buenos Aires, which, despite the elite status of most participants, focused on a range of issues from working conditions to legal status. Latin American women helped to found a range of regional organizations in the 1920s to facilitate their work across borders. They also took full advantage of the United Nations (UN), from its very foundation, to insist that women could be full participants in global rights and development debates. The UN World Conferences on Women (1975, 1980, 1985, and 1995) inspired and brought resources to the region, and Latin Americans were at the forefront of globally articulated efforts to “gender the agenda” of other 1990s world conferences.

When formal global arenas began to be targeted by right-wing, conservative counter-movements, Latin American feminists, alongside activists in other world regions, “sidestreamed” into other venues for social justice activism, such as the World Social Forum. For four decades, the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist “Encuentro” (encounter or meeting) – known by its Spanish abbreviation, EFLAC – has been a space for debating issues, sharing strategies, and developing alliances. From the challenges of working with “allies” from leftist parties, other movements, state institutions, and philanthropic foundations, to insuring the inclusion of a range of female-identified persons – across many differences – and their issues, EFLAC has reflected regional feminisms. Issue- or identity-based meetings have facilitated the collaboration of the many regional feminist and women’s networks, from the 28 of September Campaign to decriminalize abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean, to the Alliance of Indigenous Women of Central America and Mexico and the Network of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Women. Regional feminist and women’s activism has also been manifest in the World Women’s March.

Although regional feminist articulation has been complex and often fraught, strong connections have been forged over time, rooted deeply in local and national counterpublics. These in turn provide other models of feminist space, such as the widespread model of “assembly” meetings, designed on the general assembly principle of decision making by the membership. In feminist hands, such as the inspiring intersectional mass movement of Argentina, they have become “a situated apparatus of collective intelligence” (Gago 2020, 225) that is also sovereign and revolutionary. Through the sharing of grounded experiences across difference, feminists have come together to analyze their current conjectures and find strategies of alliance and transformation.

The strength of feminist spaces and the strengths that feminists draw from them are part of what inspire IFJP conferences. It is not surprising that a region that has made such fruitful use of such spaces has contributed this Special Issue and the forthcoming Special Issue 24.1 to our intellectual community. We are grateful to the organizers and to all of those whose work to make these conferences possible might otherwise become invisible with the passage of time. Its visibility is in the lasting strength of our IFJP community.