Horizontes temporales para pensar la emancipación. Leer en clave feminista y desde el sur

Abstract

This work aims to problematize the construction of feminist genealogies from the South, based on the postulation –following Benjamin- that there is a secret key connecting emancipatory attempts from the past to those in the present. The relationship between past and present is an arena of struggle where selective traditions have been built in order to expel subalternized subjects. Due to its historical and political significance, the paper focuses on a momentous period of this struggle: the cycle of revolts and revolutions that gave way to the breakdown of classic colonial ties. National histories have erased rule-breaking and defiant women, including those of them who were racialized but also those who were considered enlightened, since their accounts are intruded by the hindrances of androcentric, classist, racist and Eurocentric views. Besides dwelling on the meanings of emancipation, this work seeks to uncover the complexities and tensions of our genealogies as feminists from the South, based on the revision of historical documents relating to Hispanic America’s independence and its national histories, as well on a theoretical reflection on the notions of emancipation, temporality, and feminism(s). The unfinished past, fraught with revolutionary promises, stands as witness of our ephemeral victories and our defeats, and it counters –both as interruption and warning- the continuous past of the dominant class, articulated as masculine, bourgeois and white.