Decolonial Feminisms: Place, Territory and the Body-Land

Abstract

This chapter presents the conceptual–epistemic–methodological context for the book based on the work of decolonial and communitarian feminisms from Latin America. I demonstrate how decolonial and communitarian feminists seek to dismantle the perspectives of progress and well-being embedded in modernity and coloniality, and enact other worlds through an engagement with the politics of place and territorio cuerpo-tierra. I introduce decolonial feminisms, not as a concrete theory, but as a process that is alive, emphasising the openness and the entanglement of ways of thinking (Millan et al. 2014). I argue that decolonial feminisms opens up spaces to think from the places, bodies and territories of resistance and re-existence. Here, I also introduce Lorena Cabnal’s (2015) territorio cuerpo-tierra and emphasise its epistemic and political importance. Following this conceptual review, I move on to narrate its entanglement with the epistemic–methodological processes of the projects presented in the book through feeling-thinking and veredeando.