Abstract

In face of an ethno/Eurocentric system that plunders and exploits human and nonhuman beings by wild capitalisms, colonialist and enslaving genocides, the exclusionary and femicide heteropatriarchy, women in the north and the global south have struggled through processes of resistance for centuries.

Indigenous women have been subject to the greatest impacts produced by these systems of death, Maya and Xinca women of Guatemala and Bolivian Aymara, propose an indigenous community feminism that will bring all the patriarchates to an end, in a process of decolonisation which in turn should be depatriarchalising. Their motto is that without depatriarchalisation there will be no decolonisation (Paredes, 2010).

If this is true in the global South, it is not least in the north, but here we also have to focus on the downside of this issue, which is that without decolonisation there will be no depatriarchalisation. In light of a white hegemonic feminism, black, Chicano, indigenous… feminists have spent decades criticizing the ethnocentric and colonial bias that even today can be seen in many of the institutionalised discourses about gender binary opposition, which do not fit the realities of people with diverse sexual and gender identities and/or orientations. It is extremely urgent to work this decolonisation so to also depatriarchalise in the north.

Key Words: Decolonisation, depatriarchalization, Post and Decolonial Feminisms

Suggested Readings

Framework
- Cabrera, Marta; Vargas Monroy, Liliana (2014) “Transfeminismo, decolonialidad y el asunto del conocimiento: algunas inflexiones de los feminismos disidentes contemporáneos”, en Universitas Humanística, 78 julio-diciembre de 2014, Bogotá, 19-37.

- Chirix, Emma (2015) “¿Colonialismo en el feminismo blanco?”, en Blog Comunidad de Estudios Mayas, 6 de febrero 2015, http://commaya2012.blogspot.mx/2015_02_01_archive.html

Q&A
- Ensler, Eve (2013) “The Congo Stigmata”, en In the Body of the World. A Memoir of Cancer and Connection, Macmillan, 41-44.

Also available at
http://talkmag.in/cms/columns/book-talk/item/1564-thecongo-stigmata

- Fraser, Nancy (2013) “How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it”, en The Guardian, 14 octubre 2013.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal

[To access the articles under discussion send an email to gw@ces.uc.pt]

Bio note:

Begoña Dorronsoro is Bachelor in Biological Sc. (Ecology) at the University of the Basque Country (U.P.V.-E.H.U.) Spain. With a broad experience of more than 10 years, volunteering and working on international cooperation for development issues, with indigenous counterparts mainly from Colombia, Bolivia and Guatemala.Turns to the academy to get a Master on Feminist and Gender Studies, at the University of the Basque Country too, with the final presentation of the master thesis "Contextualizando la descolonización del feminismo desde la perspectiva indígena. Una mirada múltiple" 2009 (unpublished)