Call for articles: “Historiographical and intellectual productions on Latin American women and feminisms”
Call for articles:
“Historiographical and intellectual productions on Latin American women and feminisms”
Deadline for submission: January 31, 2025
Since it emerged as a field of knowledge production in the 1970s and 1980s, women's history (and later gender relations and feminism) has spawned an impressive range of research, theoretical reflections, and publications in a variety of forms. Disseminating the results of research was and has been key to circulating knowledge that is multiple in terms of themes, sources, periods, and approaches. In this little more than half a century of research, despite the intense production of research and theoretical and methodological reflections, there have been fewer frequent analyses of the intellectual paths taken by scholars and the meanings of such production over time. Given the significant time that has elapsed since work began in this area and the considerable mass of results, we believe it is important and desirable to open up space for reflections focused especially on historiographical analysis, seeking to understand the historicity of production and its development paths.
The start of this research field in our region coincides with the expansion of women's and feminist movements so that academic production in the area of women's studies can hardly be thought of in isolation from social processes. Understanding this type of production implies surveying the referential works that have been important for studies on the different themes that deal with women/gender and feminisms. In this same chronological period, Latin America attracted a great deal of interest from foreign academics who carried out important intellectual work, whose works have become a reference for women's mobilizations and figures. Therefore, we must retrace the paths taken by women's history, understanding how this production was received and given new meaning.
Thus, this proposal covers works that propose to provide historiographical analyses and assessments of these fundamental themes, focusing on the production of women, gender, and feminisms in Latin America, from the colonial period to the present. This material should be gathered and analyzed to understand which aspects have been most explored by historiography and intellectual production in other areas of the Human Sciences, how much work has been concentrated on certain themes, where there are gaps in other areas and the key analytical points of the discussions on each proposed collaborative theme. It is also desirable to be able to measure/question the impact of the theoretical contributions in these productions from all these periods, such as the social history of women, debates on gender relations, queer theory, intersectionalities, decoloniality, and feminist criticism. Theoretical approaches, after all, have also contributed to the emergence of new investigative paths that have marked historiographical production on women, gender, and feminisms in Latin America.
Revisiting production paths with a historiographical focus means weighing up what has been analyzed over time on a given topic. Proposing a file of this nature also implies an interest in the formative paths of historians and researchers from other areas who have dedicated themselves to studying women/gender and Latin American feminisms, aiming to examine their trajectories, understand their motivations, the degree of engagement of their productions, the limits they found in terms of the interpretative paths they proposed, the doors they opened in their research and analysis, the prejudices they faced, and the strategies they articulated to overcome them. It means thinking about the roles of these characters who, in doing historical research on the subject, also ended up making history. This is a concern that has been addressed by different authors in recent times. Here, we are asking not only what is the history of those who have made the history of women, gender, and feminisms in general, but also how this has happened specifically in Latin America. In addition, it is worth inquiring about the relationship between the production of knowledge in this part of the continent and other centers of production, such as the United States and Spain, which, in addition to having a marked historical and power relationship with Latin American countries, cultivate a relevant historiographical production as “Latin Americanists”.
