Monographic Section L32 (2026): Identity Crossroads and Social Transformation: Rethinking Feminisms in the 21st Century
Social transformation is a human aspiration that is as necessary as it is natural in modern societies. As a result, the reflections and mobilizations of both the activism of minority groups and the different approaches to transfeminism, gender, sexual diversity, antiracism, and posthumanism in recent decades tend to be guided by this demand for social change.
However, even when the debates and dialogues produced within the context of feminist politics have challenged gender binaries, gone beyond the limits that define the subject of feminism, and conceived sexuality and gender beyond bodily and biological boundaries, their revindications have often reinforced fundamentals of colonial epistemology. In their efforts to socially transform the norms and categories that define what Judith Butler has called a “livable life”, they have frequently resorted to frameworks based on exclusive identitarian categories and humanist reformulations of the subject. Hegemonic, white, Eurocentric feminism has usually understood a “livable life” to be constituted by not just a minimum of human biology but, especially, by what is humanly intelligible in terms of the social, spatial and chronological forms of production, repetition, and continuity that make a life meaningful. But aspiring to a “livable life” is not always possible for subjects who have been deprived of their “humanity” because of their skin color, their sexuality, or their migratory status. Moreover, this aspiration can also entail the risk of not problematizing the colonial nature of the categories through which we name our oppression. In other words, to reduce the political struggle to the revindication of identities through which the demands of social justice are articulated is to simply restore the categories (androcentric, patriarchal, colonial, heterosexual, ableist) that, in defining what is “human”, legitimize said exclusions. “These identities and differences, even if they are important to position ourselves and to build coalitions, cannot be the main focus of our politics”, says Ochy Curiel, who also insists on the need “to consolidate a project in common that is committed to the struggle to end all systems of domination and that is constituted by the multiple subjects who have been impacted by coloniality.”
Speaking from a radically different site of enunciation than Curiel, Paul B. Preciado has also insisted on the necessity of abolishing the inscription of sexual difference in administrative documents. Especially since the publication of Dysphoria mundi, his proposal defends that the paradoxical situation in the Global North should be put to an end, insofar as the North has dedicated their political struggles and the desire for social transformation—since at least the 1970s—to the reclamation of social rights that are sustained by the production of stagnant identities. Further, these are themselves buttressed by systems of thought and socialization rooted in modern coloniality, and which reinforce processes of social normalization within the framework of sexual difference and gender changes within the binary.
With this in mind, of note is how antiracist and post/decolonial feminists have distanced themselves from the idea of gender, as well as from approaches to modes of oppression that in fact impose and reduce the matrix of inequality to a sex/gender universalism. Among these feminists, Oyèronkẹ́ Oyěwùmí stands out as denouncing the “racialization of knowledge” and has demonstrated that gender is not a universal category that could allow us to explain the forms of relationality and social organization that are established in non-Western societies. This colonial inheritance is what leads us to demean bodily knowledge. Verónica Gago proposes understanding violence against women, lesbians, and transwomen as a network of violence. In doing so, Gago demonstrates the necessity of moving out from under the institutional umbrella that would see us only as victims, in order to understand violence as the result of an organic connection created and upheld by economic, institutional, and labor differences, as well as the colonial inheritance, among others. Gago follows Suely Rolnik in her diagnosis of the colonial dimension of aggression against feminized bodies, especially as a means of emphasizing how colonial repression is structured around the repression of the body itself, of its ability to listen to the forces of the present, and its power to evaluate and act. It is in this sense that Gago notes that “The ability to evaluate and the ability to act are two powerful, practical keys for subaltern knowledge and feminist epistemology”. Body knowledge “is a strategic knowledge-power" that operates “both in the defensive withdrawal and in the persistence of the desire for disobedience”. The body, however, does not only articulate a feminist epistemology in its aptitude for listening in the present, but also in relation to the past and the ancestral Black diaspora. iki yos piña celebrates that, “Above all, we are negrxs, cimarrónicxs and this is in our songs for our dead and our prayers to our gods”, as a resisting body whose knowledge is defined through alternative registers that recognize the presence of spirituality. This is in line with what Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro calls “singular time: the time of smiles, tears, pleasure, stomach flu” and in which materiality is in “constant transformation”, in an escape that connects us to the memory of the earth.
Within a theoretical and political context in which antiracism and the critique of modernity and colonial epistemologies continues to be marginalized, it is necessary to interrogate and rethink how feminisms articulate their proposals, activism, and language in order to achieve social transformation. Along these lines, if the struggles and theories rooted in identity have demonstrated their limitations and exclusions, it becomes necessary to ask ourselves, how can we name and contest inequalities? Is feminism that derives from identity—even when this questions gender binaries—not just another way of perpetuating those privileges sustaining white, Eurocentric thinking? How can we constitute feminism’s subject(s)? How are feminist theories produced from the Global South distinctive in their articulations of collaborative thinking? To what extent are those feminisms produced in the North dialoguing and contributing to these proposals and activism?
On the other hand, what do we do with difference? How can we work toward social transformation without falling into the dangerous trap of essentialisms and their intelligibility? What epistemological possibilities emerge from these debates? To what extent can fiction—literary, filmic, historical—and artistic production and performance from recent decades offer alternatives for thinking about paths toward social transformation that are not limited to debates on identity vs. anti-identity?
This call is open to articles that reflect on these questions, contradictions, crossroads, and proposals as they are reflected in textuality and culture, with the goal of rethinking the site of intellectual, artistic, and feminist activist productions and how these reorient their contributions within the framework of the changes and political and social tensions that run throughout institutional knowledges in the 21st century.
This monographic section will be edited by Dr. María Teresa Vera-Rojas (Universitat de les Illes Balears).
Articles, written in Catalan, Spanish, Galician, Basque, English, French, Italian or Portuguese, should follow the journal’s style guidelines and be submitted online before September 15, 2025.
Journal guidelines and information on previous issues are available at: https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/lectora/information/authors
Works cited
Butler, Judith (2006), Deshacer el género, Patrícia Soley-Beltran (trad.), Paidós, Barcelona [2004].
Curiel, Ochy (2021), “A propósito de las protestas sociales en Abya Yala”, Ochy Curiel y Diego Falconí Trávez, Feminismos decoloniales y transformación social, Icaria, Barcelona: 61-91.
Gago, Verónica (2019), La potencia feminista. O el deseo de cambiarlo todo, Madrid, Traficantes de sueños.
Oyěwùmí, Oyèronkẹ́ (2024), “Conceptualizar el género: los fundamentos eurocéntricos de los conceptos feministas y el reto de las epistemologías africanas”, Feminismos antirracistas: relecturas para el siglo XXI, María Teresa Vera-Rojas (ed.), Toni R. Juncosa (trad.), Icaria, Barcelona: 31-45 [2002].
piña narváez, iki yos, “Mi cuerpx es una derivación ancestral”, The Backroom. Museo Tamayo.<https://www.museotamayo.org/thebackroom/iki-yos-pina-narvaez>.
Preciado, Paul B. (2022), Dysphoria mundi: el sonido del mundo derrumbándose, Barcelona, Anagrama.
Vitorino Brasileiro, Castiel (2019), “Conversación con Castiel Vitorino ‘El trauma es brasileño’”, entrevista con Diana Lima, C& América Latina, 12 ago., 2019. < https://amlatina.contemporaryand.com/es/editorial/trauma-brasileiro-castiel-vitorino/>.
