The Latin+ Feminist Sociology Collective Launches its site!
https://www.latinplusfeministcollective.org
The Latin+ Feminist Sociology Collective launched its own website (www.latinplusfeministcollective.org) on July 1, 2022. The Latin+ Feminist Sociology Collective was created in 2020 by Drs. Erika Busse-Cardenas, Nancy López, Verónica Montes, and Roberta Villalón in the context of the Sociologists for Women in Society 2020 Winter Meeting as a community group. Since then, the Collective has been offering workshops and virtual gatherings, and dozens of Latin+ feminists joined enthusiastically, emphasizing the pressing need of building this community.
The Latin+ Feminist Sociology Collective is a space to share, validate, reflect, and coproduce knowledge for liberation about being a critically conscious Latin+ Feminist Scholar in the Global North. The Collective is guided by our ethical and political commitments to a Latin+ antiracist intersectional feminist liberatory praxis that acknowledges the heterogeneity of our lived experiences and the legacies of the Latin American and Caribbean diaspora. Intersectionality as inquiry and praxis is a fundamental pillar of our collective because it departs from the premise that systems of oppression/resistance are imbricated, simultaneous and overlapping (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, nativism, etc.). It also acknowledges that we are all implicated in these systems through our intersectional social locations in grids of power, positionalities through our ethical and political commitments as well as our experiences and narratives of identities or stories we tell about our Latin+ communities in the Global North and beyond.
Accordingly, the Collective cultivates convergence spaces for conversation, coexistence, reflection, accompaniment, and flexible solidarity as essential to its praxis. Moreover, it follows a set of basic agreements to build a safe space including mutual respect, inclusivity, constructiveness, openness, commitment, and multilingualism. Regarding the latter, it has so far utilized English, Spanish and Portuguese in its gatherings, documents and communications, but is open to include as many languages as necessary by providing as much interpretation and translations as possible to ensure mutual comprehension. Simultaneously, the Collective acknowledges that its physical location and the geopolitical, educational and cultural legacies of migrations in the United States and the Global North has resulted in the use of English as lingua franca, which is the reason why its site is mostly written in that language while including Spanish and Portuguese versions of some but not all content.
Borrowing from the terminology developed by non-binary social movements (from LGB to LGBTQIA+), the Collective adopts the term “Latin+” using the plus sign as a means to highlight its commitment to intersectional inquiry and praxis that centers the simultaneity and co-constructed nature of systems of oppression/resistance. The Collective is committed to cultivating flexible solidarity and alliances across geopolitical and sociocultural borders and boundaries and embrace our difference in race, gender, class, sexuality, age, ability and other as part of our intersectional praxis. By utilizing the term Latin+, the Collective attempts to commit to on-going critical reflexivity and work toward praxis (action and reflection) that strives to overcome the paralysis that confrontations about the variations Latin@, Latine, and Latinx have brought. It believes that the term Latin+ can help the Collective be more inclusive and inviting, while also implying a literally positive turn given that plus means addition, development, multiplicity and incorporation.
The Latin+ Feminist Sociology Collective has developed several initiatives reflecting the needs and interests that emerged in our various workshops and monthly gatherings:
- Latin+ Feminist Blog
- Latin+ Feminist Podcast
- Build on Latin+ Feminist Scholars
- Latin+ Feminist Scholars Speakers
- Counter-hegemonic Pedagogical Tools
You can learn more about the Collective and its initiatives at its newly launched site: www.latinplusfeministcollective.org and of course, by joining its future virtual monthly gatherings and workshops at the upcoming SWS Summer Meeting.