How do contemporary Latin American feminist cultural practices mobilize media, form, and public space to contest gender and state violence? This panel addresses this question through the analysis of graffiti and video-mapping, poetry and photography, and transnational performance. The contributions gathered here engage with diverse understandings of how feminist resistance operates through the bodies, material surfaces, and virtual circuits in Latin America. The scholars in this panel situate activist practices within a long and constantly renewed history of formal and transmedia strategies to make gendered and racialized violence visible that challenge state violence, and build transnational solidarity. Each presentation attends to the specific materiality of its object — a protest chant, a collaborative artist's book, a monument's surface — while reflecting on how feminist form and feminist politics are co-constitutive.
Since 2015 Latin America has witnessed an extraordinary intensification of feminist mobilization: the Ni Una Menos and Green Wave movements, the mass performance of Un violador en tu camino throughout the continent and the pintas feministas that marked Mexico City's monuments during the 2020 International Women's Day in march are some examples of this activism. Existing scholarship tends to treat these movements through social movement studies and through single-medium close reading. This panel proposes a transmedia feminist framework that brings together scholars working across performance, visual culture, poetry, and heritage studies. This interdisciplinary approach illuminates the logics of political embodiment, and archival and textualities circulation.
The panel's contributions are in dialogue with several bodies of scholarship: transnational feminist theory and its theorizations of solidarity and testimonial travel (Grewal and Kaplan; Sternbach et al.); new materialist and affect theory approaches to feminist performance and protest (Serafini; Butler); decolonial feminist and eco-translation frameworks foregrounding gendered and racialized knowledge production (Lugones; Mignolo); and heritage and memory studies scholarship on monumentality and urban space in Latin America (García Canclini; Huyssen). Together, these presentations ask how feminist activisms' material and formal properties constitute acts of political intervention.
Each of the three presentations is given 15 minutes, preceded by a 3-minute introduction from the chair (55 minutes total). This format will reserve a minimum of 20 minutes for open, unstructured discussion, during which panelists and audience will exchange ideas.
"When Protest Travels: Feminist Testimony and Transmedia Activism in A Rapist in Your Path" analyzes the Chilean feminist performance Un violador en tu camino by Las Tesis as embodied testimonial protest and transmedia activism. The presentation traces how the chant functions as a mobile feminist archive, traveling across borders, languages, and digital platforms through repetition and recontextualization. It argues that chants constitute emancipatory testimony, and that by moving private feelings into the public space and a transnational solidarity is created against gender-based violence.
"'My Water Is Not Your Circumstance': Translingual Feminist Form in El río / The River" a collaborative work by poet and activist Dolores Dorantes and photographer Zoe Leonard, as an instance of feminist form and political intervention. Dorantes’ poetic voice declares, “My water is not a part of your circumstances,” moving between English and Spanish without translation. This translingual refusal operates as a feminist strategy, rejecting transparency and resisting monolingual, state-centered narratives. The project’s transmedial composition placing poetry and photography in tension produces a critical space in which representation itself becomes contested.
"Heritage De-Faced: Scriptural and Digital Coatings" reflects on the uses of the surfaces and “skins” of Mexican cultural and natural heritage and how this deployment of monuments and landscape as canvas results in re-narrations with high political stakes, reinforcing or defying the state’s patrimonial narrative. Through a comparative reading of digital spectacle and feminist graffiti, it theorizes defacing, de-facing, and queering as distinct modes of intervention into patrimony, arguing for heritage's malleability as a form of political and aesthetic queerness.
This panel assembles scholars from different national contexts —Chile, Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexico border— as well as diverse disciplinary formations including performance studies, poetics and translation, and heritage and visual culture studies. Combining early-career and established voices the panel reflects a broad range of methodological and geographic perspectives within Latin American feminist cultural studies.