Feminist Genealogies: On Women, Revolution & Enlightment. A Point of View from the South

Abstract

The goal of this work is to sketch and reconstruct Feminist Genealogies from a southern perspective.It aims to articulate a philosophical reflection on women’s political past and the disperse fragments of thehistory of women (herstory) in Our America. This reading will be based on the Benjaminian thought about therelationship between past and present. From this point of view, the past that concerns subalterns is the jetztzeit, a present time that is fed from the regard to the past. Namely, in this case, the relationship between asignificant time of the History of Our America — the time of the Independence Wars during the nineteencentury — and the present. At the time new horizons were opened, then anticipated as the inauguration ofa new time and a new political order. This reflection is focused on the relationship between body, politics andHistory/Herstory with the attempt to build situated and critical knowledge against the idea of the a-historicalcharacter of subordination of women, to transform it into what Genevieve Fraisse called a “querelle”, that isa timeless debate in which the endless repetition of the same situation is at play. In this note we will discuss howand why this operation multiplies in the case of the southern women.