The article interrogates transnational feminisms as a concept and as a practice. It frames its analysis using contemporary theories of globalization and the older concept of global sisterhood as a backdrop to the concept of transnational feminism. To assess the practical dimension of transnational feminisms, the analysis focuses on women's rights as a human rights movement and the transnationalization of Latin American feminisms. The article suggests that, although transnational feminisms (particularly feminist postcolonial theories) envision themselves in a new frame and see themselves as committed to intersectional analysis and transversal politics, there are important gaps between the intentions (theory, tactics) and outcomes of their theory and practice.

Anticolonial theories analyze complex power relations between the colonizer and the colonized to promote the political project of decolonization. This chapter situates anticolonial feminist theories in relation to two schools of anticolonial thinking, postcolonial and decolonial theory, particularly the strand of decolonial theory developed by the modernity/coloniality school of thought of Latin America. It compares key theoretical arguments and political projects associated with intersectionality, postcolonial feminism, and the decolonial feminism that Maria Lugones has advanced with her notion of the coloniality of gender. The chapter explores the reception of Lugones work in Latin America and the critical insights that decolonial theory offers contemporary social justice projects.

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A cursory review of diverse theories (postmodernism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, decolonial theory, and anthropology) that are concerned with the crisis of modernity and ecological destruction reveal not only how moderns often have turned to indigenous cosmologies and ontologies to find resolutions to this crisis, but also how confounding this process of recuperation has been. We observe moderns sometimes trying to appear as saviors of the subalterns because they intuit in the subalterns a revelation so powerful it will prevent the definite destruction of the world, or at least redeem the moderns from the sins of their ancestors. At other times, we find moderns giving a substantive importance to the concepts and ontologies developed by non-moderns as a way to imagine futurity for themselves. Instead of rescuing the subaltern, it is the subaltern that rescues them. There are also cases where indigenous ontologies and cosmologies are utilized in unstated forms as in posthumanism, revealing the colonial relationship to indigenous knowledges that modern theorists often have. This includes postcolonial and decolonial theorists from the south, which is my locus of enunciation. Indigenous intellectuals themselves are committed to rescue their ancestral knowledges to build futurity as they also believe that their cosmologies and ontologies are better suited to solve the problems of modernity. But in the indigenous projects, there are no absolute dividing lines or clear-cut dichotomies between indigenous and modern epistemologies. Here I argue that indigenous peoples have dealt for centuries with modern epistemologies. Indigenous theories must be taken more seriously, but also critically analyzed.