Peasant and popular feminism and feminist epistemology

situated knowledges and decolonial critiques from the Latin American countryside

Abstract

This article examines the convergences and tensions between peasant and popular feminism and feminist epistemology, taking as its central focus Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” and the critiques developed by Latin American decolonial feminisms. We begin from the observation that, although peasant and popular feminism has consolidated itself as a political project of rural women in Latin America, its specifically epistemological implications remain underexplored in the literature. Based on a documentary literature review, we bring Haraway’s work into dialogue with scholarship on peasant and popular feminism and with contributions from decolonial authors such as Ochy Curiel and Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso. On the one hand, we discuss how “situated knowledges” challenge claims to neutrality in knowledge production and unsettle the centrality of urban-centered and Eurocentric epistemologies within feminist debates, offering analytical tools to recognize peasant women’s experiences—inscribed in body-territories, agroecological practices, and anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal struggles—as embodied standpoints. On the other hand, we highlight the limits of feminist epistemology produced from the Global North by showing how rural women’s theoretical-political elaborations displace and radicalize the notion of situated knowledge, foregrounding coloniality, racism, and territorial dispossession as central dimensions. We argue that knowledges produced from the Latin American countryside are not merely objects of inquiry but theoretical interventions that contribute to the formulation of a situated and decolonial feminist epistemology, thereby expanding the horizon of contemporary feminist theory.