Pensamento Feminista Hoje: Perspectivas Decoloniais. Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, editor. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, 2020 (ISBN: 978-85-69924-78-4)

Abstract

When I received the invitation to review Pensamento Feminista Hoje: Perspectivas Decoloniais (Feminist Thought Today: Decolonial Perspectives), I was excited to engage in this work that centers leading feminist scholars from around the world, published in Portuguese. However, my second thought was, they do realize that I’m a feminist anthropologist, and not a feminist philosopher, right? In this essay, I will offer a brief description and overview of the book, as well as a detailed description of a subset of essays that offer key contributions, from my perspective as a Black feminist anthropologist. A key strength of this book is the national, regional, linguistic, racial, and ethnic diversity of the contributors. Of the twenty-two contributors, eleven are from Brazil, two are from Ecuador, two are from Bolivia, and two are from the Dominican Republic, as well as one contributor each from Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Algeria, and Nigeria. Eight of the contributors self-identify as Black. In this sense, the editor, Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, certainly reflects an awareness of the diversity of women’s lives and transnational feminist perspectives. The book is divided into three major sections: “Desafiando Matrizes” (Challenging Matrices); “Práticas Decolonais” (Decolonial Practices); and “Outras Línguas: Três Artistas Brasileiras” (Other Languages: Three Brazilian Artists). The editor admits that these divisions are arbitrary, and that they “reinforce the urgency of eliminating the binary between theory and practice” (30). The book consists of an introduction, sixteen chapters, and includes three artist profiles at the end. In the introduction, Buarque de Hollanda offers an overview of the decolonial turn, summarizing some of the key interventions of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Anibal Quijano, and María Lugones. Maldonado-Torres defines the decolonial turn as “a movement of political and epistemological resistance to the logic of modernity/coloniality” (16). Buarque de Hollanda asserts that decolonial feminism “denounces the structural imbrication of notions of heteronormativity, racial classification, and the capitalist system” (17). She provides a chapter overview that highlights key interventions from the contributors, such as Julieta Paredes’s concept of “community feminism,” and Maria da Graça Costa’s argument that feminism is crucial to agroecology. The “Challenging Matrices” section opens with a foundational 1988 essay by Afro-Brazilian feminist scholar Lélia Gonzalez, which denounces how feminism has often “forgotten” about the racial question. Drawing upon Lacanian thought, Gonzalez argues that Black women have been “spoken about, defined and classified