The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

Examining feminist ethics in Latin America is necessarily an interdisciplinary endeavor. While the number of feminists in professional philosophy in Latin America continues to increase, historians and social scientists such as the Mexican anthropologist Lourdes Arizpe, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Elizabeth Jelin, an Argentine sociologist who earned her doctorate at the University of Texas, have been important forerunners in engaging in feminist ethical discussions. Human rights and relatively new academic fields such as memory studies also intersect with feminist ethics. Writers, artists, and filmmakers additionally contribute to shaping the contours of feminist ethics. This chapter addresses common practices in women’s expression, ethical perspectives on women’s historical struggles, late twentieth-century consciousness-raising, and contemporary feminist ethics.

An especially effective means of conveying women’s situations is the genre known as testimonio:

an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g., war, oppression, revolution, etc.) Emphasizing popular oral discourse, the witness portrays his or her own experience as a representative of a collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or exorcising and setting aright official history.

For example, Let Me Speak! is an account by a woman married to a Bolivian tin miner of her efforts to organize women in the mining community and confront class struggle, exploitation, and repression (Barrios de Chúngara et al. 1978). Similarly, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Rigoberta Menchú, details the plight of indigenous Guatemalans in one of the most violent contexts in the Americas (Menchú 1987). In Massacre in Mexico (Poniatowska 1991), a collection of cleverly imbricated, eyewitness accounts of the massacre of 325 students who had peacefully protested police repression the week before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City combine to portray an assault that went far beyond the Kent State and Jackson State shootings and the incident of the eleven people who were bayoneted by National Guardsmen at the University of New Mexico. The military repression of Mexican students continues to resonate, particularly in the context of the 2014 kidnapping of forty-three student teachers of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Mexico.

In the above testimonios, more educated, literate women facilitate the transmission of other women’s accounts of their lives. This practice in itself generates ethical issues as some accounts stem from responses to a series of guided questions and others are more free-flowing transcriptions with few prompts (Patai 1993 [1988]). Documentary films incorporate testimonio in various ways. Rigoberta Menchu’s fight for existence and political voice during troubled United States-Guatemala relations is featured in Cuando tiemblan las montañas (1983, When the Mountains Tremble). Que bom te ver viva (1989, How Nice to See You Alive Again) graphically explores the brutal challenges women face decades after they were tortured during Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Beyond the academy, Chilean women who created arpilleras, colorful patchwork scenes on burlap that depict the abuses of General Augusto Pinochet’s regime, powerfully express their ethical indignation. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the human rights group formed in 1977 by women whose children were disappeared by the military regime in Argentina, had to witness the pardons of military leaders in the early 1990s, but now many of these women may live to see their children’s torturers and murderers sentenced to prison terms. Ongoing trials represent an overwhelming achievement after long years of struggle. In most Latin American countries, women have had occasion to participate in the caceroleada, the simple act of taking to the streets as a group and banging on pots and pans to draw attention to their ethical indignation over events or policies.

Throughout Latin American history women have faced ethical challenges, and some have been able to report on how they handled them. More than five centuries ago, the woman known alternately as Malinal, Malintzin, Malinche, or Doña Marina was assigned to Hernán Cortés as a slave. La Malinche (the Traitor) became one of the most reviled figures in Mexican history because she was believed to have opened the door to the European invaders and enabled the conquest. La Malinche and a Spanish priest, Gerónimo Aguilar, worked in tandem to interpret for Cortés by transferring Nahuatl (the Aztec language) first to the Chontal Mayan language and then to Spanish. They continued this practice until La Malinche learned Spanish and could herself interpret directly from Nahuatl to Spanish for Cortés. La Malinche also had a child by Cortés. Sandra Cypess interprets Malinche as “Protector of the foreigner, she was also the Great Mother; the child she bore Cortés, Don Martín, was considered the first mestizo, origin of the Mexican nation, the union of the Amerindian and European” (Cypess 2010: 9). Gloria Anzaldúa portrays Malinche as one of three Chicana mother figures, the others being the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Llorona, the weeping woman featured in a well-known Mexican legend (Anzaldúa 2012: 54). Used as an adjective, Malinche’s name is synonymous with “traitorous,” but what if La Malinche had been a man? While he would not have had a child with Cortés, he would presumably still have been his interpreter. Rather than becoming known as El Malinche, he instead might be viewed today as a brilliant entrepreneur who secured privilege and status for himself, cleverly working his way out of slavery. Gerónimo Aguilar, the Spanish priest who co-interpreted with La Malinche, appears to share none of the blame for the betrayal. He has been de-emphasized almost to the point of invisibility, as if La Malinche had single-handedly interpreted for Cortés and must, therefore, assume all of the blame for the conquest.

Another noteworthy woman who experienced ethical dilemmas was Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a nun, Mexican baroque poet and philosopher who has become a powerful symbol for independent and socially exploratory thought in the Americas (Oliver 2014). Octavio Paz, Nobel Prize Winner and Mexican poet and essayist, wrote a sensitive biography of Sor Juana in which he did not fully develop her feminist dimensions though he did compellingly reveal her to be a poet of equal standing in the Americas with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (Paz 1990). A decade after Paz’s biography, Stephanie Merrim published Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Merrim 1999), in which key feminist essays explore Sor Juana’s ethical dilemmas. In the world of seventeenth-century Mexico in which women had only two lifestyle options, marriage or the convent, Sor Juana chose the one she perceived as the lesser of evils, and the one that would give her the greatest independence.

A passage in her poem, “Foolish Men,” questions the hypocrisy of men regarding sexual behavior, especially prostitution, and the Eve-Mary dichotomy many such men seek to perpetuate:

Or which is more to be blamed—

though both will have cause for chagrin:

the woman who sins for money

or the man who pays money to sin?

So why are you men all so stunned

at the thought you’re all guilty alike?

Either like them for what you’ve made them

or make of them what you can like.

(Trueblood 1988: 113)

Sor Juana, battling the “primitive instincts” of men during the colonial period, was certainly a thinker ahead of her time, and it took considerable courage to express her views, perspectives that revealed hypocritical stereotypes that trapped women into spaces that stunted their intellectual and moral growth. Indeed, Sor Juana’s writings put her at great risk for censure and punishment. Sor Juana’s most famous essay, “Reply to Sister Philothea de la Cruz,” has been translated into English five times, which gives a measure of its perceived importance. This essay resulted from a discussion with Sor Juana’s long-time friend, the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, in which she expressed criticism of a well-known sermon given forty years earlier by an eminent Portuguese Jesuit, Antonio de Vieyra. The bishop was impressed with Sor Juana’s argument and requested that she put it in writing. Without Sor Juana’s permission or knowledge, the bishop then paid for her critique to be published and titled it “Missive Worthy of Athena.” However, in an apparent contradiction, he simultaneously sent a letter to Sor Juana admonishing her for her intellectualism and suggesting that she comport herself more like other nuns by devoting her time to religious rather than secular matters. He signed his letter with a feminine pen name, Sor Philothea de la Cruz.

The bishop was evidently not the friend Sor Juana thought him to be, since his letter left her open to attack from a rather misogynist establishment in the Mexico City of her day. The bishop benefited from the public circulation of Sor Juana’s critique because it coincided with his own negative assessment of Vieyra’s sermon and because it helped him advance in his rivalry with the Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco Aguiar y Seijas, who was an admirer of Vieyra in addition to being well known for his misogyny. That a woman wrote a brilliant critique of Vieyra’s sermon was heresy enough, but that Sor Juana was a nun also raised issues of religious authority and hierarchy. Sor Juana found herself entangled in the contentious relationship between two powerful figures in the Church. Thus, it comes as no surprise that she was pressured to conform to traditional expectations for nuns by accepting the punishment of selling her substantial library and musical and scientific instruments.

Among the many techniques analyzed in How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Russ 1983), the one that most closely corresponds to the suppression of Sor Juana’s expression is, “She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have.” In an extraordinary twist on how to perpetrate this particular form of suppression, the bishop asked Sor Juana to put in writing an oral analysis he thought brilliant, then without her permission paid for her written analysis to be published, and finally admonished her in writing for having written it. Sor Juana’s case, then, requires an unusual addition to the suppression technique described by Russ, and becomes “She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have (even though she was asked to).” Sor Juana’s response to this treatment by the bishop came to be a famously defining moment in her life.

After maintaining a silence of several months following the surprise publication of the “Missive Worthy of Athena” and receipt of the bishop’s letter of admonition, and no doubt acutely aware of the greatly circumscribed space available to women in colonial times, Sor Juana wrote her now famous “Reply to Sister Philothea de la Cruz.” In Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, Debra A. Castillo distinguishes between choosing to remain silent and simply remaining silent: “One reaction to the pressures of the dominant social force is silence. Initially, however, silence is not a response but a condition imposed from outside: silencing, rather than silence freely chosen” (Castillo 1992: 37). Sor Juana announces her silence in her Reply; that is, she explains that she is not going to remain silent, but that talking back, or breaking her silence, is her choice. Castillo rightly argues that “no decir” (not speaking) and “callar” (remaining silent) are actions of different orders. After months of not commenting, Sor Juana chose to break her silence by voicing through the Reply at least a partial version of her objections. In view of the sad politics of her context, she most likely could not have gotten away with more than what she writes explicitly and implies indirectly in her Reply.

The Reply is largely autobiographical and what little we know of Sor Juana’s life comes primarily from this crucial letter. Sor Juana seeks through her own example, and the example of classical and biblical women, to defend a woman’s right to education, knowledge, and reflection. She also manages to extract from St. Paul and St. Jerome passages that she uses to support a woman’s right to be educated. The Reply showcases Sor Juana’s mastery of theology, but she devotes much of the letter to explaining how the study of the secular world enhances and is necessary for the understanding of theology. Thus, she indirectly challenges the bishop’s contention that she should devote herself solely to religious matters by proving her erudition in theology and church history at the same time as she demonstrates her mastery of many secular intellectual domains. Following St. Theresa of Avila, Sor Juana explains to “Sor Philothea” how she philosophizes even while cooking. She writes, “If Aristotle had been a cook, he would have written much more” (Trueblood 1988: 226). Ultimately, Sor Juana proves that devoting herself solely to religious matters would not serve to enhance her unparalleled knowledge or practice of them, but would only diminish her knowledge of the secular subjects that she had also mastered. In this sense, Sor Juana demonstrates that the bishop’s “suggestion” that she limit her pursuits to the religious could only be interpreted as arbitrary and punitive.

A few years after sending the Reply to the bishop, and after having been forced to give up her books and instruments for having written this missive, Sor Juana succumbed to a plague while ministering to her sisters. Her last years were undoubtedly marked by frustration, fear, and repression, but the Reply serves as an inspiring defense of her earlier participation in public life, her studies, and her poetry and prose writings. The ways in which she defends intellectual autonomy, particularly for women, and indirectly questions authority that seeks to repress such an endeavor, have led many to champion her as a symbol of independent thought.

With the stirrings of suffrage in the beginning of the twentieth century, a wide swath of women in Latin America engaged in discussion of women’s rights and possibilities. Perhaps unexpected was that a man was the first philosopher to write a book on feminism. Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872–1958) was Uruguay’s leading twentieth-century philosopher. He was exceptionally dedicated to public education at all levels and was arguably the most famous and public professor at the University of Montevideo. Almost all of his published work stemmed from lectures he gave at the university. Among the best known of his many works are Lógica viva (Living Logic) and Moral para intelectuales (Ethics for Intellectuals). To the surprise of many male colleagues, who did not see a particular need to think seriously about feminism, Vaz Ferreira delivered a series of public lectures on feminism between 1914 and 1917.

Vaz Ferreira, in the context of a progressive political climate in Montevideo, later published Sobre feminismo (1945 [1933]). During the two presidencies of José Batlle y Ordóñez (1903–1907 and 1911–1915), Uruguay became the first country to legislate the eight-hour workday, the first to guarantee healthcare to the poor, and the home of a social security system that served as a model for the rest of the continent. Changes in the law also made it easier for women to divorce and gain access to higher education and social services, and in 1932 Uruguay became the second Latin American nation to grant women the vote in national elections (after Ecuador in 1929). Vaz Ferreira’s feminist thought was supported by the progressive political climate established by politicians such as Batlle y Ordóñez and Baltasar Brum, but Vaz was himself an agent of change. Concerned with the civil and political rights of women and the social participation of women, Vaz Ferreira, working with many others, had a decisive impact in favor of women in the Uruguayan legislature. Vaz Ferreira proposed a bill that passed into law exactly as he had conceived it: the law of “unilateral divorce,” which gave “women the power to obtain a divorce at will, without giving cause, while men have to show just cause” (Vaz Ferreira 1945 [1933]: 83). This law is consistent with his theory that the situations of men and women are fundamentally different.

In confronting the problem of the social situation of women, Vaz Ferreira’s philosophical strategy had two steps: (1) examining questions of fact, the possible questions about the similarities and differences between the two sexes; (2) examining normative problems. Vaz distinguished factual questions from normative ones in his Lógica viva (1910). Factual questions were those of knowledge and verification. Among the questions of fact, of similarities and differences between the sexes, Vaz Ferreira maintained that debatable data and undebatable data existed. The undebatable detail that was most crucial to him and most radical for his time was: “From the union between a man and a woman, the woman can become pregnant; nothing happens to the man.” He argued further, “Finding this fact to be satisfactory is to be ‘antifeminist’” (Vaz Ferreira 1958: 25). Normative questions were those of action, preference, and choice. For Vaz Ferreira, the normative issues were most relevant to the condition of women. The normative feminist problems for Vaz Ferreira were: (1) a woman’s political rights; (2) a woman’s activity in society, her access to public office, her access to careers, professions, and education; (3) civil rights; and (4) the relations between the sexes and the organization of the family. He addressed such structural issues sometimes before suffragist feminists did, and made significant contributions to theorizing about women in relation to the family. Two Uruguayan scholars argue, “Vaz Ferreira’s ideas about the family and the role of women in it constitute, even today, a kind of paradigm in Uruguayan society” (Rodríguez and Sapriza 1984: 12).

A central idea in his analysis of the above issues was to maintain the difference between feminism of equality and affirmative or corrective feminism. Feminism of equality was based on the idea that

jobs and careers should be open to women as they are to men; that women should have the same civil capacity as men, the same level of education; that, in general, the sexes should be equalized by diminishing the difference between them and by placing women in the same situation as men, making them more like men.

For Vaz Ferreira, “feminism of equality” did not merit much attention because of the fact that women were biologically mistreated by the likelihood of pregnancy in their unions with men and, therefore, to speak of “equalization” was not pragmatic. The only acceptable feminism, for Vaz Ferreira, was corrective, based on the idea that society must compensate physiological injustice given that it will never be possible to equalize it and that it would be counter-productive to attempt to do so. For Vaz Ferreira, “Antifeminism takes as its guide that fact [women’s biological disadvantage]. Bad feminism does not even take it into account. Good feminism strives to correct it and compensate for it” (Vaz Ferreira 1933: 38).

Vaz Ferreira examined a wide range of additional issues affecting women as he formulated theories about what would be necessary to correct their disadvantaged status. Contemporary readers may be made uncomfortable by some of his assertions, which seem antiquated or lodged in Uruguayan social conditions now nearly a century old, but at other moments, his ideas seem contemporary and insightful. The occasional presence in the text of its author being in the patriarchal mode of helping women does not, in the end, taint the surprisingly early advances that men and women together achieved in early twentieth-century Uruguay. Maximizing freedom for women and men was a prominent theme in much of Vaz Ferreira’s work:

His thought was fragmentary and spontaneous and germinal; he opposed systematizing; he sought to open windows, not to build walls; he describes “two types of souls: liberal souls and tutorial souls—souls whose instinctive ideal is freedom (for themselves and for others) and souls which have an ideal of tutelage and consequently of authority,” identifying the former position as his own.

Shortly after Uruguay enacted suffrage, women in other South American countries gained the vote, and it extended throughout most of Latin America by the late 1950s, with Paraguay being the last in 1961.

The International Year of the Woman in 1975 was a catalyst for the women’s movement in much of Latin America. In 1973, Mexican author and feminist Rosario Castellanos published Mujer que sabe latín (the title is an abbreviated version of the expression “A woman who knows Latin has no husband and does not come to a good end”), a collection of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women and feminist topics, which was widely read and appreciated as women prepared for the 1975 events. Her short story collection Album de familia (1971) features “Lección de cocina” (Cooking lesson) in which a recently married woman contemplates the requirements brought about by her new civil status such as cooking, remaining silent, obeying her husband, and being a perfect housekeeper. While reflecting on the double standards present in Mexican society, the protagonist comes to identify with a piece of meat she is cooking, and eventually overcooks, a metaphor for the state in which she finds herself.

After 1975, films about the plight of women in Latin America were made more frequently and involved a wider range of themes. Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa, 1979) examines gender relations, double standards, la doble jornada (the double workday of working for pay and then doing all the household tasks once home), and domestic violence. This film powerfully raised awareness of male privilege and the need for gender equality in Cuba. Although day care centers were established to free women to do paid work, and although Cuban law demanded gender equality, stereotypes endure. “Camila” is based on a true story of nineteenth-century Argentina about Camila O’Gorman, and is a reflection on strategies women use to try to cope with patriarchy and authoritarian governments. It was no accident that this film was made in 1984 and served as a thinly veiled call for resistance to the “dirty war” that was ravaging the country. In Brazil, A hora da estrela (Hour of the Star, 1986) highlights the marginality of the poor, and the phenomenon of rural women who are forced to move to urban centers to find work. This naturalist film portrays work as underemployment that stems from lack of access to education, leading finally to mental underdevelopment of the poor. Lastly, the Mexican film Danzón (1991) shows how a single, middle-class woman, while initially trapped in the typically female occupation of telephone operator, can exercise the right to self-discovery in a man’s world with the result of gaining substantial autonomy and relative empowerment. These films and many others were an effective way for women to reflect on the women’s movement and social change on various levels.

Consciousness-raising about feminism through literature, testimonio, art and film, and studies and publications by social scientists have been followed by more philosophical treatments of feminist ethics. Most Latin American feminist ethicists have no quarrel with the contention by Western feminists that women have not been granted equal value with men in traditional Western ethical theory. There is substantial interest among Latin American feminist philosophers in reading translations of key works by colleagues outside Latin America. Among the thinkers who have been translated into Spanish are Carol Gilligan, Marilyn Frye, Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Kate Millett, Alison M. Jaggar, and Arleen L. F. Salles. Far fewer works by Latin American women have been translated into English and there is a great need to remedy this discrepancy.

María Pía Lara Zavala is a Mexican moral and political philosopher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa, several of whose works have been translated into English, which has allowed her to engage fruitfully with American and British ethicists. In Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (1999), Lara employs Hannah Arendt’s notion of storytelling to establish feminist narratives as critical sources of identity production, which have impact in quests for justice. Lara explores human cruelty in history, moral memory, and reflective judgments in Narrating Evil: A Post-Metaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (2007). While Lara does not work exclusively on feminist topics, her work has much to suggest in this area.

An alternative understanding exists across borders that different epistemologies and ontologies can undergird feminist ethics. Francesca Gargallo studied philosophy in Rome before moving to Mexico, where she earned a doctorate in Latin American Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, specializing in the history of feminist thought, especially indigenous feminisms. Gargallo observes, “Noting that criticism of European and North American feminist concepts and categories has been present throughout the history of Latin American thought is imperative because recovering universals to interpret societies where no underlying political unity exists is impossible” (Femenías and Oliver 2007: 75).

Accordingly, the differences that obtain between Northern and Southern feminist ethics are perhaps more worthy of study than the points of common discourse. In Latin American feminist philosophy, greater concerns with violence, development, and domestic work are three distinctive traits (Schutte 1989). Violence against women includes domestic violence, which is not uncommon, rape, and torture, but these categories should be updated and extended to include hostility and violence toward lesbians, human trafficking, sex trafficking, forced exile, and forced residency of women who would prefer to flee their countries as refugees. Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador are the three countries with the highest levels of community violence against women, or violence committed by organized crime as distinguished from domestic violence. “Pleasure kidnappings” are quite common in which a member of organized crime decides he wants a certain girl or woman. She is then abducted and sexually abused, and, if she is lucky, she is not killed.

Femicide is a pandemic in Mexico partly because of social acceptance of violence against women, but also because murders of women have been caught up in the phenomena of other murders stemming from increasing drug violence and lack of reliable law enforcement. After twenty years of denouncing femicides, activists and experts see the same pattern that was observed in Ciudad Juarez at the beginning of the 1990s throughout Mexico; that is, disappearance, followed by sexual torture, murder, and later the dumping of bodies or body parts in public spaces. Feminist and human rights groups are much more proactive about collecting data and finding solutions than are local, regional, or national governments. Still, rape, torture, and femicide are increasing problems in several countries, so it makes a good deal of sense for feminist ethicists to think and write urgently about ways to ameliorate the systemic violence. Philosopher Urania Ungo of Panama believes that femicide is “a concept that synthesizes and comprises the extreme form of violence founded on gender inequalities” (Ungo 2008: 13). Violence against feminists is a problem of long standing as well. One of the founders of the celebrated journal fem, which was published in Mexico from 1976 to 2005, Alaíde Foppa, was abducted in Guatemala in 1980 and later killed. Some Latin American feminists, journalists, and other women who fear for their lives have been forced into exile (Agosín and Sepúlveda 2001).

These kinds of extreme conditions have made theory a luxury for many, but a necessary luxury. Philosopher and writer Francesca Gargallo provides compelling reasons for putting feminist ethics into practice:

Feminist ethics acts against male social and moral privilege, recognized universally in culture, and discovers that this constitutes a fundamental injustice upon which a political system has been constructed that has led humanity down a path of destruction and made it incapable of peace.

Gargallo’s work makes clear that women must participate in change. The current challenge resides in continuing to find how and where women can best access solidarity and participatory democracy.

Mexican philosopher Graciela Hierro (1928–2003) maintained that liberation of pleasure for women is a necessary condition for them to exercise power. Her philosophy contributed to women reflecting on their having a body under their control, and deriving pleasure from it. These topics were generally taboo in Mexican society prior to Hierro writing explicitly about them. She identified women’s oppression as the ethical problem of our time (Hierro 2014 [1985]: 8). Much of her work explores the masculine slant found throughout the history of Western ethics. She believed that respect for human rights is the point on which women and men most coincide. More bridges between scholarly and political work still need to be constructed to continue dialogue between the feminist movement and supporters of human rights.

Bellatin, Mario, Poniatowska, Elena and Itúrbide, Graciela (2010) Graciela Itúrbide: Juchitán de las Mujeres 1979–1989, Mexico City: RM/Editorial Calamus. (Iconic photographs taken in a matriarchal society in southern Oaxaca.)

Debate feminista (1990– present) Mexico City. (These journal issues contain a wealth of reflection on women’s issues in Latin America.)

De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, and Arenal, Electa (1994) The Answer/La Repuesta, Including a Selection of Poems, New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. (One of five translations of Sor Juana’s letter, this edition provides a facing translation.)

Gargallo, Francesca (2012) Feminismos desde Abya Yala: 607 Pueblos en Nuestra América, Colombia: Editorial Desde Abajo. (Exploration and analysis of indigenous feminisms throughout Latin America.)

Lavrín, Asunción (1995) Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. (A half-century of Women’s history during a period of rapid modernization.)

Meyer, Doris (1995) Rereading the Spanish American Essay: Translations of 19th and 20th Century Women’s Essays, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (Makes available excellent essays by writers and thinkers.)

Partnoy, Alicia (1998 [1986]) The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, Berkeley, CA: Cleis Press. (Memoir of abduction and torture during Argentina’s “dirty war.”)

Feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); testimony, trust, and trustworthiness (Chapter 21); women, gender, and philosophies of global development (Chapter 34); feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); multicultural and postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47).

Agosín, Marjorie and Sepúlveda, Emma (2001) Amigas: Letters of Friendship and Exile, trans. Bridget M. Morgan, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Anzaldúa, Gloria (2012) Borderlands/La frontera, San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

Barrios de Chungara, Domitila, Ortiz, Victoria and Viezzer, Moema (1978) Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Castillo, Debra (1992) Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.

Cypess, Sandra Messinger (2010) La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Femenías, María Luisa and Oliver, Amy A. (Eds.) (2007) Feminist Philosophy in Latin America and Spain, Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.

Haddox, John H. (1966) “Carlos Vaz Ferreira: Uruguayan Philosopher,” Journal of Inter-American Studies, Special Issue 8(4): 595–600.

Hierro, Graciela (2014 [1985]) Ética y feminism, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Lara Zavala, María Pía (1999) Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

—— (2007) Narrating Evil: A Post-Metaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, New York: Columbia University Press.

Menchu, Rigoberta (1987) I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray trans. Ann Wright, Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

Merrim, Stephanie (1999) Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Oliver, Amy A. (2014) “Seeking Latina Origins: The Philosophical Context of Identity,” Inter-American Journal of Philosophy 5(1): 65–80.

Patai, Daphne (1993 [1988]) Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Paz, Octavio (1990) Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Poniatowska, Elena (1991) Massacre in Mexico, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.

Rodríguez, Villamil and Sapriza, Gabriela (1984) El voto femenino en el Uruguay ¿conquista o concesión? Montevideo, Uruguay: Grupo de Estudios sobre la Condición de la Mujer en el Uruguay.

Russ, Joanna (1983) How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Schutte, Ofelia (1989) “Philosophy and Feminism in Latin America: Perspectives on Gender Identity and Culture,” The Philosophical Forum 20: 62–84.

Trueblood, Alan S. (1988) A Sor Juana Anthology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ungo, Urania (2008) Femicidio en Panamá 2000–2006, San José, Costa Rica: Asociación Feminista de Información y Acción.

Vaz Ferreira, Carlos (1945) [1933] Sobre feminismo [On Feminism], Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada.

—— (1958) Obras: Homenaje de la Cámara de Representantes de la República Oriental del Uruguay, volumes 3, 4, and 9, Uruguay: Montevideo.

Yúdice, George (1991) “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” Latin American Perspectives 18(3): 15–31.