Feminist Indisciplines in Abya Yala: Arts and Music from the Margins
Volume 22- Number 1
Guest Editor: Alejandra Quintana Martínez
DEADLINE CALL FOR PAPERS DATE : july 22
The arts and music in Abya Yala constitute spaces where memories, knowledges, and historical tensions converge. Far from being homogeneous, these spaces reveal a living plurality in constant transformation. In this context, the term Abya Yala, from the Kuna language of Indigenous peoples of Panama and Colombia, refers to the continent now known as Latin America and alludes to a territory in full maturity—alive or flourishing. This name highlights the vitality of its lands, the depth of its history, and the continuity of ancestral knowledges, and has been reclaimed as a symbol of resistance and identity affirmation in the face of frameworks imposed by colonization.
We refer to the term Latin America critically, aware that its colonial and patriarchal origins sought to consolidate European hegemony and reduce the diversity of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples to a uniform cultural framework. As such, it does not fully reflect the historical, linguistic, spiritual, and political complexity of the environments inhabited by those who live there.
Various feminist, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant thinkers, artists, and movements have emphasized the importance of naming and inhabiting territories from these perspectives, recognizing living memories, cultural practices, and modes of creation that emerge from the margins as acts of resistance and re-existence. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2018) points out that “the social sciences of the continent still bear a Eurocentric and colonized imprint,” and observes that broad social sectors reflect “from geography […], from feminism and art, from concern for the land” (23), articulating in their practices connections between ecology, Indigenous knowledges, and social justice. These critical perspectives not only question the hierarchies of Western knowledge but also propose more holistic and contextualized ways of thinking, creating, and acting. They also underscore the importance of the arts and music in peacebuilding processes, linking creativity and cultural expression with reconciliation, historical memory, and social transformation in contexts of conflict and post-conflict.
Within a heterogeneous fabric marked by persistent colonialities, racialization, gender inequalities, epistemic hierarchies, and linguistic borders, feminisms, in the plural, play a fundamental transformative role. From theoretical, political, and academic perspectives, they have expanded and renewed our understanding of power, social relations, and forms of knowledge and expression. By revealing historically silenced experiences and challenging hierarchies, they articulate proposals to rethink and recreate from the diversity of bodies, identities, spaces, and epistemologies. As Andrea Giunta (2021) notes, feminist art destabilizes patriarchal parameters and has taken shape as a collective project that rewrites previously silenced histories: “Racist, classist, and geographically exclusionary, the art system is also sexist and heteronormative” (66). Giunta further reminds us that in the region, feminist arts have always been in dialogue with political contexts such as dictatorships, liberation movements, and diverse forms of resistance and community-based social organization. Creating, preserving, and disseminating these genealogies through the arts and music is one of the most suggestive forms of exploration and expression of feminist indisciplines, reflected in a kaleidoscope of sonic, visual, and performative practices that allow experiences to be narrated, re-signified, and shared from diverse stages and bodies.
Julieta Paredes’s community feminism connects these debates with activism grounded in Indigenous corporeality. In the performance Hilando fino, she emphasizes how dressing as a chola makes women visible as political subjects; she herself states that “no one looks at me when I am dressed as a chola: we become invisible,” thereby denouncing the prejudices that assume that “cholas have no body, no sexuality, no ideas” (New York University 2010, 15:44–17:00). This example shows how cultural and community practices can become spaces for making visible knowledges, histories, and experiences that have been historically rendered unequal. In this way, cultural and artistic initiatives emerge as tools for promoting more equitable, inclusive, and respectful dialogues around diverse identities and experiences.
In the broader context of Abya Yala (Latin America), these artistic and musical practices also function as spaces of resistance and situated creation, making visible historically subalternized experiences and articulating struggles for recognition. Intersectional approaches challenge hierarchies of gender, race, class, and coloniality, while opening new genealogies, sensibilities, and ways of knowing, historicizing (or de-historicizing), and creating in the arts and music. Mara Viveros Vigoya (2023), for example, examines how the “social markings” of race, gender, and class are inscribed on bodies and condition their possibilities for action. Rita Laura Segato (2023) emphasizes that gender-based violence functions as a technology of power rooted in modern coloniality. Mercedes Liska (2024) analyzes the tensions between pleasure, spectacle, and politics in popular music and queer and feminist activism, and considers how dance practices sexualized by women can be re-signified as forms of bodily emancipation.
With the aim of making visible and valuing the multiple expressions of women creators, this dossier brings together works that explore artistic practices in their diversity and show how their histories and experiences—individual, collective, or community-based—generate alternative forms of sensitivity, memory, and thought. It also seeks to create space for historical creators and for those who have not yet been sufficiently studied, named, or recognized, in order to recover hidden trajectories and broaden the horizons of research.
Feminist, transfeminist, and intersectional approaches reveal how creators,situated across diverse social, ethnic, racial, territorial, neurodiverse, gender, and sexual categories,reconfigure languages, bodies, and ways of making arts and music, whether through contemporary experimentation, popular scenes, community practices, oral traditions, activism, or insurgent aesthetics.
We invite contributions that approach the arts and music from feminist, critical, and situated positions, constructed from specific historical, territorial, and affective contexts rather than from presumed neutralities. We welcome proposals that articulate archive, experience, and body as fields of political production; analyses that highlight practices linked to peacebuilding and memories that have remained in the shadows; narratives that speak from the margins and their diverse trajectories; and dialogues that connect aesthetics, sonic practices, and collective or community-based projects.
We seek works that embrace feminist indisciplines as a theoretical, methodological, and political practice: research and creative projects that question established frameworks, dispute hegemonic categories, tension disciplinary boundaries, and contribute to transforming ways of understanding and narrating the arts and music in the region.
To guide the submission of contributions, we propose a series of thematic axes that do not seek to limit proposals but rather to open a broad and critical field of discussion. These axes articulate feminist indisciplines as a theoretical, methodological, and political horizon for analyzing and creating in the arts and music. Proposals may engage with one or more of these axes, or situate themselves at their intersections or tensions:
- Coloniality, racialization, and feminisms: Perspectives that analyze how colonial, racial, and gender hierarchies operate in artistic and sonic fields, and how they are challenged and re-signified by diverse creators.
- Bodies, territories, and situated creative practices: Approaches that explore the relationships between corporeality, territory, memory, and creation, including neurodiverse experiences and non-linear forms of perception and knowledge, recognizing ways of inhabiting and creating from the diversity of bodies, territories, and subjectivities.
- Invisible genealogies and feminist archives: Initiatives that recover historical creators and poorly documented or hidden trajectories; that propose critical, alternative, or community-based archives; and that make visible the construction of feminist memory and legacies.
- Methodological indisciplines and feminist experimentation: Proposals that challenge established canons and disciplinary borders; that explore alternative methods, formats, and languages for research, creation, or theory from feminist, situated, and critical approaches, including neurodiverse experiences that reconfigure forms of knowledge and artistic practice.
- Non-hegemonic practices and scenes: Projects that give visibility to arts and music outside legitimized centers; that include insurgent aesthetics, community-based sound practices, and activism; and that highlight aesthetic innovation and the presence of historically marginalized practices.
- Art, politics, and collective action: Experiences that demonstrate how the arts and music contribute to feminist, anti-racist, community-based, or territorial struggles, functioning as tools for organization, resistance, social transformation, or peacebuilding.
- Technology, media, and cultural production: Analyses of access, technical mediations, circulation, cultural industries, and creative economies from a critical feminist perspective, including the possibilities and limitations that digital technologies offer or impose on creators.
References
Giunta, Andrea. 2021. Feminism and Latin American Art: Histories of Artists Who Emancipated the Body. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.
Liska, Mercedes. 2024. My Ass Is Mine: Women Who Dance as They Please. Buenos Aires: Gourmet Musical.
New York University. 2010. “Hilando fino desde el feminismo comunitario.”
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2018. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Essays on Critical Thought, Memory, and Indigenous Sociology. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.
Segato, Rita Laura. 2023. The War Against Women. 4th ed. Buenos Aires: Prometeo.
Viveros Vigoya, Mara. 2023. Intersectionality, the Decolonial and Community Turn. Latin American Council of Social Sciences.
*Alejandra Quintana Martínez
Feminist artivist; M.A. in Gender Studies (National University of Colombia), M.M. in Music with an emphasis in History (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana), and advertising professional (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano). Her indisciplinary trajectory encompasses research, teaching, composition, musical parody, audiovisual production, radio production, and consultancy in gender approaches, intersectionality, and peacebuilding.
She has led the strategic line Equity for Peace at the NGO Alianza para la Paz (APAZ), coordinating projects such as the National Equity Initiative for Women in Rural Sectors (INÉS) (2020–2022); Communication for Political Advocacy and the Prevention of Stigmatization of Women Leaders and Human Rights Defenders with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2022–2023); and ACORDES for Peace: A Gender Approach to Peace and Reconciliation in Music Education for Children and Adolescents (2022–2024), in collaboration with Fundación Batuta and the Kofi Annan Foundation (Switzerland).
Her academic production includes articles such as “Gender Equality in New Colombian Music” (2021), “Your Life Is Also My Country: Dissonant Sexualities and Gender Flights in Liliana Felipe and Jesusa Rodríguez” (with Camila Esguerra Muelle, 2018), and “Bagpipe and Drum Festivals in Ovejas and San Jacinto: A Tradition of Exclusion of Women” (2009); the documentary Why Do Birds Sing: Women, Music, and Armed Conflict (with Adrián Villa Dávila, 2015); and the book Women in Music in Colombia: The Gender of Genres (with Carmen Millán de Benavides, 2012). She also conducted the study Gender Perspective in the National Plan for Music for Coexistence (with the Colombian Ministry of Culture, 2008).
She is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, where she has taught the course Women, Music, and Gender since 2008, as well as the more recent course Art, Sexuality, and Gender, alongside colleagues from the visual and performing arts.
Every December, she recreates her parody of the Feminist, Gender-Inclusive, and Anti-Clerical Novena, a tradition she has maintained for over twenty years.
To submit your article for the current call for papers "Feminist Indisciplines in Abya Yala: Arts and Music from the Margins", the article must be sent by registering on the OJS platform*. The journal only accepts articles within the thematic dossier calls.
*In case of problems to submit your article through the OJS platform, please send your application to the mail cuadernosmavae@javeriana.edu.co, attaching the requested documents.