Since 2007, this working group has been addressing, from a feminist perspective, various explanatory hypotheses of the region's social reality and the impacts of globalization on the development of our countries and their populations, especially women, children, sexual minorities, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants, among others. The narratives of our work over the last 15 years have focused primarily on highlighting the complexities of societies in Latin America and the Caribbean, in connection with the processes of resistance and emancipation that arise from a dialectic of feminist thought and movement.

Our productions have warned about the crisis of the economic, political, and social development model. The growing exhaustion of this model, with its expressions in the ideological, symbolic, and cultural spheres, manifests itself dramatically from time to time. Manipulated elections, "soft" coups, and attacks on democracy using tactics such as post-truth, fake news, and lawfare reveal its progressive impacts.

Globalization presents one face that favors the "bringing closer" of humanity through the rapid exchange of ideas, people, goods, capital, information, and technologies—a process generally seen as beneficial. However, another facet reveals negative impacts on the lives of most of the planet's inhabitants (Valdivieso 2009). Regarding the processes of identification and differentiation in the pursuit of rights, amidst the diversity that coexists on our continent, Valdivieso warns that "this process of globalization aims to homogenize, unify, and position the market as the organizing center of life" (2009: 30). Given the multidimensional nature of globalization, it cannot be interpreted solely through economic terms; it is also essential to analyze its cultural and political essence (Carosio 2019).

Thinking about the rights of women and non-normative sexual minorities requires incorporating the complex perspective of intersectionality. This implies recognizing human diversity and how its multiple expressions have been situated within a matrix of hierarchical privileges and exclusions. This results in the interconnection of different power systems with patriarchal structures that operate and discriminate in various ways through different axes of social differentiation and stratification. This means that individuals immersed in a power regime are integrated into a matrix of intelligibility and subjected to a normative order, from which they will act in the world (García, C, 2014).

The end of the progressive hegemony that the region experienced in the last two decades has several consequences. One is the realization that the old paradigms are no longer useful for finding solutions that benefit large disadvantaged sectors, because what is at stake and what we need to change is the way we live, the way we inhabit the planet, the way we relate to each other and to other forms of life.

In this regard, it is worth mentioning the emergence of analytical proposals regarding what is (arguably) called the environment, which have gained prominence since poststructuralist studies. These seek to provide details about the consequences of inhabiting the planet in a way that is both neglectful and exploited in an economically unsustainable manner. Some theoretical currents analyze this situation as an expression of the Anthropocene (Haraway 2016; Biset 2022; Vivieiro de Castro, 2010; Issberner and Léna, 2018) or the Capitalocene (Serratos 2020).

It is important to mention the contradictions between capitalist modes of production and consumption, as already addressed through the perspective of Buen Vivir (Good Living) as an alternative paradigm to "development," which gained strength in the first decade of the century and was enshrined in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. This new paradigm is structured around the ancestral notions of Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) and Sumak Qamaña (Good Living), which converge with all those contemporary currents that place life and its reproduction as their central focus and objective. Thus, both feminism and environmentalism are part of this new paradigm that has spread as a global alternative. Magdalena León T. proposes the need for a new economy for life, based on the principles of interdependence, solidarity, complementarity, and reciprocity with nature and with human beings. She reconceptualizes the idea of ​​work to include an expanded dimension of care, inherent not only to human existence but to all forms of life in a systemic sense (León 2016). Recently, the Colombian Vice President Francia Márquez's invitation to "Live Well" gained prominence, referring to the aspirations to improve the living conditions of communities affected by violence, with dignity, guaranteed rights, and free from violence. Thus, these types of proposals, which seek to reverse the marginalized living conditions of millions of people, gain substance and strength.

The severity of the problems we face today is manifested in a proliferation of organized women's movements, many of which identify as feminist. Far from being universalist, these proposals are situated and, at the same time, benefit from being enriched by the transnational experiences of other groups (Drovetta 2021). Feminist movements have launched mobilizing actions that have now translated into initiatives with global reach and impact, such as the March 8th strike or the "Ni una menos" marches across the continent, as a way to amplify the demand to end gender-based violence and femicides (Sagot 2020).

These events appear to be occurring contemporaneously and can be interpreted as steps toward a genuine expansion of rights. For example, the legislative progress permitted by Law 27.610 of December 30, 2020, which decriminalizes abortion in Argentina, follows the recognition of three grounds for legal abortion in Chile through Law No. 21.030 in September 2017, and the full decriminalization up to the 24th week of pregnancy, approved by Ruling C-055 in Colombia. However, anti-rights stances are also asserting themselves through the tightening of abortion penalties in El Salvador and Nicaragua, condemning women and girls to forced births, unplanned pregnancies, and child motherhood (Arguedas 2020). In the case of Mexico, regressive penal codes still exist that criminalize women's sexual conduct. In Guatemala, in March 2022, it was declared a pro-life capital and in Peru, the criminalization of abortion continues with more than 5,400 people reported from 2016 to 2021, 55 of them for therapeutic abortion which has been legal since 1924 (Green Justice Association, 2022).

Within this context, there was an increase in social movements and religious organizations founded on conservative precepts throughout Latin America, with significant participation and leadership from women. This is important, for example, to understand the relationship that develops between conservatism and neo-Pentecostalism in some Latin American countries, more specifically in peripheral regions with their markedly dependent economies (Duarte, 2019). A conservative wave directly impacts feminist rights and struggles. These attacks, sustained by a conservative medical-religious discourse, focus on women's reproductive rights and family indoctrination.

In light of the ideas developed above, it is a governmental imperative in the region to formulate and implement public policies to advance gender equality. These policies must encompass not only the goals of SDG 5, "Gender Equality," to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, but also progress toward eradicating all forms of violence against them and improving opportunities for their full human development. However, it will be necessary to critically assess the impact of these public policies as governmental mechanisms in terms of real progress in women's rights and the potential cost of failing to implement them.

ECLAC studies highlight the concept of care economics as a contribution of feminist economics, and a definition of care that encompasses “everything done to maintain, continue, and repair the immediate environment so that one can live in it as well as possible” (2019b: 144). In this sense, the Montevideo Strategy pointed to the sexual division of labor and the unjust social organization of care as one of the structural knots of inequality and the main obstacle to achieving women's economic autonomy.

By early March 2020, the Gender Equality Observatory of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, 2020b) warned of the need to incorporate the concept of care into sustainable development agendas—economic, social, and environmental—if structural change was to be achieved that reflected progress toward the reproduction of life. This change would imply overcoming the culture of privilege and moving toward a culture of equality, which, specifically, would confront us with a new way of distributing time and other resources, as well as addressing care as a core aspect. We know that in the middle of that month, the pandemic was declared, and this warning was put on hold.

Since then, the relational spaces of couples, families, work, and community have been reconfigured amidst the tension of closeness/distancing; a tension as evident as that faced by states when they must prioritize or combine healthcare and the economy. This imbalance in daily life has negatively impacted schedules and confronts us with inequalities that threaten to drive poverty to exponential levels, the consequences of which would be far more severe than those described by COVID-19 infections. In Latin America and the Caribbean, these fluctuations will have a disproportionate impact due to pre-existing inequality, especially for certain population groups that have historically been more vulnerable, among which, of course, are women.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2020) report, this was a foreseeable consequence because women represent 58,6% of the total workforce in the service sector and primarily perform caregiving tasks, such as those of nurses and doctors, but also educators. However, women have less access to social protection services and bear a disproportionate workload in the care economy, particularly in the event of school or care center closures (ILO, 2018: 7).

It is also important to highlight that post-pandemic society requires new and original approaches to reflect the changes that have occurred at both the macro and micro social levels. In the former case, the economic adjustment variables present in international crises like the current one demonstrate their differential impact on the population.

In this sense, feminist economics has proven to be an essential perspective for accurately accounting for these differential impacts. As Alicia Girón (2009) indicates, in all structural adjustment processes, women have functioned as a hidden balancing factor, absorbing the shocks of economic adjustment programs. This occurs both by intensifying domestic work to compensate for the reduction in social services due to decreased public spending, and because the privatization of social security systems has disproportionately affected women due to their role in reproduction (for example, the social costs of motherhood borne individually). Furthermore, an increase in interest rates to reduce inflation impacts women more severely, resulting in less access to employment and higher costs for basic necessities. Their position within the family and the labor market places them as part of the market's deregulation strategy.

In all cases, by not taking into account the value of reproductive work, women tend to double their workload in society, much more so in neoliberal times, in which the responsibilities of the State towards the well-being of citizens are displaced to the private sphere.

Caregiving involves specific actions that require particular knowledge, time commitment, and emotional connection with those receiving care. Therefore, it is clear that caregivers must make physical, mental, and emotional efforts. The pandemic lockdown exacerbated this workload, and revealing it can contribute to understanding a phenomenon that traditional economics has rendered invisible and which is precisely the subject of the care economy: the countless hours of undervalued or underrecognized work that women around the world perform to sustain life (ECLAC, 2020). In this regard, Mitzy Flores (2020) notes that the "stay at home" directive functioned both in the sense of maintaining social distancing from "others" and in focusing on the space and network of relationships that make up the home, as well as being the one who sets the health guidelines that demand special dedication to cleaning and hygiene activities within a family. The closure of schools meant that women had to provide full-time care for children, in addition to the care they had to provide if there were elderly people in the household; this resulted in an overload of domestic work that they already performed and which, according to ECLAC (2020b), tripled the amount that their male counterparts dedicated to the same tasks.

In this regard, ECLAC itself (2019a) has warned that women's domestic work increases from 20% to 200% if there are children under 5 years of age in the home, since taking care of them necessarily implies a systematic approach to schedules that become practically mandatory as they are related to health care, food preparation and hygiene.

Other phenomena, as Sasken (2003) refers to, explain the well-oiled system of domestic work carried out by migrant women from the global south in industrialized countries, complicated by undervalued and informal work, the sending of remittances, the condition of "illegality" that the receiving countries give it, among other characteristics.

The aspects mentioned—and others—form the backdrop for the presentation of our work project, which has as its central purpose to analyze situated feminisms, as critical thought and as a movement, in their theories and analyses, in their demands and proposals, in their achievements, in their failures and in their political strategies, in the current moments in Latin America and the Caribbean, highlighting their contributions to collective social emancipation, in the contexts of power disputes that intersect in our region.