Currently, in the Latin American and Caribbean region, there is a strong tension between progressive and right-wing government strategies, creating a climate of unease in the face of current conditions. The amplification and expansion of neoliberal and neo-developmentalist socio-economic policies leads to the intensification of repressive policies against popular sectors and their demands. In addition to the devastating effects on ecology, society, and politics, there is a noticeable expansion of "repatriarchalizing policies" (Vargas) that not only represent a setback in access to public policies aimed at protecting and strengthening the social and political rights of women and gender minorities, but also the deployment of extreme and cruel forms of violence against grassroots organizations, activists, and leaders of territorial communities. Similarly, at the global, regional and national levels, there is a strong advance by conservative fundamentalist groups with an anti-feminist, anti-gender and anti-LGBTQ+ policy in line with a more comprehensive project of the ultra-conservative right.

Given this panorama, women's, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements are reformulating their practices and strategies for intervention and struggle, reclaiming themes, organizational forms, and actors from previous political processes and imagining alternatives for the present and future. These strategies reveal novel and insightful uses of past memories, emotions, and feminist and women's activism. The emergence of transnational organizations and networks around feminist and women's agendas has revitalized popular struggles with new approaches to strategies for action and organization to resist the onslaught of neoliberalism, with the role of memory and emotions being particularly prominent. These reemergences critically recover and reformulate the political practices and articulations of the recent past, particularly those that, during the second half of the 20th century, focused on the conquest and expansion of social and political rights.

Thus, the demands and struggles surrounding women's personal autonomy (binding divorce, access to reproductive health, among others) and access to the political sphere (parliamentary and institutional representation quotas, specific spaces within the framework of public policies, etc.) are spurred on by demands related to the persistence of structural inequalities linked to the intersection of gender with race and class, as well as the resurgence of sexist and patriarchal forms of violence. The growing importance within feminisms and women's movements in the region of groups and organizations of Afro-descendants, indigenous peoples, and so-called popular feminisms compels a refocusing of the struggles against state inaction and impunity in the face of femicides, high maternal mortality rates linked to clandestine abortion, the persecution and murder of local leaders in conflict zones and regions of extractive development policies, the impoverishment and social precarization of neighborhoods, setbacks in policies of integration and expansion of rights for sexual dissidence groups and women, among other forms of inequality and violence in the region.

The recovery and revision of slogans developed by feminisms, popular movements, and human rights movements of the late 20th century constitutes a collective task of discussion and critique, which fosters new horizons where feminisms and women's movements play an increasingly important role. The so-called Green Wave, with its global expansion, synthesizes the accumulation of these demands and struggles.

Based on these considerations, the Working Group on Gender, Feminisms, and Memories, which operated from 2019 to 2022, has established three key lines of work for the current phase, supported by numerous actions and activities. These three lines aim to continue and expand upon existing work, based on the understanding that comprehending the present (and its projection into the future) is only possible if we anchor the memory of the past as a force that extends into the present. All of this is framed within the normative framework of human rights.

1) Affects, emotions, and memory. In the current political context of the region, affects and emotions (issues addressed from gender and sexuality studies, memory studies, and feminisms) are key to understanding both the advance of conservative and anti-rights groups and the ways in which feminist revolts, the resistance of cis and trans women, and other subaltern subjects are taking place. Furthermore, emotional and affective energies play a role in how memories of past social struggles are reactivated to advance the conquest of rights. They also constitute a very promising horizon for promoting the necessary and not-so-simple task of critically destabilizing a coloniality of knowledge still deeply rooted in the legacies of Eurocentric modern reason—that is, for promoting other epistemologies.

2) Genealogies of work on women and gender since the origins of CLACSO. Along these lines, we consider it crucial to recover the history of the institution itself in terms of its contributions to the thematic field of this group. This is because, following Foucault's line of thought, we believe it is a way of constructing history, rescuing and bringing to the forefront the discourses and knowledge of different historical/institutional moments.

3) Building feminist archives to generate our own body of knowledge on feminist research and practice in Latin America and the Caribbean. Working collectively within the Working Group will allow us to share and systematize valuable information for our research, as well as for future research. The work of preserving memory is also the work of building archives; it is with this perspective that we seek to develop it collectively.

The purpose of the GT continues to be to articulate the networks of knowledge production on feminisms in the region and their political memories, recognizing their rootedness and national and local specificities, as well as the multiple levels of oppression and exploitation that permeate the experiences of women and sexual dissidents (gender, race, class).

This reconstruction of feminist history takes as its starting point the 1970s, a pivotal moment for feminism in Latin American and Caribbean countries. From that time onward, the struggles of feminist and women's movements across our continent contributed to making visible the situation of women's subordination and oppression, the relationship of this situation to other social determinants, the specific demands in our region, and the recognition of women as subjects of specific rights. Specific organizational forms and gatherings also developed. The Latin American Council of Social Sciences itself has a history of groups that worked on issues of women, gender, and feminism. This genealogy is extremely relevant to recover, given the epistemological line of work that led to the current administration being called a feminist administration.

The Working Group "Gender, Feminisms and Memories Network," established three years ago, brings together research teams and researchers who study memory processes from a gender perspective and/or are dedicated to reconstructing the memories of women and the feminist movement in Latin American and Caribbean countries. It is a group with a strong interdisciplinary component (history, sociology, literature, anthropology, political science, etc.) and encompasses the diverse historical dimensions specific to each country.

In our region, during the mid-80s and early 90s, social movements became significant social spaces in the face of the decline of more traditional forms of modern organization and mediation, such as political parties and trade unions. In this context of social fragmentation and a crisis of representation, new social actors emerged with proposals for new public agendas, based on demands for the expansion of rights (López, 2002).

The women's movement and feminist organizations introduced demands for greater democratization of social relations and claims for their recognition in the public arena, while at the same time constituting a source of transformation and development of public debate and new forms of participation and political action, which sought the expansion of the institutionalization of a perspective anchored in rights (human, social, civil, etc.).

In this sense, the Working Group's proposal falls within the field of studies on social movements in Latin America from a gender and sexual diversity perspective, which is also related to studies on the construction of political memories linked to democratization processes following contexts of human rights violations and state violence. It emphasizes the recovery of the genealogy of these struggles and actions in relation to gender and feminist struggles.

Laurence Klejman and Florencia Rochefort (1985) argue that constructing feminist memory is difficult, a historical reconstruction marked by chaos and discontinuity. From their perspective, feminism does not seem to demonstrate a need to reconstruct the memory of its past struggles; either amnesia prevails, or it emerges episodically in response to new events. This difficulty in systematically reconstructing its own history, they maintain, leads to feminism's inherent fragility. For Luisa Passerini (2016), this fragility of feminist memory and the women's movement stems from an anxiety to innovate and a need to reinvent itself, which leads organizations and movements to distance themselves from and fail to recognize their past experiences.

Regarding the reconstruction of memory processes, archives in their multiple formats—but with an emphasis on orality and testimony—are indispensable vehicles for valuing “other memories” or “subaltern memories,” linked to the histories of social and political struggles of counter-hegemonic sectors (Spivak, 2010; Beverley, 2004 and 2012). In this sense, it is no coincidence that oral history has been a tool for a large number of research projects carried out by and about women (Passerini, 1992).

With strong precedents in the reconstruction of memories linked to the European experience of the 20th-century Jewish extermination and the importance of survivor testimonies (Bacci and Oberti, 2014; Ricoeur, 2004; Portelli, 2004; Calveiro, 1998), testimonial practices have been recognized as central elements in the development of social and cultural histories since the late 1950s in Latin America. This narrative genre constitutes a highly relevant social and political practice, linked to the denunciation of injustices and inequalities, the violence of the State and dominant social sectors, and above all to the construction of a legacy of their own by subaltern sectors in the public sphere (Oberti, 2009 and 2015; Jelin, 2002 and 2014; Arfuch, 1995).

Thanks to the act of remembering, it is possible to establish a connection with the past that helps us interpret the present and guide the future. This is a task we usually perform individually, but one we can also carry out collectively, as a feminist movement. To this end, feminism must also be concerned with creating spaces of memory and generating collective experiences of commemoration, which serve to transmit not only intellectually, but also emotionally, our collective past. This work offers women the possibility of generating fundamental feelings of recognition and identification, both in the construction of individual subjectivity and in the creation of collective bonds. The feminist movement, from its plurality of experiences and the diversity of the women who comprise it, possesses a rich, valuable, and plural collective memory that must be safeguarded, documented, and prevented from being forgotten. This task requires conscious effort, both in strengthening documentation centers and archives of women and feminism, and in participating in the processes of constructing historical memory.

In line with the theoretical and social framework described – and despite the difficulties of the pandemic context – between 2019 and 2022, the GT worked on three basic lines of action.

The first focus was designing a tool to survey archives and collections related to the struggles of feminism and women in Latin America and the Caribbean. This survey—which we have already conducted among members of the Working Group—includes cataloged and compiled documents, oral interviews, works of art, journals, newspapers, and personal papers, all of which are part of the working group. This registry allows us to access essential information for the advancement of feminist movements.

The second focus involved sharing and developing knowledge about how affects and emotions intervene in memory processes and feminist struggles. We undertook critical rereadings of texts framed within the so-called "affective turn" (Ahmed, Sedgwick, Cvetkovich, Hemmings, Rosenwein, among others) and recovered the work of authors from our region to produce conceptual elaborations and analyses from a Latin American perspective (Chirix, Macón, Peluffo, Moraña, Medina, among others). We worked with a variety of objects: testimonies, literature, public demonstrations, and aesthetic productions, among others. Our methodology was to create a study group on affects around three instances: first, Affects at the Feminist Table, where we held three virtual meetings open to the public where we shared and analyzed our own work on affects and memories based on three axes: itineraries, concepts and methods; second, we organized a panel for the Clacso Conference 2022; and third, we began working on a book on affects and memories, through meetings and cross-readings of the chapters, to be published during 2023.

Third, we began working on a line of research linked to tracing the genealogies of feminism, women, and gender within the various administrations of CLACSO since its inception. This task of delving into the institution's history began at the 2022 Mexico Conference, where several colleagues who had worked on these issues at different points in the Council's history participated. This exploration is fundamental to mainstreaming gender. Understanding, documenting, and giving meaning to this history is key to current actions and to shaping the future of new feminist groups.

In this new phase, the Network aims to further promote regional exchange, strengthen existing academic ties, provide spaces for dialogue, offer institutional support, bolster the work of local teams, and contribute to the consolidation of the field of feminist and memory studies. To this end, we will continue the work developed along the three lines outlined above, without prejudice to the possibility of expanding into new areas of interest.