Currently, there is significant tension in the Latin American and Caribbean region between progressive government strategies and a growing trend of ultraconservative and right-wing governments, whose repressive policies reinforce existing conditions of inequality and violence, in a climate of increasing political, economic, and socio-cultural unrest among popular sectors and their demands. Adding to the devastating ecological, social, and political effects of this advance is the expansion of "repatriarchalization policies" (Vargas) that hinder access to public policies aimed at protecting and strengthening the social and political rights of women and gender minorities, as well as the deployment of extreme and cruel forms of violence against grassroots organizations, activists, and leaders of local communities. Similarly, a significant expansion of moralistic, anti-feminist, anti-gender, and anti-LGBTQ+ policies is developing globally, regionally, and nationally, promoted by conservative fundamentalist groups that render invisible and justify violence against women and gender minorities. While this constitutes a long-standing trend, the recent surge of "counter-mobilizations" by these groups can be interpreted as a reaction to feminist advances (Gutiérrez et al., 2024).

Given this panorama, women's, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements are reformulating their intervention and struggle practices and strategies, reclaiming themes, actors, and organizational forms from previous political processes and imagining alternatives for the present and future (Álvarez, 2022). These strategies incorporate novel and thought-provoking uses of past memories, emotions, and activism. The emergence of transnational organizations and networks based on the pluralistic agendas of these sectors has revitalized popular struggles with new approaches and strategies of resistance, action, and organization in the face of the onslaught of conservative neoliberalism. These reemergences critically recover and reformulate the political practices and articulations of the recent past, particularly those centered on the conquest and expansion of social and political rights during the second half of the 20th century. The recovery and revision of slogans from feminisms, popular movements and human rights constitutes a collective task of discussion and critique, which promotes new horizons, in which the so-called Green Wave, with its globalized expansion, synthesizes the accumulation of demands and struggles.

Based on these considerations, in this new phase of our Group we propose to work on three key lines of inquiry that continue and expand upon what has been developed, anchoring our understanding of the present (and its projection into the future) in the potential of updating political and cultural memories. The three lines of inquiry will be:

1) Feminist genealogies, emotions and memories.

In the current political context, affects and emotions are key to understanding the anti-rights conservative advance, as well as feminist uprisings, the resistance of cis and trans women, and other subaltern subjects. Affective energies, drawing on the memories of past social struggles, sustain and advance the conquest of rights. They thus constitute a horizon for driving the necessary and complex task of critically destabilizing the coloniality of knowledge still anchored in the legacies of modern reason. Furthermore, we consider the work of (re)constructing archives indispensable to these strategies, and therefore we seek to develop them collectively in dialogue with initiatives of activists, groups, and preservation and documentation projects that safeguard and disseminate the actions of Latin American feminisms and dissidents.

2) Genealogies of work on women and gender from the origins of CLACSO to the present:

We consider it essential to recover the history of the institution itself in terms of its contributions to the Group's thematic field. In the preceding period, we began surveying training and research processes at CLACSO at different historical and institutional moments. To this end, we revisited digitized archives (books and minutes) and documentary materials (personal archives) of participants in these initiatives throughout the region. We also began compiling testimonies and narratives from participants in these training and collaborative initiatives from previous decades, which we began sharing in the Group's Bulletin No. 3. The continuation of this work will inform specific publications and communications in Bulletins, meetings, and conferences. Furthermore, in line with the actions promoted by CLACSO to consolidate institutional policies for the prevention, care, and reparation of gender-based violence, we actively participated in the development and definition of the guiding principles of the "Protocol for Care and Intervention in Situations of Gender-Based Violence from an Intersectional Perspective, within the framework of activities organized by CLACSO." In this proposal, we will maintain collaboration among researchers and activists from different countries in the region in developing strategies for its implementation and dissemination.

3) Conservative advance, patriarchal restoration and feminist resistance:

In 2025, we organized the virtual workshop "The Kitchen of Research: Feminisms Facing the Neoconservative Attack," where we reflected on the current challenges facing feminism in the face of the advance of anti-rights and anti-feminist discourses and policies from the contemporary right. We discussed gender-based political violence on social media, the rise of anti-gender discourses in universities and the scientific system, attacks on sexual and reproductive rights, human rights, and diverse forms of political and social organization, the memories of dictatorships and feminisms, and strategies of resistance. We understand that the patriarchal backlash is rooted in memories and emotions to produce discourses and practices that attempt to dismantle the progress made in women's rights and gender diversity. Therefore, we consider it essential to generate knowledge and policies that interrupt increasingly brutal forms of violence, from a human rights perspective.

In sum, within a context of advancing antifeminist and neoliberal-conservative discourses and policies, the purpose of this Working Group is to articulate networks for the production of knowledge about feminisms in the region and their political histories, recognizing their national and local roots and specificities, as well as the intersectionality of the multiple levels of oppression, exploitation, and violence in the experiences of women and sexual minorities (gender, race, class, among others). This reconstruction of feminist memories takes the 1970s as its starting point, a pivotal moment in the region. Since then, feminisms and movements of women and gender-diverse individuals have brought to light persistent forms of subordination and oppression, countering them with specific organizational forms and strategies of resistance. CLACSO itself has a history of pioneering work on women, gender, and feminisms, which this Working Group proposes to revisit and disseminate.

In this new phase, we will deepen regional and intergenerational exchange, strengthen existing academic ties, and foster spaces for dialogue between academia and social movements to contribute to the consolidation of studies on feminisms, memory, and affect. To achieve these objectives, we are welcoming members from new countries, diverse regions within countries, and younger generations.

In the recent Latin American and Caribbean context, neoconservative activism is expanding and consolidating, combining street interventions, communication campaigns, and intensive use of social media to generate moral panics and challenge the bodily autonomy of marginalized sectors (Gudiño 2017; Morán 2023; Tabbush and Caminotti 2020; Vargas 2022). The literature shows how these groups articulate Christian values ​​with a far-right, conservative neoliberal ideology (Brown 2021; Cooper 2022; Ramírez 2021), integrate themselves into transnational networks, and seek to legitimize themselves as actors claiming "universal" liberal values ​​of citizenship.

Members of our Working Group have investigated this anti-rights backlash. María Angélica Cruz, focusing on the Chilean case, proposes understanding anti-abortion activism as part of gender neoconservatism to grasp how the boundaries of public morality and bodily self-determination are being reshaped today (Cruz, Aguirre, and Eguren, 2024). The disputes surrounding the notion of gender, involving feminisms, LGBTQ+ activism, and the neoconservative backlash, mobilize conservative memories of the recent past linked to the dictatorships of the Southern Cone (Cruz et al., 2022; Bacci, 2022). This line of inquiry also connects with a situated reading of the struggles for abortion rights, as Nayla Vacarezza has proposed from a regional perspective (Sutton and Vacarezza, 2021). On the other hand, Alejandra Oberti analyzed conservative and anti-rights discourses in the Argentine context, examining how they articulate selective memories, religious frameworks, and strategically mobilized emotions to reinstate essentialist conceptions of gender and sexuality, as well as to contest meanings surrounding sexual and reproductive rights. With this emotional narrative, they legitimize anti-feminist positions and revive conservative memories of the recent past, framing their opposition to the rights of women and LGBTQ+ groups within a security-driven moral crusade (Oberti, 2024; Ben Brizola and Oberti, 2025).

A central point in the repertoire of collective action around gender operates from an intense affective mobilization (Ahmed, 2015; Cvetkovich, 2018; Hemmings, 2015). This is something that several members of the Working Group have already problematized in the case of feminisms (Peller and Fernández Ossandón, in press), and that some have also begun to work on in relation to the far right and neoconservatism (Gutiérrez et al., 2024; Wolff and Schmitt, 2024; Oberti and Brizola, 2025), broadening the understanding of how gender struggles are updated in the public sphere.

Also, thanks to a CLACSO grant from the call for proposals "Multiple Dimensions of Gender-Based Violence," members from Argentina and Brazil analyzed gender-based violence and antifeminism on the Internet and how they are linked to emotions and memories. The work "Digital Political Gender Violence, Antifeminism, and Misogyny: Local Expressions of a Global Phenomenon (Argentina and Brazil)" points out, among other things, that digital violence against those who hold political office operates interdependently through surveillance, control, or manipulation of information, configuring an online/offline continuum of sexist violence according to structural sociocultural patterns, to discourage the participation of women and gender and sexual minorities in democratic political life. Among their concrete effects on public and private life, they inhibit political participation, generate fear, affect mental health, and can even lead to physical aggression.

In this regional context, we consider it essential to understand the advance of the right wing, conservatism, and violence, while reinforcing the recovery and construction of memories and genealogies of the struggles and forms of resistance that allow us to imagine actions and policies for the present and the future.

One of the challenges in constructing feminist memories and those of women's and gender-nonconforming movements (Klejman and Rochefort, 1985) is institutional or organizational fragility, which hinders the recognition of these organizations and movements within the historical record (Passerini, 2016). In response to this challenge, our Working Group set out to reconstruct ephemeral memories and archives of these movements, which, in their various forms, serve as vehicles for valuing "subaltern memories" linked to the histories of social and political struggles of counter-hegemonic sectors (Oberti and Bacci, 2025; Spivak, 2010; Beverley, 2004).

The creation of these memories establishes a connection with the past that challenges the present and guides us toward the future. Feminism and other marginalized groups have focused on producing diverse forms of memorial representation and generating collective experiences of commemoration for the intellectual and emotional transmission of the past. The intergenerational transmission of these markers of memory requires a conscious effort to strengthen documentation centers and archives, and to participate in the processes of constructing historical memory.

From the Working Group, we are developing lines of action related to feminist memories and genealogies from an emotional perspective, which we will continue in the next period. We wrote the book "Affects from a Feminist and Latin American Perspective," which will be published by EDUVIM and sponsored by CLACSO, compiled by Mariela Peller and Rosario Fernández Ossandón, with chapters written by members of the Working Group. The book offers analyses situated in Latin America, using theoretical and methodological tools from the affective turn and feminisms. The different chapters show that, in the current context, emotional energies influence how memories of past struggles are activated and the capacity to imagine possible futures.

Secondly, we worked on tracing the genealogies of feminism, women, and gender within the various administrations of CLACSO, a fundamental approach to mainstreaming gender. Within the framework of social and political democratization processes in the region, these works highlighted the diverse forms of inequality in women's social and daily lives. We produced two publications that compile the work and publications produced by researchers and fellows within the framework of the first CLACSO Working Groups on Women and Gender in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s: the Retazos Bulletin. Feminist Memories, Year 2, Number 3 (2024) and the chapter "25 Years of Dialogues. Latin American and Caribbean Gender Working Group, 2000-2004," written by Claudia Bacci and María Alicia Gutiérrez (2025).

Finally, in relation to the construction of feminist archives, we are organizing the documentary collection "Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters" which brings together documentation on said Encounters that is scattered in libraries, documentation centers and personal archives not always accessible to the public, to create a unified repository of these materials (resolutions, calls, flyers, posters, photographs, videos and books of conclusions).