Towards decolonial, Black and community feminisms to decolonize gender and health studies

Within the "Latin American Critical Thought Notebooks" Collection, CLACSO presents "Towards decolonial, black and community feminisms to decolonize gender and health studies", a research project by Odeth Santos Madrigal.
Towards decolonial, Black and community feminisms to decolonize gender and health studies
Odeth Santos Madrigal*
The objective of this work is to carry out a brief review on the epistemic foundations from which the so-called gender and health studies were developed in Latin America and the Caribbean; and in turn to characterize the possible contributions and critical intersections of decolonial feminisms (Lugones, 2011) to Latin American critical thought on health from the South in the 21st century (Basile, 2022).
The analysis proposed in this article, therefore, forms part of a necessary review of knowledge situated in the Global South regarding certain Eurocentric and Anglo-Saxon feminist theoretical currents reproduced as universal and unique, which became intertwined with the dominant mechanisms in the field of health, from modern clinical biomedicine, functionalist public health, social medicine, and the geopolitics of the Pan-American health doctrine with contemporary liberal global health, reproducing a set of concepts, theses, mandates, slogans, and global agendas on the women's health from modern scientific thought and its dynamics of coloniality of power, knowledge and knowing (Quijano, 2000).
We propose, then, to review how we have learned the determinants of health processes and their intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, how these multiple oppressions intertwine and accumulate—not in an “additive” way—in the colonial legacies of dependent peripheral capitalism, the racialization of bodies, territories, and lives as racial hierarchical orders of domination, subordination, and dehumanization that impact the ways of (sur)viving, working, getting sick, and dying of indigenous nations, black peoples and populations, sexual diversities, and, in general terms, the popular classes of Latin America and the Caribbean.
In short, this text is a first step in updating the frameworks of understanding in the study of public health problems and in the search for a critical epidemiology from and for women in the Global South that requires significant changes in health theories, policies and practices in Latin America and the Caribbean, understanding that the solutions to our life processes and comprehensive health and life care do not come only from the knowledge systems of the technical-health field, much less if we insist on reproducing epistemologies and practices that naturalize the matrices of oppression from the dominant Eurocentric feminisms of the Global North.
Thus, we have the important task of rethinking epistemologies of Health from the South (Basile, Iñiguez, 2023), which necessitate epistemic, theoretical-conceptual, technical-practical, and methodological decolonization of what are called gender studies in health to problematize in a dynamic and complex way the ecology of knowledge and wisdom of decolonial, black, community feminisms in order to rethink, reconfigure and act on the health of women and peoples of the South (Viveros, 2023).
Raising profound questions is essential for updating Latin American and Caribbean critical theories on health in the 21st century: What theoretical frameworks have governed research on gender and health? How is this research used as scientific evidence to formulate and implement public policies and practices in public health, epidemiology, care responses, or diagnosis and treatment? How does the generalization of a category exclude, render invisible, and naturalize the matrices of oppression that are reproduced in clinical biomedicine, functionalist public health, social medicine, liberal global health, and Pan-American health policies as expressions that, to varying degrees, reproduce episystemic racism, the coloniality of knowledge and being, and the commodification of health?
To discuss, understand, or problematize these questions in the field of health, in epidemiology, in health policies and systems, in promotional-preventive programs and strategies, in public health management and governance, among other technical-political health spaces and fields; it is first necessary to characterize the epistemic and practical implications of the use value of the category “gender".
Critique of Gender and Health Studies: Decolonizing ourselves from Eurocentric feminisms in the health field
For the process of decolonization and updating of Latin American critical thought on health from the South, it is essential to critically review the studies of gender and health through the contribution of decolonial feminisms and the critique of Eurocentric feminist reason (Espinosa Miñoso, 2022).
The category gender (gender The Eurocentric feminist movement, proposed by the dominant Anglo-Saxon Eurocentric feminism, shifted the focus and discussion to the dynamics of patriarchy in the Global North as a structuring power that produces asymmetrical social relations (both productive and reproductive) within the societies of global capitalism. It is important to note that this Global North or Center, in its constitution as a contemporary world-system, originated as metropolises that underwent conquest, colonization, and colonialism, structuring a Superior-Inferior order of humanity that was later readjusted into an economic order of industrial market capitalism and extractive financial capitalism. Thus, the Eurocentric feminist current universalized and instituted a way of understanding oppression between the sexes as a division: women and men.
In this case, the concept patriarchy It is central to the modern Eurocentric rationalist critique of these societies, which, as a general rule, is made by Eurocentric feminism. Before being reformulated by feminist theory, the meaning of this term corresponded exactly to its etymology: the word “patriarchThe term “patriarchy” is composed of the Greek words “ἀρχω” (to command) and “πατήρ” (father), and since antiquity it has referred to the social organization that grants primacy to the male part of society and institutionalizes the influence of the father. In turn, the conceptual perspective of gender arises from the proposals of various currents of Anglo-Saxon Eurocentric feminism that sought to understand the inequalities affecting women with respect to their injustices and human rights in the Zone of Being (Grosfoguel, 2012); as well as to assume a political position on equality between women and men.
In this sense, the contributions of the Nigerian scholar Oyéronké Oyewùmi (2017) are key to our analysis, as she questions whether patriarchy is a valid universal category. In posing this question, she does not contrast patriarchy with matriarchy, but rather proposes that “Gender was not an organizing principle in Yoruba society (Nigeria) before Western colonizationIn other words, there was no institutionalized gender system, nor were sociocultural relations organized in the Yoruba community according to these sex-gender asymmetries. Thus, Oyewùmi understands gender as a tool of domination introduced by the West, designating two social categories that oppose each other in a binary and hierarchical way. The colonial association between anatomy and gender is part of this binary and hierarchical opposition, central to the domination of females and introduced by the Colony.
In summary, this self-perceived framework of understanding universal consolidated the categories of gender and patriarchy by proposing to “a woman"of a modern, universalist and essentialist nature, which produced this feminist knowledge in a unique situated context, under specific productive-reproductive relations and with naturalized and invisible colonial hierarchical orders under the eyes of the West or the Global North (Mohanty, 1991).
As Yuderkys Espinoza (2022) states, the idea of femininity and masculinity associated with the category of “gender” does not correspond to the experience and situation of women and men. racialized, dehumanized, and anchored in the zone of Non-Being (Grosfoguel, 2012). Thus the gender It is not a category independent of the knowledge system from which it arises: from modern thought and from situations observed in contexts of the Global North.
As Oyewùmi (2017) shows in her work, gender is undoubtedly a sociocultural construct of societies, but it is first and foremost a construct of the global North or the contemporary world system in “its” societies and in its bases of hierarchical humanity.
This is why María Lugones (2008), like other Latin American, Caribbean, and Global South authors, argues that there is a modern/colonial gender system with the imposition of a gender system constitutive of the coloniality of power; and how coloniality itself (which means hierarchical orders brought about by colonization and still in force) was and is constitutive of this gender system. This system constitutes the very meaning of “man” and “woman” in the modern/colonial sense. This gender system (or genderization) makes a fictional comparison of the situation of the white Western woman, as “the woman“under the subordination and inequalities with the Eurocentric, white, and Western “man.” This already highlights the immense differences between being a “woman” or being “black” or “indigenous” (Lugones, 2010).
However, the process of life, work, survival, and humanity, simultaneously racialized and gendered, implies the subjugation of colonized, racialized, dehumanized, and subjugated women under a different system of oppression than that established by the West since the genderization.
Just as race is a mythical invention of colonization (racial classification), so too is gender. The invention of “race” establishes the relations of superiority and inferiority created through colonial domination. Humanity and human relations are considered through a fiction, in biological terms. White bourgeois women are considered women. The excluded females (slaves, indigenous women)—by and within that description—were not only subordinates but also seen and treated as animals, subhuman, or inferior. Therefore, Lugones makes an important contribution by introducing the concept of coloniality of gender and denouncing, along with other decolonial feminists, that both gender and patriarchy only make sense within the Western epistemologies of the Global North. This trap of so-called unity or sisterhood among women diligently conceals the class and racial interests of those who present themselves as representatives of “women” in universal terms (Espinosa, 2022). And this also obscured epistemic violence and the ethnocentrism of a feminist theory that made invisible the experiences of non-white women and their theoretical and epistemic contributions.
Lugones (2008), from his concept of the colonial gender system, criticized the dichotomous and hierarchical categorical logic central to modern colonial capitalist thought that resulted from the separation between the human and the non-human, where the human has been represented in man white, modern, European, bourgeois, colonial, heterosexual, Christian, considered civilized; and likewise the universal category of “woman” generalized by the West as dichotomous and subordinate in the productive-reproductive to that “man” in the global North, while denying humanity to black women, indigenous women and other racialized and oppressed women in the Zone of Non-Being (Grosfoguel, 2012) or the global South.

Source: Lugones, 2010
The thinking developed by decolonial and antiracist feminists radicalizes the critique of this claim to universalism inherent in Eurocentric feminist theory. Decolonial feminist conceptions, from thinkers and activists such as María Lugones (2010), Lélia González (1984), and Afro-Caribbean women like Ochy Curiel (2021), Yuderkys Espinoza Miñoso (2022), Julieta Paredes Carvajal (2022), Mara Viveros (2023), Karina Ochoa Muñoz (2021), Aura Cumes (2014), and Breny Mendoza (2021), among many others, cannot be situated without considering the systems of knowledge and the ecology of ancestral Black, Indigenous, popular, and territorial wisdom from which our feminisms in the Global South are grounded, embodied, and territorialized.
Since classical feminist theory and the category of gender are inadequate for interpreting the reality and oppression of racialized women, because this category (gender) does not properly explain how "women" from non-European populations of the Global North were subjugated. In short, we seek to describe a racism that masks the claim to universality of the category "woman" in Eurocentric and white feminisms, from which many feminist currents in the Global South in general, and especially in Latin America and the Caribbean in particular, have been and continue to be nourished. This concept of "woman"[1] She does not understand the knowledge systems emanating from these white feminisms. folkloriza or it devalues Black, Indigenous, peasant, migrant, lesbian, and gender-diverse women; it erases the oppressive intersections of race, coloniality, and class exploitation that are not mere “additives” or a slogan of “the intersectional“in the 21st century (Lugones, 2008). The intersectionality of imbrications, articulations, and flows of conditioning factors and adversities structured on racialized women did not originate with Crenshaw’s (1990) simplified theses—used for a legal case—which have now been universalized and reduced to empty slogans and pretexts for maintaining classical feminist hegemonies (Lugones, 2010). In this way, they were fragmented into homogeneous categories that create fixed, static, and focused positions, thus providing the theoretical basis for the emergence of agendas of demands and policy responses.” inclusion social neoliberalism by fragments (Lugones, 2005).
As Vigoya Viveros (2016) identifies, as intersectionality has become the most widespread feminist metaphor today in Europe and the United States, many of the works written on intersectionality have lost connection with the Latin American and Caribbean black, indigenous, popular contexts that gave rise to it and have ignored important contributions made outside of the university contexts of the Global North and written in languages other than English.
Hence, the critique of universal patriarchy and the universal female subject characterized by the white-bourgeois-hetero hegemonies of feminist practices and theory (Espinoza Miñoso, 2022) is fundamental for the black, decolonial, community feminist movements that emerged in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and Asia or the United States.
Now, Why bring these frameworks of understanding and epistemic shifts into the field of health from the South? Because this categorical framework of Anglo-Saxon Eurocentric feminisms also hegemonized the fields of healthcare, public health, and epidemiology, as well as European and Latin American social medicine, collective health, and other areas. This gendered construction has had and continues to have significant repercussions on the processes of understanding life, health, subjectivation, and sociability, but also markedly on the very design of research, training, management, public health policies and programs, and international health cooperation that is reproduced in Latin America and the Caribbean. Denying it or resisting addressing it does not imply its non-existence.
Implications of the Gender category in the field of Health in the South
The repercussions of this categorical framework of Eurocentric feminisms in the field of health and epidemiology were not insignificant and maintain a significant coloniality in health knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean (Quijano, 2000). Modern clinical biomedicine, like public health—in all its expressions, even critical ones—reproduces serious omissions in its understanding of health and the ecology of health knowledge held by Indigenous nations, Black, peasant, and working-class populations, in their ways of living, working, becoming ill, and dying, simply by considering them within universal categories in the hackneyed international classifications of diseases, or within the matrices of approaching public or collective health from a gender perspective.
Reviewing the gender category in the field of health by visualizing the current definition of the World Health Organization (WHO) can give us some initial insights:
“Gender refers to the roles, characteristics and opportunities defined by society that are considered appropriate for men, women, boys, girls and people with non-binary identities. Gender is also a product of relationships between people and can reflect the distribution of power between them…” (WHO 2018)
With this conceptualization of gender, it is possible to observe a series of works in clinical and public health research that operationalize and understand the gender as a universal category for studying, acting upon, or responding to health-disease and care problems of women and men in the societies, communities, territories, and territorialities of the Global South. Countless epidemiological studies reduce the category of gender to distributions and frequencies of morbidity and mortality by sex (PAHO, 2022). These were the scientific findings that led to the establishment of a health professional training policy with the overarching premise of “gender inclusion“gender perspective,” “gender equity” in clinical care and in vertical public health programs according to the epistemic matrices of the Global North, which were reproduced and are reproduced in the agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2015), in the Population and Development agendas (ECLAC 2022) and currently could not be missing “gender"in the liberal global health governance agenda so widespread in schools and public health managers (Basile, 2018).
In the literature review, we also found that gender and health studies reproduce the entire Eurocentric feminist epistemology operationalized in women's health:
“Promoting gender equity in health implies contributing to the accumulation by women of social, human and cultural capital, against the current of the dispossession process that this patriarchal social history imposes on them…Concomitantly, it should be noted that there is sufficient evidence to affirm that the difference between genders, that is, the social division by sex of labor and power, establishes a close link between the epidemiological profiles of a population and the characteristics of accessibility, financing and management of the health system” (Tajer et al, 2007).
This has also been called gender epidemiological profiles (PAHO 2009), which have created a kind of additive superimposition of categories such as gender, social class, and ethnicity/race in what are called gender inequalities in health. Furthermore, Anglo-Saxon social epidemiology (Borrell, 2015; Dahlgren and Whitehead, 1991) and risk epidemiology (Breilh, 1998), prevalent in both academia and health management and governance, have transformed these categories into: gender = sex; social class = socioeconomic level; and ethnicity/race = skin color. This accumulates in biostatistics about individuals (case = person) as individual phenomena of counts by sex/gender of illness/death, placed in a distribution, and then added on artificial scales by sex/gender, socioeconomic level, and skin color.
Currently, this perspective has reshaped health policies and programs focused within the framework of the waves of neoliberal reforms to the health sector and health systems, adapting this sex-gender system in the individualization of individual risks converted into artificial sums in the so-called “vulnerable populations or groups"In the best style of neoliberal social risk management, for example, by calling "gender perspective" the counting of packages or mitigation actions according to the number of poor women and girls, children and adolescents; which are ordered, by income level, place, sex, age, and other layers of data accumulated in the systems of unique beneficiaries of social and health programs within a given population as a sum of aggregation of individuals, and finally designing and putting functionalist public policies of prevention and care of disease and territorially structuring the precarious health and social security systems to packages of services and public health interventions from a gender perspective under these same premises.
“Accelerating gender equality and investing in empowerment generates huge economic benefits. No society can develop sustainably if it does not change and increase the distribution of opportunities, resources and choices for men and women so that they have the same power to direct their own lives and contribute to their families, communities and countries” (World Bank, 2023).
These conceptualizations not only do not complicate intersectionality –perhaps they trivialize themNor do they take into account the evolution of communities of life (Colmenares, 2022), how their health-illness-care processes are historically conditioned by multiple matrices of oppression. They only contribute to the exploitation of epistemic resources to justify policies aimed at the division, individualization, and extermination of the community and social life of communities of life (Colmenares, 2022).
These categorical frameworks have their most serious consequences in policies that are currently defined as “population and development"for Latin America and the Caribbean, constantly updated and with international funding flows to local NGOs, activists and networks, as well as those internationalized by the United Nations system itself."
Here, women and men from black and indigenous communities were and are subjected to a whole agenda of “population control"in their own birth and death rates under the approaches of epidemiological transition and development theorizing (Omran, 1971) from colonial premises of family planning through forced sterilization or in certain conceptual updates of what is sometimes currently called the premises of sexual and reproductive health although it continues in practice to be family planning with a human face for "poor" populations."
Based on consensus statements and economic indicators proposed by ECLAC to contribute to economic development plans, it was determined that some countries needed to lower their fertility rates, supported by the World Population Action Plan (ECLAC-WAP 2000). In Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Peru, implementation was the responsibility of the Ministries of Health or Health Secretariats, or supported by private organizations affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which provided family planning services in rural and urban areas. In other words, biological processes were modified without any real change to the material living conditions of these populations and communities.
Necochea López (2008) described it within the framework of “National security in the North, contraceptives in the SouthBoth the European Union, through its numerous development cooperation agencies, and the United States continue to address population growth and human migration and mobility as a problem in countries of the Global South.They call it developing– and considering it a threat to their national security.
But it is clear that these policies, programs, and practices of birth control and vertical family planning were and still are implemented today by public health teams and programs that are always reproduced in racialized, disenfranchised, and permanently dispossessed territories and populations in the Global South. Interculturality is not considered, or is simply instrumentalized as a problem of linguistic translation.
These modern colonial feminist epistemologies entered vertically, more or less amicably, and structured Eurocentric feminist technocracies in the Global South through the well-known international system of development cooperation...or what we commonly call international cooperation or the international cooperation regime. This international cooperation system, also in health, reproduces a North-South geopolitics through its central cooperating agencies (e.g., USAID, EU, DFID, AFD, JICA, others) and NGOs from the Global North, which expanded into our territories, communities, and populations with the internationalization of its values, interests, approaches, theories, and policies as universal, consolidating a women's health agenda monocultural approaches based on the theses of family planning, population and development, birth control, even through financing and flows of projects from NGOs in the Global North.
It is common to look at these categorical frameworks of gender In clinical care and practice, individual curative-assistance healthcare systems (within health systems) reproduce, in their very design, management, care, and responses, experiences of racialization and oppression that are frequently experienced simply as exacerbated forms of discrimination and are currently recognized as forms of institutional violence within health services (gynecological and obstetric violence, mistreatment, among others). When we begin to visualize an epidemiology of institutional racism (Werneck, 2016) and systematically map care, curative, clinical-medical practices, and treatments on racialized bodies, it is possible to find not only gender inequalities but also profound practices of racial and class-based dehumanization (Basile et al., 2022). These are some examples where this epistemology of gender in health also translates into the reproduction of matrices of oppression, racism, and classism at all levels within the coloniality of knowledge in medical practice (Anunciação et al., 2022).
In summary, the critique of the category of “gender” operationalized in health from Eurocentric and Anglo-Saxon feminisms refers to:
- Studies of the frequency and distribution of diseases by sex/gender. And that's what they call a "gender" variable or perspective in epidemiology.
- In the institutional architecture, organization and functioning of Health Systems with gender health units or gender as a department within the bureaucratic curative care apparatus of biomedical care response (more or less universal depending on the health system).
- In the creation of national policies that reproduce global health agendas from the modern colonial episteme of global and Pan-American health.
- In the transfer of functionalist public health programs that also permeate the practices of Eurocentric Latin American social medicine, which were further fragmented by vertical programs in maternal-child health, sexual-reproductive health, by the pathologization of women's health, etc.
Keys to decolonial, Black, and community feminisms for thinking about and doing health from the South
As a first epistemological contribution, decolonial feminisms manage to construct their own characterization of the concept of gender, thereby offering a profound and particularized revision of the colonial concept of gender and patriarchy, with the deep interest of dismantling practices, policies, and discourses that contribute to and shape the coloniality of knowledge and power (Quijano, 2000). According to the work of Mara Viveros (2016), Patricia Hill Collins (2000), Chandra Mohanty (1991), Ochy Curiel (2013), Yuderkys Espinosa (2007), Breny Mendoza (2010), María Lugones (2005), Oyéronké Oyewùmi (2017), and other colleagues, the oppressions experienced by Black women, women of color, peasant women, Indigenous women, and women of diverse sexual orientations are explained, from different perspectives, in relation to the matrices of oppression that dictate a way of being a woman and a man.
As a second contribution, this critical thought and action challenge the category of gender proposed by dominant Anglo-Saxon and Eurocentric white feminisms, and build historical, epistemic, and methodological foundations for understanding the matrices of oppression of women in the Global South. Black, decolonial, and community feminisms generate critical decolonial thought and action from the Global South, and undoubtedly share common ground with Latin American critical thought on health from the Global South. The revision, decolonization, and updating of Latin American and Caribbean critical thought on health in the 21st century aims to rethink health within a new categorical framework of Health from the Global South (Basile, 2022). This involves understanding health as a complex, sociocultural, and historically conditioned process, resulting from colonial, racial, and capitalist legacies in their different phases, within a geopolitics of dependencies and international determinants of health and life in the Global South.
Leaving us, in the field of health, with the task of asking ourselves: How can we understand territories and territorialities to produce comprehensive healthcare and life care in our spaces of action regarding the multiple oppressions suffered by Black, Indigenous, peasant, migrant, LGBTQ+, and other women? How can we build strategies for health sovereignty also within the territorial, national, and regional agenda of women's health in the Global South? What are the implications of refounding health systems and decolonizing our ways of organizing and institutionalizing health strategies, services, and actions to comprehensively monitor and respond to intersectionalities in life and health? How do decolonial, Black, and community feminisms contribute to thinking about and creating another epidemiology in our communities of life?
As a final reflection
The central objective of our reflection is to position the foundations of thought and action of decolonial, Black, and community feminisms, which in their diverse representations were configured politically and epistemologically by individual trajectories and especially by the ecology of diverse collective knowledges. All of these converge on the need to interpellate, confront, and offer alternatives to all hierarchical orders, as well as to discourses and dominant practices, in order to understand and respond to the matrices of oppression that cannot be fragmented, folklorized, or trivialized in terms of "Afro" or "Indigenous," which are currently repeated under the guise of Anglo-Saxon and Eurocentric feminisms, also in the fields of health, epidemiology, and sexual and reproductive health, among others.
Latin American critical thought in health has undertaken and continues to undertake the recovery of diverse Latin American and Caribbean critical and decolonial theories as new intersections with the health and social sciences, independent of Eurocentric critical epistemologies. It recognizes other knowledge systems that arise from practices and realities ignored by modern science, constructing an alternative history and explaining and incorporating epistemologies and knowledge displaced from the ecology of Abya Yala (the Americas), which have resisted penetration and civilizational cultural genocide. This process is part of a dignified stance against the systematic and normalized violence experienced by our own groups and collectives of women, aiming to generate relative autonomy and spaces of health sovereignty in adverse global and regional contexts (Basile, 2023; Breilh, 2022).
Here we arrive at the key point of this article: we say that there is no Latin American Caribbean critical thinking on health from the South in the 21st century without decolonial, black and community feminisms at the center of its epistemologies, frameworks of understanding, theories, policies and new health practices.
To make visible the need to question and fight against a network of matrices of domination (Hill Collins, 2000) involved in the field of health at different levels. Multiple oppressions are expressed in bodies, territories, and Mother Earth through destructive processes—in the form of illnesses, suffering, death, and pain, as well as socio-environmental and epidemiological crises—making it important to visualize the relationship between systems of oppression and rethink racism as a key epidemiological problem in the health of racialized women in the Global South (Gondim, et al., 2020). We also invite a look through the lens of Black, community, and decolonial feminist struggles to conduct a profound review of the category of intersectionality In health, proposing the simultaneous study and action on health from the imbrication of oppressions that are generated in the ways of being born, living, working or dying that give rise to polarized, racialized epidemiological profiles and alarming health-disease-care processes in black and indigenous populations that are precarious and dehumanized even in the 21st century.
Ultimately, it is about opening new questions and taking on the complex implications of studying, problematizing, and building practices from the intersections that decolonial, Black, and community feminisms call us to as key nuclei of Latin American critical thought on health from the South in the 21st century.
In this work process, we find a group of researchers, institutions, and activists from the CLACSO Working Group on International Health and Health Sovereignty where we seek to create a space for the exchange of experiences, epistemic dialogue, and critical production situated within the context of the Global South, focusing on the intersections and contributions of decolonial, Black, and community feminisms in the field of health from the Global South. This opens new paths for decolonizing ourselves from certain categories that still impact healthcare practices, but especially strengthens contributions to transforming our health and lives in the Global South.
Highlighted
Basile, Gonzalo (2022) Towards a Health from the South: A decolonial and sanitary sovereignty epistemology. Medicina Social, 15(2), 65-72.
Basile, Gonzalo; Iñiguez, Luisa (2023) Study of Inequalities from Latin American Critical Thought in Health: Crossroads for the Decolonization of Research Theories and Practices from the South. Dossier of the CLACSO Working Group on International Health and Health Sovereignty, February, 2023.
World Bank (2023) Understanding Poverty: Gender. Link: https://www.bancomundial.org/es/topic/gender/overview
Colmenares Lizárraga, Katya (2022) From modern society to community of life: agenda for a transmodern and post-Western decolonial philosophy. Tabula Rasa, (42), 133-152.
Crenshaw, K. (1990) Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stan. L. Rev., 43, 1241.
ECLAC, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (2022). UN. ECLAC. 45 years of the Regional Gender Agenda. Updated document, August 18, 2023.
Espinoza, Yuderkys (2022) Why a decolonial feminism is necessary. Essays on gender and sexuality, Icaria Editorial, collection: Women and Cultures. Barcelona, Spain.
Grosfoguel, Ramón (2012) The concept of "racism" in Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon: theorizing from the zone of being or from the zone of non-being. Tabula rasa, (16), 79-102.
Gondim, Roberta, Cunha, Ana Paula, dos Santos, Ana Giselle, et al (2022) Racial inequalities and death as a horizon: considerations on COVID-19 and structural racism/ /Racial inequalities and death as a horizon: considerations on COVID-19 and structural racism. Cad. Public Health 36 (9) 18 Sep 2020.
Hills Collins, Patricia (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.). New York. Routledge.
Lugones, María. (2011). Towards a decolonial feminism. The apple of discord, 6(2), 105-117.
Lugones María. (2008) Coloniality and gender. Tabula Rasa. Bogotá – Colombia, No.9: 73- 101, July-December.
Lugones, María (2005) Radical Multiculturalism and Feminisms of Women of Color International Journal of Political Philosophy, No. 25, pp. 61-76 Metropolitan Autonomous University Iztapalapa Mexico.
Mohanty, Chandra (1991) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Necochea López, Raúl (2010) Contraceptives in the south, national security in the north. Collective Health, 6, 103-111.
Oyewùmi Oyéronké.(2017) The invention of women. An African perspective on Western discourses of gender.
Pan American Health Organization (2022). Gender Equality in Health. Available
at: https://www.paho.org/es/temas/igualdad-genero-salud.
World Health Organization (2018) Gender and Health. Available at: https://www.who.int/es/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/gender.
Omran, Abdel (1971) The epidemiological transition; a theory of the epidemiology of population change, in Milbank Mem Fund Quart, no. 49.
Quijano, Aníbal (2000) Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America. In Lander, E (Comp.). The Coloniality of Knowledge: Eurocentrism and Social Sciences: Latin American Perspectives (p.201-246). Buenos Aires: CLACSO.
Tajer, Devora, Lo Russo, Alejandra, Reid, Graciela, Gaba, Mariana, Attardo, Clara, Zamar, Adriana. Olivares Bustamante, Leslie (2007) Critical Path of Women's Health: Integrality and Gender Equity in Women's Health Practices in the City of Buenos Aires. Research Yearbook, 14, 00-00.
Viveros, Mara (2023) Intersectionality. Decolonial and community turn1st ed. – Autonomous City of Buenos Aires: CLACSO; Amsterdam: TNI Transnational Institute.
Viveros, Mara (2016) Intersectionality: A Situated Approach to DominationNational Autonomous University of Mexico, University Program of Gender Studies.
Werneck, Jurema (2016) Institutional racism and the health of the black population. Health and Society. 2016, v. 25, no. 3, 535-549.
* Mexico. Member of the CLACSO Working Group on International Health and Health Sovereignty. ORCID: 0000-0001-8528-3000
[1] In its classical form, women appear as a homogeneous group anchored on a material basis (chromosomal and hormonal sex); this theoretical basis would lead them to be united in a single destiny. (Espinoza Miñoso 2022, p. 82)
If you would like to receive more information about CLACSO's training programs:
[widget id=”custom_html-57″]
to our email lists.