Intersectionality in Health from the Feminisms of the Global South

The Seminar introduces critical studies on the coloniality of gender and its current use in an epistemic-methodological emptying of the concept of intersectionality in an additive application in public health and epidemiology that are currently reproduced in global and regional public policy agendas of management and government, in academies and training schools, in various geopolitics of knowledge in global health of the North and of medical-social pan-Americanism in our region. (Neo)liberal multiculturalism has reduced and emptied the hierarchies of domination and oppression into simple additive aggregates of loose variables where the intertwined oppressions that impact the health and lives of women and men in the Global South are simplified, giving multicultural faces by skin color and ethnic-racial and/or diversity to the institutions of the State, Westernized universities and/or in companies through identity policies as if these multiple oppressions were isolated risk factors and determinants that can be added, quantified and mitigated in a clinical and population-based way.

The use of the category of gender and intersectionality within the field of modern Western health sciences, from clinical biomedicine, European/Latin American social medicine to functionalist public health, from Pan-American international cooperation agendas in health to contemporary liberal global health, (re)produces a logic of additives and affirmative actions, transforming the multiple intertwined oppressions into isolated variables such as racism in counting morbidity and mortality cases by skin color, gender in the distribution of diseases and deaths by sex, and social class reduced to the socioeconomic level of inequalities by individual and/or population income.

The foundations for updating and decolonizing Latin American critical thought in Health from the South and Critical Epidemiology draw on diverse intersections, trajectories, and new contributions as theoretical, epistemic, and methodological groundwork for understanding the racial and colonial determinants of health, the geopolitics of dependency in theories and agendas of international cooperation on women's health imposed by the Global North, and other factors. In other words, this Seminar proposes to stop importing gendered categories and frameworks of understanding, as well as liberal multiculturalism, from epistemologies of global centers that have never considered the problems and oppressions faced by women in Abya Yala (the Americas).

This program focuses on the key implications of decolonial, Black, and community feminisms for women's health in the Global South and a critical epidemiology of racism, giving primary importance to the voices, struggles, practices, knowledge systems, and wisdom of Indigenous and Black women, and of the diverse communities of life in our region. It also contributes knowledge from critical epidemiological theory and its applications to the intersectional and territorial monitoring of health and life care.

The Seminar is part of continuing education spaces and strengthening of study groups of the CLACSO International Health Working Group network, seeking to be a high-level theoretical-academic exercise and to constitute a regional training proposal for researchers, academics, social movement activists, NGOs, public managers, planners and evaluators in the field of international health and public health policies.

GENERAL PURPOSE

Develop specialized training on critical intersectionality applied to addressing the determinants of women's health from the feminisms of the Global South.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

• To study the coloniality of gender in health and in the social sciences of Latin American and Caribbean public health and its expressions of colonial dependence in gender studies in the 21st century
• Identifying the foundations and contributions of Global South Feminisms to critical thinking in Health and Epidemiology for the 21st Century
• To problematize and discuss the implications of the current use of an intersectionality perspective subordinated to the epistemologies of white Eurocentric feminisms of European/Latin American social medicine, the Pan-Americanism of public health and the global health agendas of the North
•  Understanding the critical epidemiology of racism as a public health problem and reflecting on the racial-colonial determination of the health of women in the Global South
• To understand the practices, struggles, methodologies, and strategies of territorial intersectional health monitoring from decolonial, Black, and community feminisms in Latin America and the Caribbean

• Modern-colonial scientific thinking in women's health in the Global South
• Coloniality of Gender in Health.
• Decolonizing Gender Studies in Health.
• Coloniality of the International Cooperation Regime and global agendas of “Population and Development” in the health of women in the South
• Introduction to Decolonial Feminisms for the study and approach to the intersections of multiple oppressions
• Introduction to Black Feminisms for the study and approach to the racial-colonial determinants of the health of women in the Global South
• Introduction to Community Feminisms for the integral and intercultural care of Mother Earth, health and life in Abya Yala
• Critical Thinking on Women's Health from the Global South
• Intersectionality as a theory and strategy for a critical epidemiology of racism in the 21st century
• Voices, Struggles, Knowledge Systems and Health Wisdom of Indigenous, Black and Community-Popular Women of Abya Yala

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