Article

Feminist Theory
2021, Vol. 22(3) 339–359
‘We are not poor things’: ! The Author(s) 2020
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territorio cuerpo-tierra and sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1464700120909508
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organised struggles
Laura Rodriguez Castro
Griffith University, Australia

Abstract
In this article, I use Lorena Cabnal’s notion of territorio cuerpo-tierra to analyse seventeen
in-depth interviews with women leaders of rural social movements and other organ-
isations in Colombia. In the interviews, social leaders condemn violence that is epi-
stemic, systemic, militarised and that permeates all ambits of life. They denounce how
the coloniality of power operates, while at the same time they propose alternatives for a
better life from their own cosmovisions by enacting food sovereignty and constructing
feminisms from ‘below’. I demonstrate how these social leaders’ actions are entangled
in decolonial feminist struggles, which undermine the way in which women in the Global
South have been constructed as ‘objects’ or ‘in need of saving’. These women are not
‘victims who need saving’, but politically active subjects who enact change locally and
nationally through their ‘territories bodies-lands’. Not only do their narratives highlight
the intimate relationship of the body with the land, but I argue that we must follow their
lead in order to dismantle the coloniality of power.

Keywords
Decoloniality, feminism, food sovereignty, Global South, rurality, territory

Introduction
In an editorial for a special issue of Feminist Theory, Roberts and Connell high-
lighted the ‘inequalities, exclusions and distortions’ of mainstream feminist theory
as well as the ‘enormous wealth of feminist thought in the global periphery’ (2016:
135–137). This article draws on and strengthens these crucial insights by presenting
a case study of Colombian women’s rural resistance while engaging with

Corresponding author:
Laura Rodriguez Castro, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University, Gold Coast
Campus, G06, 2.20, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Southport, Queensland 4215, Australia.
Email: laura.rodriguezcastro@alumni.griffithuni.edu.au
340 Feminist Theory 22(3)

Indigenous communitarian feminist Maya-Xinka Lorena Cabnal’s epistemology of

territorio cuerpo-tierra, which is entangled in the various feminisms that
demand the dismantling of colonial feminisms (Marcos, 2005; Anzaldúa, 2007;
Lugones, 2008; Gargallo Celentani, 2014; Hernández, 2014; Cabnal, 2015;
Espinosa Miñoso, 2017). As many decolonial and communitarian feminists have
demonstrated, colonial feminisms are not grounded in any specific body of work
but rather operate through the coloniality of power (e.g. Lugones, 2008). For
instance, the coloniality of power in the modern world is entrenched in and through
practices that privilege white, Western and Eurocentric actions and narratives
(Mignolo and Walsh, 2018).
The concept of the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP), which emerged in Latin
America, is useful for understanding how the coloniality of power continues
to operate in colonial feminisms as well as in mainstream feminisms. The develop-
ment of the concept of the CMP is central to Quijano’s (2014) claim that from
the fifteenth century new forms of social domination, such as heteropatriarchal
and racist gender relations, came to the fore. The separation of the socially
constructed categories of gender and race that has occurred in many modern
mainstream feminist struggles is deeply implicated in the CMP and thus in the
epistemic violence of colonial feminisms (Lugones, 2008; Hernández, 2014;
Millán et al., 2014; Espinosa Miñoso, 2017). In this context, coloniality and patri-
archy have typically been enmeshed, and some feminisms have embarked on
a civilising project, without questioning the universalist and modernist para-
digm in which processes of coloniality are forged and racism is legitimised
(Millán et al., 2014).
Adding to decolonial feminist debates, Lugones (2008) argues that the actions
and theorising of the feminist movement of the twentieth century focused on strug-
gles that rejected the characterisation of women as fragile and weak, as located in
the private space and as sexually passive, but centred only the experiences of those
who were white and bourgeois, without making explicit how women’s lives were
inflected by race. In Mexico, Marcos illustrates the epistemic violence of these types
of feminisms by arguing that urban feminist analysis has ‘given rise to a hegemony
that has often defined Indigenous feminisms as the ‘‘other’’: exotic, strangely
rooted in ‘‘culture’’ and powerless if not nonexistent’ (2005: 82). Indeed, feminist
discourse in Latin America has also been implicated in a ‘racist, classist and het-
erosexist bias’ through a monopolisation by the ‘white and mestiza urban middle-
class elite’ (Bastian Duarte, 2012: 153).
In addition to ongoing exclusion of race and ethnicity in the feminisms of mod-
ernity, the actions of colonial feminisms in the context of neoliberal ‘development’
have also been denounced. For instance, across the Global South there is a concern
that liberal feminism has been institutionalised through government programmes
and the actions of non-government organisations (Alvarez, 2009). Colonial femin-
isms have advanced the universalisation and institutionalisation of women’s rights
in the Global South, but not without resistance from various forms of organising in
the region (see: Alvarez, 2009; Bastian Duarte, 2012).
Rodriguez Castro 341

Indeed, from what have been described as the ‘open cracks’ (Mignolo and
Walsh, 2018) and the ‘borderlands’ (Anzaldúa, 2007), those committed to disman-
tling the coloniality of power have created forms of resistance and re-existence
through their own epistemologies and political actions. Re-existence is understood
here as ‘the redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity’ (Albán
Achinte, 2008, cited in Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 182). From the rural territories
in Latin America, many communities have been at the forefront of destabilising the
discourses of the CMP and offering progressive alternatives for a better life from
Indigenous, Black and peasant cosmovisions.
In this article, I therefore engage with Colombian rural women’s organised
resistances as a means of continuing the projects of decolonial feminisms.
I engage with Indigenous communitarian feminist Maya-Xinka Lorena Cabnal’s
epistemology of territorio cuerpo-tierra, which I explain in the next section. In the
following sections, I review the literature on women’s rural organised resistance in
rural Latin America, provide background to the Colombian context and outline
the methodology. I then turn to the central focus of the article: an examination of
Colombian women’s struggles from the territorio cuerpo-tierra. In the final section
of the article, I draw on the voices of Colombian women, which denounce the
actions of colonial feminisms, and discuss the implications of these claims for
feminist resistance.

Territorio cuerpo-tierra
Cabnal explains that Indigenous women in Latin America are at the forefront
of the various forms of violence present in the rural territories:

For Indigenous women, living in territories where the state has not resolved the effects
of war, which are impoverished places, and that are far from the peace accords, it
becomes a sombre horizon. Still, it is important to say that throughout history
Indigenous women have rebelled against the oppressions of dispossession, looting
and other forms of violence against their bodies. There are numerous testimonies of
resistance; from the grandmothers and great-grandmothers against the forms of colo-
nial domination; even the contemporary women, who bring their bodies to the fore-
front of the attack to defend life. (Cabnal, 2015)1

From this perspective, Cabnal develops the epistemic position of territorio cuerpo-
tierra as a political statement that ‘implicates the conscious recovery of our first
territory body, as an emancipatory political act’ and, in line with the feminist
claims of ‘‘‘the personal is political’’, ‘‘what is not named does not exist’’’ (2010:
22). She asserts that to understand the body as territory is to awaken women’s
consciousness to the historical experiences and structural oppressions of the body –
which include patriarchy and coloniality. In recognising these historical experiences
and structural expressions, the body becomes a site of resistance, transgression and
creation.
342 Feminist Theory 22(3)

Accordingly, Cabnal (2010) explains that understanding the body as intimately

related to the land has historically contributed to the communal struggle for land.
For decades, many rural women have been at the forefront of resisting violence
against their bodies, lands and territories in Latin America, while forging connec-
tions of the body-land (Cabnal, 2010; Ruta Pacı́fica de las Mujeres, 2013; Méndez
Torres et al., 2013). In the struggles against all forms of violence, rural women and
their communities have organised to protect the Earth, to gain autonomy within
their territories and to access land legitimately – through women-led land tenure
and land titling (Lozano, 2016; Cruz et al., 2017).
In working from decolonial praxis, I strategically undermine the ways in which
women’s bodies and women in the developing world have been respectively con-
structed as ‘objects’ or as ‘victims who need saving’ by focusing on the intimate
relationships of the body-land. Thus, I draw on Cabnal’s (2010) notion of territorio
cuerpo-tierra in order to analyse the narratives of Colombian women’s organised
rural resistances. This juxtaposition highlights not only how women of the Global
South are agentive subjects but also how we can self-determine our autonomy and
our liberation. I do so in a context in which there is a prevalence of Western-centric
knowledge production and an attendant privileging of the English language and a
politics of citation (Roberts and Connell, 2016).

Women’s organised resistances in rural Latin America

In their struggle to defend life in all its forms, women in rural social movements in
Latin America have placed the protection of life as central to their political agendas,
with a specific focus on dismantling neoliberal projects affecting their territories.
Women in rural social movements have presented alternative cosmovisions to colo-
nial logics of possessing nature and have resisted various forms of violence (Cabnal,
2010; Millán et al., 2014). Lozano (2016) explains that Afro-Colombian women’s
connection to nature in the communities of the Pacific is one that does not consider
the natural world as an object needing to be possessed or appropriated, but rather as
interconnected with human life through a relational understanding of the territory.
It is also in these rural areas where violence is entrenched. The way in which
Colombian women’s bodies have resisted violence in these territories has been well
documented in the comprehensive report of the Ruta Pacı́fica de Las Mujeres. As
part of the Commission for Truth and Memory for a peaceful and negotiated end
to the Colombia armed conflict, the Ruta Pacı́fica report gathered the testimonies
of women who are understood as ‘survivors’ (2013: 22). The report notes that there
are three forms of resistance in women’s fight for preserving life, namely: ‘resist and
mobilise in the name of union’, ‘redo the conditions of being human’ and ‘knit
collective living’ within their families and communities as well as in larger orga-
nised processes in the country (Ruta Pacı́fica de las Mujeres, 2013: 27).
The Ruta Pacı́fica (2013) report gathers the different experiences of women
affected by the armed conflict in Colombia, distinguishing between Indigenous,
Black and Campesinx2 communities. Importantly, however, these ‘categorisations’
Rodriguez Castro 343

are potentially problematic in that they are borne from tensions wrought by histor-
ically imposed ethnic and cultural distinctions. They ignore, for example, the fact
that there can be Black Campesinx communities (Hoffmann, 2016). Moreover, these
categorisations have had varied impacts on the lives of people who make up these
communities. Ethnic rights legislation for Indigenous and Afrocolombian groups,
for instance, has been an important mechanism for these communities to advance
territorial claims since the Colombian Constitution of 1991. In contrast to the con-
stitutional rights that ethnic peoples hold in Colombia, the recognition of
Campesinxs as subjects deserving of autonomy and rights has been limited, which
is demonstrated by the refusal of the Colombian government to sign the 2018 United
Nations Peasant Rights Declaration (Duarte, 2018). Thus, the different forms of
violence that women face in Colombia, as documented in the Ruta Pacı́fica report,
are also tied to institutional and epistemic violence that denies the complexity of the
diverse experiences of the rural population in place.
In the context of epistemic, institutional and war violence, the fight for land has
been fundamental to Colombian and Latin American rural social movements. Yet,
despite women’s important roles in environmental and social movements, leftist
movements in the Latin American region have historically marginalised women in
their struggles. Thus, rather than highlighting the ways that struggles for land and
territory are gendered and racialised, these mainstream rural social movements
have positioned gender and its intersections with race and ethnicity as secondary
issues, which has consequently restricted women’s access to land (Palacios
Sepúlveda, 2012; Meertens, 2012; Lozano, 2016). In Colombia, for instance,
women’s land claims are limited due to the lack of understanding of their particular
gendered experiences in male-dominated mixed organisations and patrilineal inher-
itance. Illustrative of the obstacles rural women face in accessing land is Palacios
Sepúlveda’s (2012) analysis of the La Vı́a Campesina documents, which reveals that
the patriarchal axis is still subordinated to the economic dimensions of the move-
ment, and Meertens’ (2012) extensive research in Colombia, which finds that his-
torically women have had less formal access to land tenure and land titling than
men (e.g. due to lack of formal paperwork with their name).
The issues outlined above demonstrate that rural women’s struggles in Latin
America are not only gendered but embedded in the persistent inequalities of global
capitalism and ongoing coloniality. Thus, I present Colombian rural women’s
insurgencies emerging in Latin American as entangled with decolonial and com-
munitarian struggles, but also as deeply rooted in their own differentiated territory
body-land experiences, therefore blurring any closed boundaries and categorisa-
tions characteristic of Eurocentric linear epistemologies.

Colombian context
In order to understand the current social and political landscape of rural
Colombia, one has to take into account the nation’s history of armed conflict,
systemic violence, drug trafficking, United States intervention, social inequality,
344 Feminist Theory 22(3)

illegal land grabbing, forced displacement and dispossession. More recently,

Colombia’s context has changed as a result of the 2016 ratification of a peace
accord with the largest insurgent group FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed
Forces, People’s Army). The peace accord is currently being implemented with a
focus on the predominantly rural territories affected by the armed conflict.
The rural population, composed mainly of Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and
Campesinx populations, still remains disproportionally marginalised. One of the
main reasons for this marginalisation is the social and armed conflict related to
territorial control. A combination of factors, including the failed agrarian reforms
that were to benefit the small and medium farming sector at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the concentration of property in the hands of large landowners
and the militarisation of national territory (guerrillas, paramilitary, national armed
forces and drug trafficking groups), has resulted in systemic violence, dispossession
and forced displacement (Reyes Posada, 2009). Agro-industrial, agro-fuel and
mining industries have benefited greatly from forced displacements and land grabs
as communities have disappeared from regions (Ruta Pacı́fica de las Mujeres, 2013).
The consequences of this social and armed conflict are seen today as Colombian
territorial control is highly fragmented and unregulated and is most often dominated
by drug traffickers and paramilitary groups (Reyes Posada, 2009).
In the last decade, women’s experiences and political actions in the context of
armed conflict have been slowly made visible through women’s organised initiatives
that, although fragmented in the war years, gained prominence following the com-
mencement of the peace accord negotiations in 2012 (Casa de la Mujer, 2018).
Women’s testimonies have condemned ‘the systemic actions of the diverse armed
actors that have learned to violate their bodies, their life spaces, and rights as a form
of contempt and intimidation’ (Ruta Pacı́fica de las Mujeres, 2013: 115). In the ‘post-
peace accord period’, many social movements have denounced the continuation of
patriarchy, hegemony of foreign investment and militarism in the country, and have
proposed alternative forms of peace-making (Paarlberg-Kvam, 2018).
To date, the peace accords have not been sufficient to change the realities of
Colombia’s rural population. Moreover, violence directed at social leaders is surging
in the post-accord period, with 263 murders to date3 (Pacifista, 2017). Organised
social movements are demanding that the state comply with the peace accords and
address the systemic violence against social leaders (see: Casa de la Mujer, 2018).
Indeed, the land continues to be a space in which state-led security agendas are
carried out with the purpose of territorial control for capitalist and neoliberal expan-
sion, denying ‘an effective process of decentralization and strengthening of local
institutions’ (Cairo et al., 2018: 467). Thus, social conflict and violence continue in
other forms that involve both illegal and state actors (e.g. neoparamilitary groups).

A feeling-thinking methodology
The methodological considerations for the dialogues presented in this article are
embedded in a larger project that aimed to understand and forge dialogues with
Rodriguez Castro 345

rural Colombian women in 2013 and 20164 through feeling-thinking

(sentipensar) (Méndez Torres et al., 2013; Fals Borda, 2015). The approach of
sentipensar has been adopted by several Latin American scholars as a way
to rethink ourselves, that is, to feel-think and feel-know ourselves as human
beings. In order to do this, we need to unlearn what we know and to unthink
the system (Méndez Torres et al., 2013). These feeling-thinking epistemological
and methodological considerations permeated the processes that led to the testi-
monies presented here.
More specifically, this article reports on data collected through seventeen in-
depth interviews conducted in 20165 with women activists involved in social move-
ments and organisations focused on rural women in Colombia. This included rural
grassroots movements, such as the Red de Mujeres del Pacifico Matamba y Guasá,
feminist organisations such as Casa de la Mujer, feminist insurgent groups such as
Mujer Fariana, NGOs such as Oxfam and the national initiative of the Mesa de
Incidencia de Mujeres Rurales de Colombia. The full list of organisations to which
social leaders belonged is provided in Table 1. It highlights the heterogeneity of
organised resistance in Colombia, including the groups’ different modes of oper-
ation and objectives, which are constantly changing.
The recruitment period and the interviews took place over the course of eight
months as part of a broader research project in Colombia. I first identified relevant
social movements and organisations working with rural women in Colombia
through online searches and discussions with colleagues and activists. Following
the commencement of the interviews, snowball recruitment happened as I was
referred to other organisations.
The sample was limited by the fact that I lacked resources and mobility. There is
consequently a prevalence of representatives from national organisations as I was
unable to visit the more remote regions of the country (see Table 1). This reflects
how, as scholars, we might be complicit in reproducing geographical hierarchies,
and the need to reflect critically on the partiality of knowledge arising from our
research decisions, as these are not instrumental matters but deeply entangled with
power relations. However, in the broader research project in which these interviews
are embedded, there was a focus on collaboratively understanding and co-con-
structing narratives and actions based on the territorial experiences of
Campesinas in rural and remote regions (see: Rodriguez Castro, 2018).
Interviews were semi-structured and were carried out mostly in the organisa-
tions’ offices or in cafeterias nearby, with only one interview conducted via email
(Mujer Fariana) and one via phone (PCN). The interview guide focused on the
overarching themes of women’s experiences of body and territory, feminism, resist-
ance, neoliberal development and the armed conflict. Data analysis of the inter-
views commenced with a focus on the common themes within the narratives, and
was framed by the epistemology of feeling-thinking and by Cabnal’s conceptual-
isation of territorio cuerpo-tierra. The analysis was also influenced and mediated by
my experiences of living, collaborating, veredeando6 and feeling-thinking with
women in two rural communities in 2016.
346 Feminist Theory 22(3)

Table 1. Organisations involved in the interviews.

Organisation name Region Type of organisation

Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Transnational Representative of Indigenous, Afro

Organizaciones del Campo and Campesino movements
(CLOC)
Federación Nacional Sindical National Union federation
Unitaria Agropecuaria
(Fensuagro)
Compro Agro Toca, Boyacá Initiative
Mesa de Incidencia Polı́tica de las National National collective
Mujeres Rurales Colombianas
(Mesa de Incidencia)
Asociación Nacional de Mujeres National Association
Campesinas, Negras e Indı́genas
de Colombia (ASODEMUC)
La Ruta Pacı́fica de Las Mujeres National Feminist movement
(Ruta Pacı́fica)
Fundación San Isidro Boyacá Campesina foundation
Asociación Nacional de Zonas de National Association
Reserva Campesinas (ANZORC)
Oxfam Colombia (Oxfam) Transnational Global NGO
Mujer Fariana National Feminist insurgent group
Casa de La Mujer National Feminist non-profit organisation
Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá Cauca Pacific Network or group of organisations
– Timbiqui (Matamba y Guasá) of Colombia
Organización Nacional Indı́gena de Amazon/National Organisation representing the
Colombia – Amazon (ONIC) Indigenous people of Colombia
Proceso de Comunidades Negras National Process
(PCN)
Federación Departamental de Cundinamarca Union/federation
Mujeres Campesinas de
Cundinamarca (FEDEMUCC)
Federación Nacional de Cafeteros Magdalena/national Federation non-profit business
organisation
Fura Asociación (Fura) Toca, Boyacá Local association

Alongside the work of decolonial feminists in Latin America, Campesinas’

experiences of the body and territory made me question my positionality as an
urban middle-class white-mestiza. Decolonial feminists have argued that urban,
white-mestiza identities are privileged and embedded in the violences of mestizaje
– a process that has denied the plural worlds that exist in Abya Yala through the
colonial construction of modernity (Espinosa Miñoso, 2017). Critically unlearning
Rodriguez Castro 347

through anti-racism work, spending extended periods of time in the Colombian

countryside since 2013 and being committed to anti-racism in the Global North
academia as a racialised subject have been important experiences in my intellectual
work. Entangled in the networks of those fighting the coloniality of power within
women’s and feminist movements, this has also meant destabilising the construc-
tion of ‘women’s emancipation’ as a competition for belonging to a neoliberal
system that privileges white women from the Global North, despite such belonging
being ‘publicised as the only way possible’ (Gargallo Celentani, 2014: 45). Through
veredeando, listening and forging dialogues with rural women in my country,
I embarked on an ongoing commitment to decolonial feminisms (see: Rodriguez
Castro, 2017).
Thus, in this article I am not purporting to present a transparent version of
women’s experiences, as their narratives are mediated by my own understandings,
positionality and privilege. Additionally, the interviews have been transcribed and
translated – which further complicates the transparency of the oral testimonies
(Andrade, 2015). From a methodology embedded in sentipensar, I present rural
women’s stories as a dialogue.

Land claims and territorial struggles

Women’s territorial struggles and their connection to land claims were widely dis-
cussed in the interviews. Here, terrritorio cuerpo-tierra is useful to understand how
women’s relationship to the territory and the body-land operates in place and
within the communities’ own cosmovisions. Indeed, it brings to the fore the import-
ance of land access and tenure processes in Colombia, while taking into account
diverse experiences of place and of the body-land.
The representative of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), which was
founded in 1993 and is today one of the largest organised groups of Black com-
munities in Colombia, explains how territorial and land rights connect with the
social movements’ demands: ‘the territorial rights are connected to the collective
land titles of the collective property of the ancestral territories [. . .] We struggle to
make effective the right to have property over the ancestral territories that we have
inhabited. So [in our claims] we contend that we have a collective property in spite
of the land titles that each family has’. This quotation foregrounds the importance
of geo-historical approaches to land rights that take into account how communities
construct territory ancestrally. For Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific
region, an important achievement in their struggles for autonomy has been the
processes of collective titling which emerge from their cosmovisions, and which
have been part of the process of reparation for communities severely affected by
displacement and armed conflict. However, during the interview with representa-
tives of the global NGO Oxfam, which is one of the largest global organisations
working closely with rural women’s movements in Colombia, interviewees, who
were mestiza women and ‘gender experts’, questioned collective titling, arguing that
in a context of patriarchy it may make women invisible.
348 Feminist Theory 22(3)

The tensions between the PCN and Oxfam demonstrate how organisations in
Colombia problematise and understand women’s oppression and access to land
differently by, for example, prioritising territorial experiences and ancestral know-
ledge (PCN), or focusing on the fight to end patriarchy (Oxfam). These groups
recognise that access to land is a complex issue and one that involves addressing the
various forms in which the CMP operates. As a representative from Casa de la
Mujer, a long-standing non-profit feminist organisation in Colombia founded in
1982, explains:

We see a shortcoming in the legislation because it does not achieve depth in the
historical relationship of rural women to land owning. Because obviously the way
women access property is through other people that have a lawful title [. . .] The ones
that have all the knowledge on the process of possession and land tenure are the men
[. . .] There is also the psycho-social damage of the victims [of the armed conflict],
especially women going back to the territories. The judge might have different ways to
interpret and determine whether there was damage to women’s lives [. . .] So there is a
legal rigidity that sometimes, due to the lack of economic resources, and knowledge
about the process, affects women’s access to land.

In light of the historical inequalities Colombian rural women face when attempt-
ing to access land, the representative of the insurgent group Mujer
Fariana (founded 2013), as well as representatives from other women’s rights
organisations, placed the issue of land access on their political agenda as part of
the peace accord negotiations in 2016. This was articulated in 2014 in the gender
sub-commission, created as part of the peace negotiations. Mujer Fariana’s leader
explained:

In the accord on the integral rural reform and the one on illicit crops it is written
that they must guarantee women’s access to land, prioritising their condition
as single mothers or widowers. We know that the majority of victims that
survived the war in Colombia are women who have lost their land [. . .] That is
why we propose that women become protagonists in the transformation of
the Colombian countryside. So that step by step we can close the gap between men
and women.

In the context of war and social conflict explained by the representatives of PCN,
Oxfam, Mujer Fariana and Casa de la Mujer, there is evidence of the ‘differential
ways in which social divisions are concretely enmeshed and constructed by each
other’ in organised struggles for land in Colombia (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 205).
A focus on the historical body-land relations of women and on women’s construc-
tion of territory reveals these ‘differential ways’, while challenging the homogen-
isation of rural women’s struggles.
According to interviewees, the historical marginalisation of rural
women’s land access is also connected to their body-land experiences. During
Rodriguez Castro 349

the interview with the Campesina representative of the Mesa de Incidencia, she
explained:

There is an important principle, and it is that the land is like the blood for Campesina
women. And so some of us have it more ingrained in our hearts, our passions and our
work. So if the woman of the countryside does not have her economic independence
and the possession of her land, she cannot reclaim herself as a woman, as a wife, as a
mother [. . .]

The above quotation signals the ways that rural women reclaim themselves, differ-
entially, from the body through their ancestral connection to land and territory.
They advance their political struggles by blurring the boundaries of their social
collectivities (Yuval-Davis, 2006), while grounding these in the socio-historic, geo-
graphic and affective connections of the body-land through emotions that ‘show us
how histories stay alive’ (Ahmed, 2014: 202).

Territories and the body-land

The understanding of territory as a multifaceted, conflictual and relational space
was prevalent in the testimonies. Their construction of space, as territory, revealed
an embodied connection to the Earth that privileged ancestral knowledge, and
historically grounded struggles to defend life. The Campesina leader of Mesa de
Incidencia, a national initiative that proposed and passed the Rural Women’s Law
731 in 2002, explained her understanding of territory: ‘Everything is done in a
space, and that space is the land itself. The land with people in it, with activities,
collectivity and rights, is called territory. And the collectivity with other commu-
nities and municipalities that are not part of my territory is called territoriality’.
In further elaborating on this theme, the leader of Casa de la Mujer stressed the
heterogeneity of Colombian rural women’s embodied relationships with the
territories:

Well, we understand the territory as complexity. It is a multidimensional look at the

space that women inhabit. For example, when we talk about territorial contexts in
relation to women, we understand that the conception of space is very different for an
Afro, compared to an Indigenous, or to a Campesina woman. Its development has
been in accordance with specific cultural and ancestral practices and its relationship to
the environment. From the appropriation of that space is how we understand the
territory.

Thus, the land and therefore resistance in these rural territories are understood as
unique to the ancestral and historical experiences of the body-land in that space.
The Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá, a network of women in Timbiquı́ founded
in 1997, represents women who live along the lowlands of the Caucan Pacific, a
region where armed conflict, government abandonment and racism are severe.
350 Feminist Theory 22(3)

The organisation’s leader reflected on Black women’s resistance in their territory:

‘women continue to be attached to the territory. We are the ones who do the
cultural practices, the vecindad7 and the camaraderie’. For illustration, she
explained that along the river women have organised to preserve ancestral practices
such as traditional medicine and to pass on knowledge through coplas.8
Alongside the diverse understandings of territory, activists also denounced the
violations to their territories bodies-lands in the interviews. The ASODEMUC
(Campesinxs) and ONIC (Indigenous) representatives were particularly worried
about the expansion of neoliberal projects, which were destroying the natural
resources. In the biodiverse páramo9 region of Sumapaz, in the Andean mountain
range, the Campesina leader from ASODEMUC elaborated on the issues her
region is facing:

Well, I was born 53 years ago in Sumapaz, which is a conflict region. So we have
always been under the threat of war, even now that we are in negotiations. We are
located in the largest humid páramo of the world. We have under our protection an
immense water source that supplies South America through two mountain slopes. So,
it is no surprise that por mis venas,10 and of many women that are around my age, we
have assumed that the public is ours because our parents and grandparents have been
political activists. And we are going to have to continue because we have many
enemies, and they are not the Colombian government or the local mayor. They are
bigger enemies, like multinationals.

Given the environmental importance of the Andean region, people cannot farm in
the páramo. As a result, ASODEMUC’s Campesina leader explained that from her
perspective and lived experience many women play an important role in conserva-
tion and resistance, since many of their partners undertake other farm and/or
labour work in Bogotá or in nearby regions and thus are not as present in the
territory.
Indeed, in light of the increasing presence of mining and multinationals in rural
territories (e.g. fracking), resistance based on the demand for territorial rights has
intensified in the Colombian countryside. In this regard, Cabnal (2010) argues for
the importance of looking at the neoliberal processes of extractivism, as coming
from a colonial history of dispossession, which are all linked to the different forms
of violence that rural women in Colombia face.

Resisting violences as a struggle of the territorio

cuerpo-tierra
While women’s bodies are at the forefront of resistance to colonial practices, such
as neoliberal development and extractivism, these bodies are also in the frontline of
other forms of violence. Rural women in Colombia experience violence in a con-
tinuum permeating all ambits of life (Ruta Pacı́fica de las Mujeres, 2013; Viveros-
Vigoya, 2016). In a context of conflict and war, these violences are experienced in
Rodriguez Castro 351

dramatic ways in certain territories (CNNRR and IERRI, 2009; Reyes Posada,
2009). This was an issue addressed by the representative of Casa de la Mujer, who
recounted the work her organisation had undertaken in Buenaventura, a port city
that has been at the centre of the armed conflict due to its strategic location for
territorial control:

What the armed conflict does is that it aggravates the economic precarities and those
everyday violences [. . .] So, for example, in the context of the armed conflict, sexual
violence [. . .] is perpetrated with more brutality and depth [. . .] In Buenaventura, we
have evidence that femicides and violence against women have increased. We have
seen how men start to perpetrate violent practices like torture that are learned in the
context of the armed conflict against women. So these inherited, learned practices are
brought to the daily lives of women and perpetrated by their partners.

Many organisations, including the union FEDEMUCC, the NGO Oxfam and the
grassroots network Matamba y Guasá, also denounced the violence experienced by
women in the armed conflict that have continued to permeate their everyday lives.
Interviewees contended that once the physical violence of war passes, there are other
types of violence that persist, and that these are predominantly directed at women.
The leader of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá noted: ‘How many women
have been killed by the conflict? Not many, but we are the ones left with the
suffering, if your son is killed or if they disappear your husband [. . .] And then
you have the sexual violence. And the labour violence because they force women to
do jobs that are not well remunerated’. This excerpt demonstrates Cabnal’s (2010)
conceptualisation of bodies as territories that are marked by historical oppressions
wrought by persistent violence, and which Colombian women experience on a
continuum, which ‘permeates all of the ambits of life and relationships traversing
any social and institutional divisions, not only in war, but in the private, familial
and social spaces in times of peace’ (Ruta Pacı́fica de las Mujeres, 2013: 17).
In addition to the violence brought by the armed conflict, there are also other
forms of violence that are perpetrated by a neoliberal economic system. The PCN
representative named and denounced this type of violence in the interviews:

The women of the PCN have proposed that we need to consider violence in all its
dimensions [. . .] So we have been proposing that we understand the violence in the
territories and against Black women from an economic perspective. For us, all vio-
lences have been concentrated against our communities, our people and our bodies,
and it is all coming from an economic interest of trying to gain control of our
territories. It is perpetrated by guerrillas, paramilitaries and the state. There is a lot
of wealth in the Afro-descendants’ territories, which promote the military develop-
ment of armed actors and policies of the state.

Here, there is a call to confront the specific violences experienced by Black women
in Colombia. This statement is also a clear demand for the end of colonial
352 Feminist Theory 22(3)

practices, including the end to the militarisation of women’s territories bodies-

lands, which is part of the historical phenomena of territorial and land extractivism
and dispossession that persist in Colombia.
In moving on from framing women as victims of violence, activists discussed the
ways they are re-existing in their struggles to preserve life. Thus, in the next section,
I present the most recurrent form of re-existence of the territorio cuerpo-tierra
mentioned in the interviews, which were women’s initiatives of food sovereignty.

Food sovereignty as a struggle of the territorio

cuerpo-tierra
Social leaders explained that one of the most important struggles that rural women
are leading is for food sovereignty (FS). Women re-exist from their gardens and
homes, enacting their own liberation from patriarchal and neoliberal structures,
while reclaiming their rights to land and to food production. The representative of
the Colombian coordinator for La Vı́a Campesina, CLOC, the organisation that
officially proposed FS as a global rural endeavour in 1996 during the Food
Agriculture Organization meeting in Rome, detailed the organisation’s commit-
ment to this cause:

Food sovereignty is a principle that does not only talk about the right to food, but
also the right to access land, because if you are going to produce, where are you going
to do it? And within this [FS principle] you have implicit the topics of native seeds
with no chemicals, of agroecology. When we are talking about food sovereignty, we
are talking about the sovereignty of the people [. . .] Nowadays they import many
agricultural products so the Campesino has had to stop producing because there is
no profitable demand. And they are importing products that are transgenic so we are
losing sovereignty.

By placing the goal of FS in the context of Colombia, the CLOC demonstrates that
neoliberal expansion in the country affects FS efforts. However, as neoliberal
expansion is experienced relationally, and place-based processes also impact
global networks, the Campesinx population continues to organise, as is evi-
dent in the ANZORC’s efforts to gain autonomy over their territories, which I
introduce next.
As one of the largest mixed associations of Campesinxs in the country,
ANZORC (founded 2010–2011), which demands the demarcation of peasant
reserve zones where Campesinx communities can have political and agricultural
autonomy, has also incorporated FS struggles into its agenda: ‘We believe that all
the programmes that are being supported in the country like the economic expan-
sion, the free trade, and all of those international policies have directly affected the
campesino economy. So from the ANZORC we are going to continue to support
the sowing of seeds and traditional crops [. . .]’. Thus, Campesinxs’ struggles for
food sovereignty contribute to their political struggle for recognition of their
Rodriguez Castro 353

autonomous territorial rights, which continues to be limited nationally and

internationally, and in the context of the post-accord period (see: Duarte, 2018).
The Comisión de la Verdad (2019) has argued for the importance of
centring Campesinxs in the processes of reparation in order to take back the
political and economic power that large landowners have had in the Colombian
countryside.
In addition to the importance of FS as a struggle to contest neoliberal expansion
and to construct a sustainable peace in the country, FS practices led by rural
women have also worked to contest patriarchy and patriarchal practices.
Through FS, Black women have created community networks in the rural
Pacific; and in the rural Andes, Campesina women have formed independent eco-
nomic avenues. The leader of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá observed that
women’s neighbouring relationships in the Pacific region provided the impetus for
the FS initiatives, especially among women heads of households. She reflected:
‘while the men were dedicated to the coca crops, women stayed there producing
the food for their people’. In a similar respect in the Andes, the experience of
Fundación San Isidro’s (founded in 1980) agro-ecological projects shows how FS
actions, led by Campesina women, promoted gender equality and environmental
sustainability causes:

[The women’s] lives change in many aspects. In the food they eat, in the family’s
nutrition. Even the contact with the land makes their behaviours change. Along the
way, you see women changing their behaviour from watching TV all day. And on the
economic side, they stop buying the lettuce or the carrot, but rather they produce it
and save the $30,000 pesos [US$9.80].

Women’s FS initiatives in Fundación San Isidro have also been effective not only in
facilitating economic independence, but also in challenging the damaging agro-
productive practices, such as monocultures, that have negatively affected the envir-
onment in the Boyacá region.
Across Colombia, FS is constructed through women’s territories bodies-lands.
Embodied re-existence through FS becomes inscribed in the landscape as a solution
to environmental degradation, questioning capitalist agro-productive practices his-
torically led by men. FS provides opportunities to renegotiate traditional gender
roles, and it encourages women’s organising.

Towards decolonial resistance

As demonstrated throughout this article, women’s different forms of resistance and
re-existence are entangled in their experiences of territorio cuerpo-tierra. However,
their resistance is circumscribed by the continued ‘dominance’ of the discourses of
linear ‘progress’. Implicated in this ‘progress’ are the actions of colonial feminisms
that have utilised ‘genderwashing’ to ignore the marginalisation of the majority of
women in the world. For instance, such ‘genderwashing’ operates by excluding
354 Feminist Theory 22(3)

racial and ethnic experiences by homogenising women’s experiences through using

only a ‘gender lens’.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that interviewees had different identifications with
feminism as a form of resistance and re-existance. Of the seventeen women inter-
viewed, ten identified as feminist. Of this group, some used additional descriptors
to characterise their feminism such as Black (PCN), Popular, Campesina
(Fensuagro and CLOC) or Agrarian (Mesa de Incidencia and ASODEMUC).
The leader of the Process of Black Communities of Colombia (PCN) noted:

Now I have to emphasise that we are talking about Black feminism [. . .] Because that
is the other thing that is related to the language itself, that we are not just talking
about feminism [. . .] I think it is important that we identify like this, because part of
the topic [feminism] being taboo and creating certain resistances is because, in general,
what is known about feminism is that it is fundamentally white, where the
racial questions do not fit, and where the gender relations are raised from another
point of view.

Indeed, colonial forms of feminism are deeply implicated in Colombia’s history. As

Lozano (2016) argues, liberal forms of feminism in the country are still struggling
to accept and recognise women’s diversity, and do not consider addressing racism
as their main objective. She argues that the practices of resistance by Black women
have been more invisible and unknown than those of white women and Black men.
Responding to the epistemic violence of colonial feminism and proposing alter-
natives for their own struggles, rural women in Colombia have forged important
alliances. This is evidenced in the dialogues between the different communities of
rural women in organised social movements like the CLOC:

So we had many debates with the Indigenous comrades who were talking about
complementarity, and we found that yes, we couldn’t really see ourselves without el
otro [approx. trans. ‘the other’], we needed to defend complementarity. And that
feminism doesn’t really resonate with us [. . .] So we started talking from our own
realities and those corresponding to our communities [. . .] And the comrades
[Indigenous] told us things such as: ‘we also had to do this and that since we were
young. We had to live this and that’. So we are constructing our feminism from below,
from our own realities.

In working from ‘below’, and with their own visions of liberation, the leaders of the
social movements have had many successes in addressing gender inequalities. This
is the case of the peasant reserve zones led by the organisation ANZORC:

For example, in [rural towns] we have a beautiful experience in a vereda [. . .] where

there are some women’s organisations working with farmer organisations. And we go
and do the workshops with men and women. And the comrades [men] are the ones
who prepare and serve the food, because we always do a community pot. So the men
Rodriguez Castro 355

can understand better that the chores can be divided equally and that they can support
us even when they have to work in the countryside [. . .]

The successful collective actions of rural women in Colombia are changing not only
the localised lived realities of women in veredas, but also the narratives around
their lives. They are not ‘victims who need saving’, but politically active subjects
who enact change locally and nationally through their territories bodies-lands.

Conclusion
This article has demonstrated how rural women’s heterogeneous struggles, emanat-
ing from their experiences of their territorio cuerpo-tierra, need to be centred in the
way we construct social justice and decolonial feminist worlds. In the interviews,
the Campesina leader of the CLOC cogently summarised the core issue of rural
women’s continuing marginalisation:

We are not ‘poor things’. We are not ‘poor things from the countryside’. We are not
‘poor things because we are poor’. Women are able to do many things [. . .] And the
reason why we are in this position is the system that we are fighting against. And we
are convinced we need to do this with our comrades [men].

This quotation highlights how victim narratives, the constructions of ‘bodies as

things’ and of rural women as homogenous, are highly problematic and embedded
in the CMP. Constructions of the majority of women’s bodies as objects to be
empowered, that reproduce the same logics of the systems ‘we are fighting against’,
are indeed implicated in colonial feminisms.
Women’s voices and actions in Colombia denounce violence that is epistemic,
systemic, militarised and that permeates all ambits of life. They denounce how the
coloniality of power operates in place, and in particular territories. Their struggles
point to the need to address land access from a perspective that takes into account
their ancestral and affective body-land connections. At the same time, they re-exist
and propose alternatives for a better life from their own cosmovisions, enacting
food sovereignty, negotiating and dismantling traditional gender roles, calling out
racism, questioning capitalist agro-productive practices and proposing feminisms
from ‘below’.
Thus, it is imperative that those of us working from the Global North and who
are committed to feminist politics actively support territorial struggles, generate
dialogues and knowledge and forge new alliances that are politically, historically
and geographically grounded in the struggles of activists, social leaders and com-
munities. We must continue to dismantle how the coloniality of power operates in
the organisation of women’s movements and within ourselves. As we present these
voices, we must commit to a politics of citation that endeavours to overturn some
of the power of the ‘English global knowledge system’ and of the ‘knowledge
economies’ of the US and Europe (Roberts and Connell, 2016: 135).
356 Feminist Theory 22(3)

Notably, in the testimonies presented here there is a prevalence of heteronorma-

tive constructions of rural struggles in Colombia, evident in the mention of gender
binaries as important (e.g. male and female partners/comrades), which points to
the need for more critical intellectual and activist work within rural debates and
struggles. Cabnal for example, highlights the importance of challenging colonial
heteronormativity and ancestral ‘heterorealities’ (2010: 16). In our intellectual work
as decolonial feminists, we have an important role to play in challenging struggles
that do not push for more critical debates (see: Mignolo and Walsh, 2018).
Moreover, in Colombia’s ‘post-accord’ period, social leaders are experiencing
systemic violence as the social conflict continues in other forms (e.g. proliferation
of neo-paramilitary groups). Organisations are using alternative news and social
media, and looking to national and international advocates to require the current
government to abide by the peace accords and to recognise that the violence tar-
geted at social leaders is systemic (e.g. Davis, 2019). At the same time, those in the
territories, without strong support and safety networks, are experiencing threats of
violence, including murder (Pacifista, 2017). Social leaders are rightly asserting that
if the peace accord agreements were fully implemented, social movements, includ-
ing those presented in this article, would have mechanisms to organise and
strengthen their territorial struggles and land claims.
This article is an attempt towards decolonial praxis, not as an end goal that has
been achieved, but as a process that is both alive and urgent if we wish to dismantle
the coloniality of power. The voices of Colombian women need to be heard, not as
victims, but as agents and political subjects creating and enacting other worlds to
resist and re-exist.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all of the social leaders who appear in this article for your time and
ongoing resistance to construct a vida digna for your communities and for our country.
I also want to thank the reviewers and editors of this journal for your thorough comments
on earlier versions of the article. Finally, I would like to thank my mentor, Professor
Barbara Pini, for your ongoing support.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

ORCID iD
Laura Rodriguez Castro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8431-5215

Notes
1. All quotes have been translated from Spanish into English by the author.
2. Campesinx is used to neutralise the gendered connotations of the word.
3. 3 January 2020.
Rodriguez Castro 357

4. In 2013 and 2016, I spent three to four months, each year, in the Andean region. In 2016,
I also spent three months in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
5. The peace accord with the FARC-EP was ratified after the interviews were concluded in
the first half of 2016.
6. An embodied experience of walking through the veredas, a geographical division
of the Colombia countryside (see: Méndez Torres et al., 2013; Rodriguez Castro, 2018).
7. The practice of constructing relationships with neighbours.
8. A type of poem or popular song.
9. A low temperature ecosystem and plateau in South America.
10. Referring to the ancestral blood that runs through her veins.

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