Cuerpo-Territorio meets Body-Land: Towards (More) Indigenous-Settler Feminist Solidarities in the Americas


Carol Lynne D'Arcangelis, Memorial University

In the face of unprecedented climate catastrophe, ongoing Indigenous dispossession, and seemingly intractable gender-based violence, the need for feminist solidarity in all its iterations—including between Indigenous peoples and settlers—has never been more profound. As an entry point into the topic, I consider the concept of cuerpo-territorio in relation to analogous ideas in English, thereby reading across literatures (and praxes) that are rarely, though increasingly, brought into conversation: Indigenous feminisms in Anglophone North America and Latin American Indigenous/decolonial feminisms (Altamirano-Jiménez, 2020; Cabnal, 2010, 2019; D’Arcangelis and Quiroga, 2023; Konsomo and Kahealani Pacheco, 2016; Kuokkanen, 2019; Mack and Na’puti, 2019; Mollett, 2021; Motta, 2021; Nickel and Fehr, 2020; Paredes and Guzmán, 2014; Simpson, 2017; TallBear, 2016; Vasudevan, Ramirez, Gonzalez Mendoza, and Daigle, 2023; Zaragocin and Caretta, 2021). In so doing, I aim to think more deeply about the possibilities and challenges of solidarity, specifically among and between diversely positioned feminists across the “Americas.” In this way, I enter a burgeoning South–North dialogue about, amongst other things, the parameters of anti-/decolonial feminisms (Anderson, Ruíz, Stewart and Tlostanova, 2019; D’Arcangelis, 2020; Lugones, 2007; Mendoza, 2016; University of Washington, Plurifeminisms across Abya Yala Symposium, May 2022). By looking more closely at how diverse feminists theorize and enact cuerpo-territorio and related concepts, I hope to contribute to this nascent dialogue, in particular concerning the promise (and pitfalls) of feminist solidarity in the hemisphere. Following Conway and Lebon’s (2021) concerns about how the category of “popular feminisms” might create and sustain “elisions of racial and colonial difference” (p. 8), I wonder if certain understandings and applications of cuerpo-territorio —and of “the decolonial” more broadly— might eclipse the specificities of Indigenous (or Black/Afro-descendant) struggles . To lay part of the foundation for assessing this risk, this paper offers a preliminary look at Indigenous communitarian feminist understandings and applications of cuerpo-territorio and similar, but not necessarily equivalent, ideas in Indigenous feminist theory and practice across Turtle Island (North America). What might such a comparative analysis reveal about the possibilities and challenges of feminist solidarity between Indigenous feminist communitarian scholars and activists on the one hand, and Latinx, Afro-descendant, and/or white (Euro-American) settler scholars and activists on the other? How do differently positioned scholars and activists invoke these concepts and to what ends? What might any resonances (or dissonances) tell us about the parameters and salience of decolonial feminism as an analytic category in the hemisphere? Importantly, I engage with these ideas from a particular locus of enunciation (Mignolo and Walsh 2018)—as a white settler feminist located in Canada. After providing an overview of the concept of cuerpo-territorio , I argue that the scholarly literatures under juxtaposition and the embodied practices they discuss share key concerns and analyses, namely, that (1) colonialism is inherently patriarchal, (2) violence against the body is intimately linked to violence against the land, in particular the violence of extractivism, and (3) human life exists in relation to land, non-human animals, plants, and other beings. I conclude with some initial thoughts about what these convergences in theorizations and enactments of cuerpo-territorio and related concepts might indicate about a path towards enhanced South–North collaborations among feminists in the hemisphere, including but not limited to stronger Indigenous–settler bonds of solidarity.

This paper will be presented at the following session: