On April 10, as part of the “ERIGAL Fridays,” we held at Concordia University a conference by Dr. Ana Laura Rodríguez Gustá entitled From Human Rights to Emancipation: Four Decades of Feminist Movement Configurations in Latin America. The event drew a large audience, filling the Political Science conference room on the 12th floor of Concordia.
This conference marked the conclusion of Dr. Rodríguez Gustá’s stay in Quebec as a visiting researcher at ERIGAL. During this period, she took part in one-on-one mentoring sessions with several students from our team; delivered a talk at UQO titled L'Amérique Latine à la croisée des chemins; collaborated with Professor Charmaine Levy on the coordination of a book to be published in the fall; and finally, this April 10 conference.
An excellent conclusion to a highly productive research stay.
Thank you, Ana Laura!
About the conference :
We will explore the evolution of feminist movements in Latin America over the past four decades, focusing on their shifting organizational structures and evolving perspectives on women’s rights, democracy, and citizenship. The research question of the work to be presented in this lecture is: how have evolving conceptions of democracy and citizenship been shaped by transformations in the movement’s organizational configurations?
Although early feminist discourse was rooted in a human rights framework linking women’s rights to the democratization struggles against authoritarian regimes, this framework has become increasingly multifaceted over time. Latin American feminists have ultimately redefined democracy and citizenship, conceptualizing them not merely as political inclusion but as a broader pursuit of emancipation from all forms of oppression. The central argument is that these transformations are deeply tied to organizational shifts, as the feminist movement transitioned from a marginal faction within broader women’s movements in the 1980s to a dynamic, heterogeneous network of multiple feminist collectives by the early 2020s.
About Ana Laura :
Ana Laura Rodríguez Gustá is a full professor at the School of Politics and Government, National University of San Martín (UNSAM) and an independent researcher at CONICET (Argentina). Her research focuses on organizations, gender inequalities, and gender-related public policies from a comparative perspective.