Indigenizing Feminism: Films and Land Struggle in Abya Yala

This presentation will focus on South American (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) feminist filmmakers, whose work centers on the stories of Indigenous women—Wichi, Diaguita, and Mapuche—with particular regard to their involvement in struggles for land restitution and environmental justice. The study is an exploration of Indigenous philosophy on body-territory and the coloniality of gender in the films, and it seeks to contribute to the current debates within the feminisms of the Global South about land dispossession, international economic debt, green colonialism, and global distribution of labor.

Leila Gomez is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Impossible Domesticity : Travels in Mexico (Pittsburgh UP, 2021) and several other books. In 2020 and 2022 Gomez received two consecutive US Department of Education Title VI grants to develop the Quechua program at CU Boulder, which has been in place since 2021. Gomez’s new research focuses on documentaries and films on land issues and environmental justice made by Latin American women filmmakers.  She is Principal Investigator of the interdisciplinary and transnational project “Global Indigeneity and Land Struggle: Films for Sustainable Futures” (RIO, CU-Boulder).

Livestream: https://tinyurl.com/leigo2024