feminists@law, Vol 2, No 1 (2012)
Breny Mendoza (Ph.D. Cornell University) is a Honduran professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge. She has published several articles in both English and Spanish on topics related to transnational feminisms, Latin American feminisms, decolonial feminisms, and mestizaje. Her more recent work focuses on the coloniality of knowledge and democracy. She has published a book in Spanishon the Honduran feminist movement,Sintiéndose mujer, pensándose (Editorial Guaymuras, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 1996); and she is co-editor of Rethinking Latin American Feminisms (Latin American Studies Program, Cornell University, Volume 5, 2000). Her book Pensamiento Feminista Latinoamericano De Otro Modo will be published in 2012 by En la Frontera, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Julieta Lemaitre is an assistant professor at the Universidad de los Andes Law School. She holds a law degree (LL.B.) from the Universidad de los Andes (1995) as well as an M.A. from New York University (1998) and an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School (2007). She has won scholarships from Colfuturo, Harvard Law School, and the Harvard-Los Andes Fund. Since 1997, she has collaborated with the Center for Reproductive Rights’ International Program in New York. Her areas of research are women’s rights, sexual and reproductive rights, law and ideology, and violence against women. She forms part of the research group on law and social transformation (IDEAS) and the gender and the law research group. Her publications include El Derecho Como Conjuro (2009), translated in English as Legal Fetishism, and Cuerpo y Derecho (translated in English as Bodies on Trial) with Monica Roa and Luisa Cabal (2001). She has also written articles on the legal mobilization of social movements in Colombia, the judicial protection of social and economic rights, the inclusion of feminism in legal education, the rights of same sex couples, and domestic violence.
Amy Lind is Mary Ellen Heintz Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where she also served as Graduate Director during 2008-2011. She has published on gender, development, globalization, and sexual politics in the Americas, with an emphasis on gendered forms of resistance to neoliberal governance and modernity. More recently, she has focused on family norms, political homophobias, and the shift to the Left in Latin America. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Women’s Movements, State Restructuring, and Global Development in Ecuador (Penn State University Press, 2005), and editor of four volumes, including Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance (Routledge, 2010) and Feminist (Im)mobilities in Fortress North America: Identities, Citizenships and Human Rights in Transnational Perspective (Ashgate Publishing, 2012, co-editor). Currently, as a 2011-2012 Charles Phelps Taft Center Fellow, she is completing a book-length manuscript on sexual politics, social reproduction, and post-neoliberal governance in Ecuador, with comparative examples from Bolivia and Venezuela.
Catherine Walsh is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador.
In the U.S., Dr. Walsh worked for over a decade with the Puerto Rican and Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, the NAACP, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. She was also one of the founders, along with Paulo Freire, of a national network of critical pedagogy.
In Latin America, Dr. Walsh has a long record of collaboration with indigenous organizations and more than a decade of close ties with Afro-descendant organizations throughout the region. Some of her recent activity includes: advising the National Constituent Assembly in Ecuador (which drafted the nation’s new constitution), working on a national program of affirmative action in Ecuador, and engaging in the debate towards the construction of a plurinational state. See http://catherine.walsh.blogspot.com.
Professor Walsh’s research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crítico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), “Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An ‘Other’ Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference,” in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press); “Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies ‘Others’ in the Andes,” Cultural Studies, 2007; and “Political-Epistemic Insurgency, Social Movements and the Refounding of the State,” in Mabel Moraña (ed.), Rethinking Intellectuals in Latin America (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010).