INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS

2022, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 177–191

BOOK REVIEWS

Para descolonizar el feminismo: 1492 – entronque patriarcal y

FeminismoComunitario de Abya Yala, by Julieta Paredes Carvajal, La
Paz, Editorial FeminismoComunitario de Abya Yala, 2020, 104 pp., R$55
(paperback), ISBN: 978-9917-0-0306-9

Para descolonizar el feminismo is an important book that advances our feminist

understanding of Latin America in many ways. The book is linked to Paredes’
(2010) previous reflections on “community feminism” – a concept that informs
political action promoting collective rights from a communal and ancestral iden-
tity. The book unites communities throughout Abya Yala (Central and South
America)1 and questions both colonial and internal/community-based patriar-
chies (Paredes 2016). The author is Aymara, so she gathers data for her reasoning
– which is essentially theoretical and political – from her own experience as an
Indigenous woman.2
The methodological approach is particularly important in Paredes’ reasoning
since it is relevant to the function of memory in building community feminism.
For Paredes, memory is neglected in conventional and Western methodologies,
whereas it remains crucial for community feminism, in which oral histories
based on people’s tales, chronicles, songs, paintings, rites, and rituals are
central (55–56). Memory is constituted by cultural practices that contribute to
the reconstruction of the former Qullasuyu territory – a large region of the
Antisuyo, Cuntisuyu, Chinchaysuyo, and Qullasuyu territories, currently the
Plurinational State of Bolivia. Paredes also employs a comparative ethnohistoric
methodology – a non-colonial means of differentiating categories for the study
of patriarchies: body, space, time, memory, and movement.3
However, as the book’s title suggests, it is primarily concerned with the
entronque patriarcal – the connection and articulation of an ancestral and
precolonial patriarchy (the incario) to the European and colonial patriarchy in
Qullasuyu/Bolivia. This describes the colonial, regional development of a
system that continues to benefit men over women, although not in the same
manner, with women subject to differential levels of oppression. For Paredes,
Indigenous women are particularly affected by hierarchical, oppressive,
exploitative, and controlling relations.
The book’s six chapters begin with Parades’ conceptual framing of gender,
patriarchy, and the body. The second chapter is dedicated to methodology.
Paredes then explains colonial patriarchy (Chapter 3) and ancestral patriarchy
(Chapter 4), arriving at the entronque patriarcal in Chapter 5. Finally, a
“depatriarchalizing” (despatriarcalizar) proposal is discussed in the last chapter.
In response to the entronque patriarcal, Paredes proposes a counter-hegemonic
return to the history of the region’s elderly Indigenous women (retorno a la his-
toria de las abuelas). The connections of depatriarchalizing and decolonizing
178 BOOK REVIEWS

movements by FeminismoComunitario in Latin America invite us to reflect on the

reinterpretation of women’s bodies in the community and worldwide. As the Gua-
temalan community feminist Lorena Cabral states, “[d]efending land-territory and
not defending women’s body-territory is a political inconsistency” (Cabral 2019).
Paredes connects decolonization and depatriarchalization, emphasizing that
there can be no decolonization without a “return to women,” and a recovery of
memory from the perspective of women, especially the older generations.4
Important elements of Paredes’ analysis have parallels with those of other
thinkers. Paredes’ concept of entronque patriarcal is similar to Segato’s (2018)
concept of the “colonial-modern-capitalist pact”; however, while Segato’s
concept presupposes a rational pact in an asymmetric relation of power,
Paredes’ concept conveys the idea of gender oppression as the result of a colonial
social context. Paredes also critiques Quijano’s (2014) concept of coloniality for
not taking gender as a relevant social mark of difference – an issue previously
pointed out by Lugones (2010). Furthermore, Paredes’ reasoning on the shrinking
of community spaces leading to devaluation of the social role of women has
parallels with Federici’s (2003) thesis of a sexual division of labor and a witch
hunt due to primitive accumulation and the shrinking of the commons.
Paredes’ notion of Pachakuti as a process of recovering the past involves
destroying the world, including a burdensome and precarious gender
(im)balance, and creating a new one. However, this differs from Cusicanqui’s
(2021) concept of Pachakuti, which can be Chi’xi, a decolonial-historic-cultural
revision of identities.
It is worth noting a number of issues that Para descolonizar el feminismo does
not sufficiently address. It is unclear in the book whether or not the entronque
patriarcal affects Aymara women from rural and urban areas in the same way.
Similarly, Paredes focuses on a historical moment limited to the Bolivian
entronque patriarcal and its consequences for Aymaran women from colonization
to the present. As the book does clarify the relational differences between women
and the Bolivian state, a leap of faith is necessary to move from this specific
historical and geographical context to the proposal of depatriarchalizing the
Plurinational State of Bolivia. In other words, the idea of decolonizing and
depatriarchalizing a state is in itself challenging due to the colonial character of
the modern nation-state: the recent coup in Bolivia illustrates this point. Struggles
of ethnic groups worldwide show that the brief experience of Indigenous
statehood in Bolivia is probably the exception rather than the rule; Indigenous
society typically organizes against the state, as Clastres (1987) demonstrates. In
this sense, alternative struggles for collective liberation abound: see, for
example, the Mapuche struggles in Chile and southwestern Argentina; the
Kurdish project spanning Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran; the Zapatista autonomous
region in Mexico; and the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli state.
Paredes’ book is the result of a life of efforts to decolonize and depatriarchalize
Abya Yala and we recommend it as a relevant source for popular educators, fem-
inists, academics, militants, and anyone concerned with collective liberation in
general.
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 179

Notes
1. According to Paredes, she wanted to move away from an avant-garde feminism
detached from community relations (including men’s): “we are half of each
community, hope, and revolution” (94). By moving away from an anarchist
and anti-institutional feminism, Paredes connected with the Plurinational
State of Bolivia under Evo Morales’ rule as a temporary stage of revolution or
decolonization to enable the complete autonomy of ancestral communities.
She argues further that the state should decolonize and depatriarchalize (see
Chapter 6); this project is part of Paredes’ public policy engagement in
Bolivia, interrupted by the coup in 2019.
2. Paredes is a lesbian activist, writer, and feminist. In the early 1990s, she founded
Mujeres Creando – an anarchist, critical, and anti-institutional feminist move-
ment in Latin America – with María Galindo, Mônica Mendoza, and other
women. By the 2000s, she had adopted a more assembly-like, community-
based feminism: FeminismoComunitario (Celentani 2014, 179).
3. In another work, Paredes points out ways of writing and other languages in
ancestral cultures devalued by Eurocentric limitations (Paredes 2015, 102).
4. Paredes relies on terms that the community feminist movement has adopted
from the regional Indigenous Aymaran and Quechuan languages, particularly
the phrase “Without warmikuti there is no pachakuti” (98). Warmikuti is “the
return of the women to the community” (98). Pachakuti is defined as a revolution-
ary reordering of the world that Paredes describes as “the recovery of space, time,
and movement” (98), while “warmi” means woman and feminizes this term.

Notes on contributors
Katiuscia Moreno Galhera is Visiting Faculty at the Federal University of Grande
Dourados, Brazil. They hold a PhD in Political Science from the University of Campinas,
Brazil, and were a Visiting Scholar at Penn State University, USA, and a Postdoctoral
Researcher in Sociology at Londrina State University, Brazil. Their most recent publi-
cation is Labor Contestation in Walmart Brazil: Limits of Global Diffusion in Latin
America, co-authored with Scott Martin and João Paulo Veiga and published by
Palgrave in 2021.
Karina Pinhão is a feminist, activist, and lawyer. She is a PhD student in the program
“Democracy in the 21st Century” at the Center for Social Studies (CES) at the University
of Coimbra, Portugal. She graduated in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of
Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil, and received a postgraduate degree in Civil-
Constitutional Law from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Brazil. She
holds a Master’s in Constitutional Law from the University of Coimbra, Portugal.
She is currently researching the relationship between Indigenous motherhood and
the state based on the cases in which Guarani-Kaiowá Indigenous children are
“stolen” by colonialist institutions such as the Judiciary Branch in the Southern
Cone of Mato Grosso do Sul (MS), Brazil.
Thaís Vieira de Paula is a Temporary Professor of International Relations at the Federal
University of Goiás, Brazil. She is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Federal
University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in
International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
She researches Indigenous peoples, religion, and human rights from the perspective
of decolonial theory.
180 BOOK REVIEWS

References
Cabral, Lorena. 2019. “Defender o território-terra e não defender o território-corpo das mulheres
é uma inconsistência política”. Instituto Pacs, June 26. Accessed March 29, 2021. https://
pacsinstituto.medium.com/defender-o-territ%C3%B3rio-terra-e-n%C3%A3o-defender-o-territ
%C3%B3rio-corpo-das-mulheres-%C3%A9-uma-incoer%C3%AAncia-4ec7621e790b.
Celentani, Francesca Gargallo. 2014. Feminismos desde Abya Yala: ideas y proposiciones de las
mujeres de 607 pueblos en nuestra América. Mexico City: Editorial Corte y Confección.
Accessed September 27, 2021. https://francescagargallo.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/
francesca-gargallo-feminismos-desde-abya-yala-ene20141.pdf.
Clastres, Pierre. 1987. Society against the State. New York: Zone Books.
Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. 2021. Mulheres e estruturas de poder nos Andes. Brasília: Editora Lampião.
Federici, Silvia. 2003. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
New York: Autonomedia.
Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759.
Paredes, Julieta. 2010. Hilando fino desde el feminismo indígena comunitario. La Paz: El Rebozo.
Paredes, Julieta. 2015. “Despatriarcalización: una respuesta categórica del feminismo
comunitário.” Revista de Estudios Bolivianos 21: 100–115.
Paredes, Julieta. 2016. El desafio de la despatriarcalización, entramado para la liberación de los
pueblos. La Paz: Melanie Cervantes.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2014. “Colonialidad del poder y Clasificación Social.” In Cuestiones y horizontes:
de la dependência histórico-estructutal a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder, 285–330.
Buenos Aires: CLACSO.
Segato, Rita Laura. 2018. “Manifiesto em cuatro temas.” Critical Times 1 (1): 212–225.

Katiuscia Moreno Galhera (they/them/their)

Federal University of Grande Dourados, Dourados City, Brazil
[email protected]

Karina Pinhão (she/her/hers)

University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
[email protected]

Thaís Vieira de Paula (she/her/hers)

Federal University of Goiás, Goiânia City, Brazil
[email protected]
© 2021 Katiuscia Moreno Galhera, Karina Pinhão, and Thaís Vieira de Paula
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2021.1991826

DELAS: direitos, política e arte, edited by Raquel Willadino, Aline Maia

Nascimento, Natalia Conceição Viana, and Thais Gomes, Rio de Janeiro,
Observatório de Favelas, 2020, 124 pp., open access (ebook), ISBN 978-65-
87016-01-6

Over the last couple of decades, the idea of intersectionality has become an
increasingly recognized standard within gender studies for gauging how
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