ABSTRACT
Latin American feminist legal scholarship is best understood as constructed from a defensive position: trying at once to learn from a very well-established transnational canon and to be attentive to local realities. These pressures have shaped debates in the region in a way that is worth mapping out both for what it teaches us about comparative exercises and what it contributes to debates about intersectionality. In this entry, the author gives an account of three different ways in which Latin American feminist legal scholars have confronted these tensions between the transnational and the local, and between sexual inequality and other forms of oppression. The author calls these approaches “Solidaristic Feminism,” “Radical Feminism a la Latina,” and “Political Feminism.” I point out to the influence that they have had in our understanding of the way in which law participates in the creation and reproduction of oppression by carefully reading their context, in four areas: (1) the subjects that they have worked with; (2) the doctrinal innovations they have constructed; (3) the legal tactics they have used; and 4) the organizational structures they have fostered.
