Feminist Legal Thinking in Latin America. Scenarios, contents and dilemmas

This article describes the general characteristics of feminist legal academic research in Latin America, covering pioneering publications on gender and law from the mid-1990s until 2010, which explicitly refer to feminist thought. The review of these publications offers not only a bibliographic map of the connections within the field, but also illuminates those areas that have been worked upon and the issues that have been argued, linking them to the sociopolitical conditions of the production of feminism in the region. The proposed scope also looks at the continuities between Latin American productions as well as the appropriation of ideas from feminist jurisprudence in the United States. The paper ends with a discussion of some emerging debates in those productions in order to highlight the dilemmas that arise within Latin American feminisms in discussions about the law. From these debates various paradoxes emerge that serve as keys to understanding the feminist critique of law and addressing the current conditions of the rights of women and other subaltern identities in Latin America.