Lélia Gonzalez’s Afro-Latin American feminism as a tool for social transformation

Abstract

In the present article, we seek to traverse the conceptual territory of the feminist thought of Lélia de Almeida Gonzalez, where the condition of African and Amerindian women is unveiled — categories that emerge as signs of a radical otherness, forged at the intersection of history and philosophy. The author's analysis illuminates the existence of these women as body-subjects traversed by a triple mechanism of oppression: class, gender, and race, which intertwine like invisible chains sustaining the architecture of domination. In the hypothesis to be developed, the category of race reveals itself not only as a social marker, but as an ontological axis of stigmatization, establishing a symbolic wound that perpetuates exclusion. Colonization, in this horizon, appears as an ontological shadow that establishes a logic of subordination, legitimizing the fiction of inferiority and inscribing it into the fabric of reality. Thus, Gonzalez's thought calls us to understand that oppression is not a mere historical accident, but a structure that repeats itself as destiny, demanding its philosophical and political deconstruction.