Transfeminist Exhortations

The Chair of Situated Thought is an itinerant programme curated by Ileana Diéguez and Ana Longoni, and co-organised by the Metropolitan Autonomous University (Cuajimalpa Campus, Mexico) and Museo Reina Sofía. The Chair seeks to fuel the circulation of knowledge and intellectual, activist and artistic practices which, by and large, are dispersed and disjointed by the expansive and variegated territory of Latin America, and to drive spaces of encounter from which to reflect upon pivotal problems — poetic and political — that occur outside the university and museum and which also undoubtedly question, mobilise and oxygenate these institutions.

The first edition of the Chair, in 2019, gave rise to the Situated Thought Collection, an editorial project resulting from a collaboration between the aforementioned institutions and the publishing house Ediciones DocumentA/Escénicas, which looks to retrieve and share reflections and contributions stemming from the different encounters inspired by this programme, searching for ways to contribute to disseminating different voices which take up a position in today’s public debates from different coordinates in Latin America.

This encounter sets out the first issue of the collection devoted to current debates around transfeminisms, understood as a heterogeneous movement laden with tension and difference, and irreversibly altering the notion and practice of the political. Transfeminist Exhortations brings together individual and collective authorships, textualities that choose multiple tones, from poetic registers to combative manifestoes, from chronicles and registers in the images of artistic actions to reflections from feminist thought and sexual dissidence.

The event constitutes a space of reflection, debate and dialogue, framed inside the context of the notion of situated knowledge and making room for an array of voices and proposals that open fissures in the current hegemonic order. Participants include Ileana Diéguez and Ana Longoni, the Chair’s curators, and Rían Lozano and María Pía López, researchers specialised in critical perspectives within the context of Latin American feminisms.

The first volume of the Situated Thought Collection, Transfeminist Exhortations, gathers the contributions of Sebastián Calfuqueo, Fernanda Carvajal, Cerrucha, Alessa Flores, val flores, María Galindo, Lía García, Sol Henaro, LASTESIS, Jessica Marjane Durán Franco, Guillermina Mongan, Elva Peniche, Natalia Revale, Dodi Tavares Borges Leal, Red de Juventudes Trans México, Mariela Scafatti, Rita Segato and Lorena Wolffer.

Participants

Ileana Diéguez is an independent exhibition curator and professor-researcher in the Humanities Department at the Metropolitan Autonomous University on the UAM-Cuajimalpa Campus (Mexico). She coordinates the Chair of Situated Thought, a nomadic proposal propelled by UAM and the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre.    

Ana Longoni is director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Public Activities and Study Centre.

María Pía López is a sociologist, essayist, researcher and teacher. From 2011 to 2015, she served as director of the Book and Language Museum at the Buenos Aires National Library (Argentina).

Rían Lozano is a researcher at the Institute of Aesthetic Research from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a member of the National System of Researchers in the same country.