Abstract

This chapter examines some of the substantial suggestions for antiessentialist practices that have emerged from the problematic prejudice against women’s rights. Exploring the idea of identity, as it is lived and resignified by Latin American women, offers us a set of significant ideas that provide different ways of signifying language and reality. The chapter attends critically to these ideas, confronting their historical and political contexts through decolonial thought, subalternity, and globalization. It denies an essentialist view of “identity,” appealing to the collective resignification that women have achieved individually and among each other through self-expression, revealing the democratic value of ambiguity rather than that of univocity, of mestizaje over purity, and self-identifications over essentialist hegemonic definitions.