Chicana decolonial feminism asks us to re envision a world that allows for various forms of beings, creating identities based on political coalitions, having an active compassion that translates into direct action that seeks to dismantle binaries that reinscribe colonialism. Chicana decolonial feminist thought actively seeks to dismantle sexism, to dismantle racism, to focus on personal experience as theory, to focus on the body as knowledge, reconceptualize knowledge, envision new ways of being, and writing that is accessible to all. I use two concepts active compassion and interconnectedness of being that are central to chicana decolonial feminism. Chicana feminist texts and newspaper articles from the 1970s are analyzed to demonstrate how chicana decolonial feminism is seen in these texts.

This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumanizing rather than posthumanizing. Rereading Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto through a decolonial, transfeminist lens, it explores the implications of Haraway’s assertion that cyborg subjectivity is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” by examining the modern/colonial development and deployment of microprosthetic hormonal technologies–so often heralded as one of the technologies ushering in a queer, posthuman, post-gender future–as mechanisms of gendered and racialized subjective control operative at the level of the biomolecular.

In my essay, I have considered whether the data in publications on sexual violence against children reflectreality. I suspect that there are cases of child sexual abuse that goes underreported, and I try to investigate why this happens and the key possible reasons that lower the statistics. My essay focuses on the community in Western Kenya, yet I think the presumptions I made can be generalised and applicable to other contexts. I analyse material from research in Kisumu County and national data, and I support myself with information about child abuse from UNICEF. I name four key reasons why the data may not reflect reality: the taboo of being a sexual victim, economic dependency, psychological manipulation, and how society defines rape and sexual abuse. I use critical feminism as a framework to tackle the issue of a marginalised group of people.

This study sets out to investigate Sahrawi women’s understanding of maternities as bodily and embodied experiences of collective and individual resistance within the Sahrawi liberation struggle against the occupation of Western Sahara. By using the Sahrawi liberation front’s pronatalist politics as a starting point to explore Sahrawi women’s positioning in the liminal space between reproductive health and biological reproduction as a socio-political action, I draw on a decolonial understanding of agency to analyse the relationship between individual health and collective resistance – especially in correlation with the increase of humanitarian projects targeting sexual and reproductive health. As a result of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and desk review, I argue that the change in the social landscape of the camps with the arrival of humanitarian aid provided Sahrawi women with new perspectives on biological reproduction that, in turn, affected the way they contribute to the revolutionary cause, confirming their role as socio-political agents implementing new strategies of survival as acts of individual resistance.

The work presented aims to show the complexity, causes, and challenges of being stateless in the Dominican Republic through the medium of documentaries. This thesis will also uncoverpossibilities of resistance and coalitional engagement. To do so, I align myself with a decolonial feminist approach, which is a way of searching for alternative ways of being, doing, sensing, knowing, and loving for resistance, change, and a different future. This approach opens the possibility to understand statelessness within the triad of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and to move beyond the Eurocentric inventions of human rights, the concept of citizenship, and the figure of the 'citizen'. Decolonial feminism also grapples with the problem of victimization and gives us a possibility to see stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent both as an oppressed and resistant community. In a phenomenological sense, the documentaries Stateless by Michèle Stephenson (2020) and Our Lives in Transit by Sofia Olins (2015), are used in this thesis to explain and explore the lived conditions of being stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. I am conscious that film studies and particularly documentary filmmaking are colonized spaces and tools of modernity to spread the white / Anglo male gaze through the films' very impact on our senses and perception. For this reason, the work presented delinks from traditional methodologies which are often taken for granted in social sciences and migration studies. I aim to achieve this goal by practicing decolonial feminism as a theory and methodological guide for this thesis. Consequently, this thesis is a bridge-making process and an exploration of methodologies to grasp the complex reality in the Dominican Republic by practicing this work as a researcher, an audience, and a resister. Through the inspiring work of black feminists, decolonial and Caribbean scholars, but most importantly the lived experiences and voices of stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent, I intend to argue statelessness as amodern form of genocide to explain its root causes and persistence. Then, I will support this argument by bridging the links between statelessness and the coloniality of gender. Lastly, the different "world"-traveling experiences of directors Michèle Stephenson and Sofia Olins will deepen the discussion around possibilities of resistance to ongoing modes of subjugation through decolonial feminism.

Access to water is essential for every aspect of human life. Lack of water is a huge burden for people in low- and middle-income countries, directly linked to poverty, and considered a severe violation of human rights. Women are traditionally responsible for water collection and providing water for the household and consequently suffer from more burdens than men. This study aims to examine the gendered experiences of water scarcity in Gburimani, northern Ghana. By investigating the diversity of impacts of lived experiences, both within and beyond households, the purpose is to raise awareness of the community's situation and illuminate the importance of having an intersectional and gender-based perspective on the issue of water scarcity. This case study is conducted through the methods of work in the field, participatory method, and semi-structured interviews, and positions within the heart of decolonial feminism. The results are analyzed through insights and arguments from Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) and intersectionality. The results demonstrate that the social construction of gender and socio-cultural identities influences the diversity of experiences reflected in the community. The study concludes that gender division of labor, power structures, gendered responsibilities, and rights all determine that women are more vulnerable and face more burdens than men. However, the participants cannot be understood as a homogenous category with common submissions and oppressions. Gender, marital-and social status, age, and household positions are crucial variables influencing the extent of impacts and consequences. Therefore, the research stresses the importance of development actors to acknowledge the complexity of water and gender.

[pt] Esta pesquisa busca compreender como o movimento de mulheres indígenas no Brasil apresenta concepções próprias de agência e resistência, em específico, como as mulheres indígenas articulam a relação entre o empoderamento e gênero em sua mobilização. As fontes analisadas são as trajetórias e os discursos das mulheres indígenas, a partir de um escopo teórico, epistemológico e metodológico feminista e decolonial. O empoderamento é o recorte que permite observar a circulação discursiva de um vocabulário relacionado ao gênero desde uma cosmovisão da modernidade ocidental, em que esse externamente definido é friccionado e negociado pelas mulheres indígenas em seu processo de autodefinição. Em vez de receptoras passivas de concepções universalizadas, essas mulheres rompem com a oposição entre os direitos coletivos indígenas e os individuais das mulheres através do enraizamento nas próprias culturas e cosmologias como forma de resistência. Esta dissertação argumenta que as mulheres indígenas engajam com o conceito de empoderamento em associação com a sua demanda por maior protagonismo e autonomia política, enquanto que este termo é amansado à medida que esta reivindicação é expressa como uma extensão e reincorporação da sua agência como guardiãs de suas culturas e povos e indigenizado ao articular a sua mobilização política a partir da complementaridade entre as agências feminina e masculinas, entre os seres humanos e não-humanos e da interconexão entre o corpo, território e espírito no fazer da mulher indígena. / [en] This research seeks to understand how the movement of indigenous women in Brazil has its own conceptions of agency and resistance, specifically, how indigenous women articulate the relationship between empowerment and gender in their mobilization. The sources analyzed are the Indigenous women s trajectories and discourses, from a feminist and decolonial theoretical, epistemological and methodological scope. Empowerment as concept reflects the discursive circulation of a gender-related vocabulary from a Western modern worldview, in which this externally defined term is friccioned and negotiated by Indigenous women s selfdefinition process. Instead of passive recipients of universalized conceptions, these women break with the opposition between indigenous collective rights and the individual rights of women, by rooting their resistance in their own cultures and cosmologies. This study argues that indigenous women engage with the concept of empowerment in association with their demand for greater protagonism and political autonomy, meanwhile this term is tamed as this claim is expressed as an extension and reincorporation of their agency as guardians of their cultures and peoples and indigenized as their political mobilization departs from the complementarity between feminine and masculine agencies, between human and non-human beings and the interconnection between body, territory and spirit.

[pt] Atualmente o Brasil, consta nas primeiras colocações no ranking de países onde a população LGBT, em especial as travestis e mulheres trans – particularmente as negras – sofrem graves violações de direitos humanos, por comportarem em seus corpos mais de um tipo de opressão colonial, principalmente no que tange o acesso aos serviços de saúde. O presente estudo tem por objetivo central compreender a partir de um olhar interseccional, como se configura o acesso destas aos serviços de saúde, levando em conta como essas mulheres, como pessoas em situação de extremo risco social, buscam a efetividade de seus direitos, por meio de estratégias de sobrevivência. A discussão do referido estudo são fundamentadas pelas correntes teóricas do feminismo decolonial, interseccionalidade e do transfeminismo, por apreender que este percurso teórico permitiria contemplar as falas de mulheres tão invisibilizadas pelo processo da colonialidade de poder e de gênero que permanece até os dias atuais. Assumindo o pressuposto que a existência de uma política nacional de atenção à saúde integral da população LGBT não é garantia de acesso aos serviços de saúde por mulheres trans e travesti negra é demonstrada por meio da dificuldade que estas têm seu acesso aos serviços de saúde, devido à discriminação. Utilizamos como técnica metodológica o grupo focal com 6 mulheres trans e travestis negras, a fim de valorizar a historicidade destas, dos significados/sentidos que atribuem às suas vivências, sentimentos, experiências, crenças etc., no acesso aos serviços de saúde pública. Ao final do estudo foi possível vislumbrar que Política Nacional de Saúde Integral LGBT, é algo que não está presente efetivamente na realidade cotidiana da vida destas mulheres, considerando que ao tentarem acessar os serviços saúde não são atendidas dentro da complexidade de suas vivências plurais, mas sim por meio de uma lógica reducionista segregatória, que ao reproduz mais invisibilidade social. / [en] Currently, Brazil is in the first places in the ranking of countries where the LGBT population, especially transvestites and trans women - particularly black women - suffer serious violations of human rights, for having more than one type of colonial oppression in their bodies, mainly regarding access to health services. The main objective of the present study is to understand, from an intersectional point of view, how their access to health services is configured, taking into account how these women, as people in extreme social risk, seek the effectiveness of their rights, for through survival strategies. The discussion of the aforementioned study is based on the theoretical currents of decolonial feminism, intersectionality and transfeminism, by apprehending that this theoretical path would allow us to contemplate the speeches of women so invisible by the process of coloniality of power and gender that remains until the present day. Assuming that the existence of a national policy for comprehensive health care for the LGBT population is not a guarantee of access to health services for trans women and black transvestites, it is demonstrated through the difficulty they have in accessing health services, due to to discrimination. We used as a methodological technique the focus group with 6 trans women and black transvestites, in order to value their historicity, the meanings/senses they attribute to their experiences, feelings, experiences, beliefs, etc., in the access to public health services. At the end of the study, it was possible to see that the National Policy for Integral Health,LGBT, is something that is not effectively present in the daily reality of these women s lives, considering that when they try to access health services, they are not served within the complexity of their plural experiences, but rather yes, through a segregating reductionist logic, which reproduces more social invisibility.