Laura Briggs
From Femicide to Katie Britt: Thinking about Whether Latin American Feminism Travels, and What That Means for Asylum Cases
Latin American feminism has been extraordinarily productive in recent years, crossing borders and emerging with explosive energy in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, among others. It has been mobilizing women’s strikes against debt, to acknowledge the key economic role of reproductive labor, for contraception and abortion rights. Above all, it has demanded an end to femicide, linking intimate partner violence and state violence and neglect. As gangs have torn apart everyday life in parts of the Northern Triangle, this feminism has been a resource to women and femmes there, helping them produce their arguments for asylum: they are being raped regularly and threatened with death by gang members, and feminized people and children are coercively turned into their “girlfriends.” They are at risk of femicide. But feminists in the US have been unable to marshal an effective response, fragmented as it is—into abortion rights, Black Lives Matter, Red Canary Song, Red for Ed, Fight for $15, domestic workers, #MeToo, abolition. Worse, feminist issues like sexual violence have been deployed for right-wing purposes, as when Senator Katie Britt told the story of Karla Jacinto Romero, a Mexican anti-trafficking activist, in her response to Biden’s State of the Union address in March, 2024. Meanwhile, the legal question of asylum for domestic violence has been thoroughly attacked by the political right in the United States.
LAURA BRIGGS is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research studies the relationship between reproductive politics, neoliberalism, and the long durée of U.S. empire and imperialism. Briggs is the author of numerous influential books, including Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020); How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (University of California Press, 2016); Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption (Duke University Press, 2012), winner of the James A. Rawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians; Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2002). Her new book project is entitled The Future is Born in Small Places: The Gendered (Bio)Politics of Freedom, Debt Imperialism, and Unnatural Disaster in the Caribbean, and focuses on historical and contemporary uses of debt in the United States and the Caribbean as a political tool of disenfranchisement, expropriation, and necropolitics. Briggs is also a public intellectual, whose work has been featured in court cases, podcasts, and journalism, including NPR, Slate, PBS, The New Republic, Indian Country Today, and Ms. Magazine.
