Research Project Cynthia Francica Feminist (Post)apocalyptic Imaginaries in Latin American Literature and Visual Arts

Latin America, a region characterized by both alarming rates of violence against feminized subjects and the unrelenting expansion of extractivist economies, offers fertile ground to illuminate the ties between environmental injustice and the lives, and deaths, of gendered and otherwise marked bodies. In this context, attending to the (post)apocalyptic images and vocabularies that emerge from aesthetic practices becomes an important task. These imaginaries provide symbolic tools to further the struggle against extractivist megaprojects in the region and, at the same time, they re-invent the ways in which we conceive of gender, sexuality and embodiment and, more broadly, of our relation to the more-than-human. An example of the situated (post)apocalyptic imaginaries I will study is the decolonial feminist notion of “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory), a practical idea conceived to resist extractivist territorial exploitation.