Professional NGO feminists in Colombia: trajectories and subjectivities in-between

This paper investigates the modes of political subjectivation of a group of professional feminists I met during my ethnographic fieldwork in 2022 in Colombia. By professional feminists, I refer to socially and racially advantaged women who self-identify as feminists and work in feminist non-governmental organizations. Their professional location immersed in global power relations places them as transnational brokers channeling economic and political resources in global aid chains between marginalized grassroots women activists and international funding institutions. At the same time, longstanding critiques to professionalization and institutionalization of feminism since the 1990s have not left their feminist positionality unchallenged, and they critically address their uneasy positioning in-between activist and professional spheres, as well as in-between local and global scales. The paper first explores how feminist trajectories have weaved the contemporary field of Colombian NGO feminism. I argue that a close reading of the experiences of professional feminists critically aware of political contractions at play allows us to look at individual and collective processes of feminist subjectivation beyond the moralized binary terms between activism and professionalization. Despite the generational differences that I unpack in the first section, I identify three common modalities through which they present themselves as good professional feminists: (1) by signaling other incoherent feminist practices, (2) by displaying dispositions of reflexivity and (3) by claiming proximity to marginalized feminist subjects. Instead of treating these modalities as mere performances of virtue signaling or individual prefiguration, I look at them as empirical instances of moral expectations at play in feminist attempts to bridge across power asymmetries. The focus on professional feminists is a deliberate choice of studying-up among advantaged feminist subjects from my own privileged position of white European scholar who has had a close access into the milieu of Colombian NGO feminist over the last years.