Grassroots women leaders as the good subject of Colombian NGO feminism

Despite rich contributions about the conflictual dimension of the feminist collective subject in feminist theory, we find only recent contributions analyzing the empirical mechanisms that produce “good” and “bad” feminist subjects in specific sociopolitical contexts (David 2024; Dutoya 2024; Éloit and Lépinard 2024). To contribute to this agenda, I look at how grassroots women leaders have been constructed as the good feminist subjects in Colombia. Based on my ethnographic research on Colombian NGO feminism, I draw from interview material with NGO workers as well as civil society and international donors’ social official discourses to explain the production of multiply marginalized women from peripheral territorios as legitimate subjects of feminist politics. For that purpose, I first look at how multiply marginalized women from territorios came to be represented as social leaders and human rights defenders in the discourses of Colombian civil society and international actors that have emphasized women’s active contributions to peacebuilding in post-conflict contexts since the 2000s. I then place this type of discourse into a longer history of the widening disjuncture between professional NGO feminists and grassroots/popular women that has been attacked by moralized critiques to the professionalization and NGOization of feminism. Finally, I show that despite the political consensus it relies on, the celebration of grassroots leaders and defenders from territories relies on operations of over-visibility and exclusions of feminist subjectivities.