Global understandings of gender-based violence remain dominated by liberal feminist frameworks that centre individualized rights and autonomy as the universal standard for liberation. Embedded in international development and humanitarian discourse, these frameworks circulate as neutral while setting the stage for Western rescue narratives that commodify trauma. For women across the distinct historical and geopolitical contexts of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, such universalizing frameworks enact epistemic violence by erasing their political agency and culturizing violence in the Global South. Drawing on Lugones’ coloniality of gender and testimonio methodology to honour living networks of oral history, we engage with 18 testimonios from women in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, as a relational epistemology. Women theorized nosotridad, a collective ‘we-ness’ as the primary decolonial feminist praxis for moving away from damage-centred research and towards rewriting their narratives. Three themes emerged: (i) a view from the outside; (ii) nosotridad as a relational conviviality; and (iii) reconstructing the tapestry of images.
Carranza et al. (Thu,) studied this question.