Acuerpar: The Decolonial Feminist Call for Embodied Solidarity

Abstract

This article argues that meaningful solidarity relies less on our ability to imagine ourselves in the place of others and more on our openness to encounter difference through the messy doing of care summoned by acuerpar. The verb acuerpar—to give one’s body—is a central political term in the vocabulary of decolonial feminist resistance in Central America. It names the collective care practices that bodies undertake to hold space for each other and the land in the face of capitalist extraction and rampant gendered and racialized violence. Against disembodied forms of solidarity that entreat us to bestow empathy on disadvantaged others by “putting ourselves in another’s shoes,” acuerpar invites us to stand side by side in our own bodies and remake the world through mutual aid. It is a call to be with rather than be in another’s shoes. Drawing on the work of Indigenous feminist thinkers from Central America, I show how acuerpar moves us away from colonizing models of coalition building that romanticize sentimental connection as the remedy for social ills. I do so by reflecting on the embodied support and radical self-care that took place at a feminist encampment in Honduras demanding justice for the murder of Indigenous Lenca organizer Berta Cáceres.