Embodying Hope: Choreographies of Presence and Reiterative Endurance in Latin American Feminist Protest

How is hope sustained under conditions of violence, loss, and political disappointment? Recent feminist and critical theorists have reimagined hope as entangled with grief and failure, yet this work remains largely focused on texts and representation. In this article, we develop a feminist theory of embodied hope grounded in Latin American feminist protest. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic and visual documentation from Colombia and Mexico (2022–23), we show how activists enact hope through what we call choreographies of presence: collective acts of public visibility, such as mourning, dance, mutual aid, and bodily exposure. We argue that these practices reframe feminist hope as a collective, democratic capacity for endurance grounded in return, relationality, and a refusal of closure. Rather than deferring hope to a future horizon, these movements sustain political life by returning to sites of loss and enduring together.