Across Oceans: Feminist Dialogues on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
A feminist transcontinental podcast
What happens when feminist conversations travel beyond borders, languages, and political contexts? Across Oceans: Feminist Dialogues on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) is a three-part podcast series that brings together feminist voices from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to explore shared struggles, different realities, and the possibilities of collective action.
Developed through a collaborative, participatory, and dialogue-based methodology, Across Oceans creates a space for exchange rather than comparison. The series recognizes that while SWANA and LAC have distinct histories, cultures, legal systems, and political landscapes, they are also connected by experiences of colonialism, institutional inequality, gendered violence, and struggles over bodily autonomy and justice.
Each episode adopts a semi-structured conversational format, combining guided questions with the freedom for the conversation to develop organically. Rather than presenting feminism as a single universal framework, Across Oceansasks what feminist knowledge can look like when it is produced across contexts and when communities are given the space to learn from one another.
Episode One — Borrowed Maps: Decolonizing Feminism Across SWANA and LAC
With Daniella Téllez del Valle (Dany) and Roxana Hernández (Rox)
The series begins by questioning the maps through which feminism is so often understood. Borrowed Maps examines how colonial histories continue to shape gender norms, legal systems, institutions, and feminist organizing across SWANA and LAC.
The conversation explores the ways colonialism does not simply belong to the past, but continues to influence whose knowledge is recognized, whose bodies are regulated, and whose struggles are considered legitimate. Dany and Rox reflect on the similarities between their regions while remaining attentive to the differences that make each context unique.
At its heart, the episode asks what it means to decolonize feminism: to challenge inherited frameworks, recover local forms of knowledge, and recognize histories of resistance that have too often been marginalized.
The discussion ultimately moves beyond the idea of identical experiences, toward something more nuanced: shared histories do not require identical struggles. Solidarity can emerge not from erasing differences, but from understanding them.
Episode Two — The Courtroom and the Kitchen Table: Feminist Legal Imaginations Beyond the State
With Raquel Brítez
The second episode moves from history to one of the most powerful and contested tools for social change: the law.
In conversation with Raquel Brítez, The Courtroom and the Kitchen Table explores the complicated relationship between feminist movements, justice, and legal institutions. The episode considers what law can accomplish in the struggle for sexual and reproductive rights, while also confronting its limitations.
Can legal reform transform deeply rooted inequalities? What happens when the law recognizes a right but communities still cannot access it? And what forms of justice become possible when we look beyond courts, legislation, and formal state institutions?
The conversation turns toward community-based advocacy, strategic litigation, collective action, and alternative understandings of justice. The “courtroom” represents formal mechanisms of law, while the “kitchen table” evokes the everyday spaces where people organize, share experiences, care for one another, and imagine change.
The episode therefore asks us to rethink what justice looks like and who gets to define it.
Episode Three — The Inheritance of Shame: Community, Solidarity, and Feminist Futures
With Alejandra Sosa (Alé) and Melanie (Mel)
The final episode turns inward, toward the communities and relationships that allow feminist movements to survive.
The Inheritance of Shame explores how ideas about gender, sexuality, bodies, and reproductive lives are transmitted through families, communities, institutions, and generations. But the episode does not stop at examining shame. It asks what happens when inherited forms of silence are replaced by care, solidarity, accompaniment, and collective resistance.
Alé and Mel reflect on feminist practices that place community at the center of political action. Care emerges not merely as a personal or private act, but as a political strategy: a way of sustaining movements, protecting communities, resisting isolation, and creating spaces where people can imagine lives beyond inherited constraints.
The conversation ultimately looks toward feminist futures—not as a distant ideal, but as something built through everyday acts of solidarity. It reminds us that movements are sustained not only by protests, policies, and legal victories, but also by the people who listen, accompany, protect, and remain.
Taken together, the three episodes move through three interconnected spaces: history, law, and community.
Borrowed Maps asks where our feminist frameworks come from.
The Courtroom and the Kitchen Table asks where justice can be pursued.
The Inheritance of Shame asks how communities can sustain the struggle and imagine what comes next.
Across all three, Across Oceans resists the idea that there is one universal feminist experience. Instead, it creates a dialogue between different shores—one that recognizes difference without allowing difference to become distance.
The series is ultimately an invitation to listen across borders: to recognize familiar struggles in unfamiliar places, to question the frameworks we have inherited, and to imagine solidarity as something built through exchange, curiosity, and shared responsibility.
Across Oceans is not an attempt to draw a single map of feminist struggle. It is an attempt to redraw the map altogether.
By bringing together voices from SWANA and LAC, the series creates a space where histories can be questioned, legal systems can be challenged, and communities can imagine futures beyond inherited inequalities. Its conversations remind us that oceans can separate geographies without necessarily separating struggles.
Across different shores, there are different stories. But there are also shared questions: Who has the authority to define our bodies, our rights, our justice, and our futures? And what becomes possible when we begin answering those questions together?
Different shores. Connected struggles. Shared futures.
