When the Body Speaks (to) the Political: Feminist Activism in Latin America and the Quest for Alternative Democratic Futures

Abstract

The article claims that the feminist movements emerging in the context of contemporary Latin American political struggles – such as Ni Una Menos – allow for a re-conceptualisation of the political, along with its subjects and objects. The uniqueness of these movements is predicated on the way they managed to link the ordinary killings of women’s bodies to the extraordinary alliances between different social movements. A closer inspection into these ongoing experiences that mobilise different, rhizomatic arenas of political entanglements – such as the internet and the streets – allows us to see how Latin American feminist attachments and movements can redefine democratic practices and build different forms of community. By resisting what is perceived as ‘a war against women in Latin America,’ these movements allow for understanding the operation of a gendered necropolitics, which ties women’s death with the ultimate functioning of modern politics and modern subjectivities. In doing so, they politicise not only the lives (and therefore voices) of women who are struggling in/for the political, but also the deaths (and therefore silences) on which the political has been built. Furthermore, by politicising the role of the body in the political and ethical arena, these movements open our political imaginaries to the possibilities of new attachments, filiations and articulations that are not subsumed under abstract universal categories and values, nor limited to identitarian and thus legalistic affirmations of the political. Following these arguments, I argue that contemporary feminist articulations in Latin America productively dispute the validity of the abstract, universal, modern ‘human’ to think alternative political futures. By politicising materiality and embodiment alongside language and discourse as productive of political ontologies, feminists open the space for reclaiming the political function of the female body.

Criminalización de la protesta feminista: el caso de las colectivas de jóvenes estudiantes en México

“…Existen varios intentos por clasificar los movimientos sociales para distinguirlos de otras formas de comportamiento colectivo. En el caso del activismo feminista universitario la hipótesis de esta investigación es que su auge responde a una tríada contextual: reacción a las fallidas políticas de atención a la violencia a nivel do-méstico, impacto del feminismo global e influjo de las nuevas tecnologías y las redes de activismo (Castelles, 2012;Esquivel, 2019;Friedman, 2005;Gil, 2019;Larrondo y Ponce, 2019;Rovira, 2016;Schild y Follegati, 2018;Félix de Souza, 2019;Van Dijk, 2012;Zerán, 2018).…”

Popular Feminism(s) Reconsidered: Popular, Racialized, and Decolonial Subjectivities in Contention

“…Through critical and contextualized studies of popular feminism, the contributions to this issue make these relations, tensions, and contradictions explicit and explore their import both for the concept of popular feminism and for the practices and politics it seeks to name. They foreground the activism of subaltern women, which overlaps with but is different from the mass women's movements protesting gender-based violence, such as the marchas de las putas (part of the worldwide 2011 "Slut Walks" initiated in Toronto), Ni Una Menos (Not One Less), and the Chilean viral flash-mob song Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist in Your Way) (Souza, 2019). The 2017 International Women's Strike and its "feminism of the 99 percent" show greater affinity with cross-class popular feminism such as that of the World March of Women (Palmeiro, 2017).…”

Jóvenes, activismos feministas y violencia de género en la Unam: genealogía de un conflicto

“…E n la actualidad, la violencia de género -en sus diversas formas-está instalada en la agenda pública latinoamericana (Félix de Souza, 2019). Particularmente en México, en el último lustro, se observa un aumento de la con"ictividad social en torno a esta problemática.…”