Precarity and Counter-hegemonic Articulation: From the Massification of Feminisms toward a Radical and Plural Feminism
Thinking strategies of resistance for a transformation of our time through the notions of precarity in Judith Butler’s theory and counterhegemonic articulation in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s thesis.
By: Malena Nijensohn (she/her/hers)
On 3 June 2015 the first demonstration under the political slogan “Ni una menos” took place in Argentina. “Ni una menos” is a way of saying enough violence against women and its extreme exponent, femicide. It was an unexpected and massive gathering that congregated the enormous and plural social movements that had been active for decades as well as non-organised people: more than half a million-people mobilised in the Plaza de los dos Congresos in the city of Buenos Aires and in central squares in other cities around the country.
Other plural and multitudinous feminist gatherings followed: 3J (because of the date: 3 June); the first Women’s Strike on 19 October 2016, the International Women’s Strike 8M (8 March) and the “vigilias” (vigils) for the legalisation of voluntary abortion during the discussion in the Parliament, to name but a few. On 3 June 2016, the document that called for mobilization, although focused on femicide, also referenced the network of violences that stands behind murder as an extreme form of violence targeted at the bodies that are subjected to the aggressions and cruelties of the hetero-cis-patriarchy. It was already becoming apparent what would take shape from the Women’s Strike on October 19 – namely, an extension of the concept of violence that defines sexual violence as only the tip of the iceberg of a whole series of aggressions, from femicide to economic violence. By March 8, 2017, the idea of a strike as a form of struggle had become established in the political imaginary of the movement, this time within the framework of an International Women’s Strike that took place in more than 50 countries. On March 8, 2018, the International Women’s Strike changed its name to the International Women’s, Lesbians’, Travestis’, and Trans*’ Strike, naming subjectivities that had historically participated in the movement but whose identities were often invisibilized and subsumed under the signifier “women.”
My article analyses the “politics of the street” and discusses how this feminism managed to organise joined demonstrations and to produce documents agreed by a plurality of movements and organisations. It proposes the concept of a radical and plural feminism as one that is not only centered on the identity “women” but on precarity as the site of alliances for thinking of the possibilities for an anti-neoliberal feminism. It seeks to answer the following questions: How should the massification of feminism be understood in a context of neoliberal hegemony? Can feminism engage with the struggles for emancipation and social justice, or is it caught in neoliberal rationality?
My article takes up Judith Butler’s work on precarity and plural performativity, as well as the concept of radical and plural democracy from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It focuses particularly on the massive demonstrations in the public space, understood as plural performativity, and on the documents agreed by the plurality of movements and organizations that participate in the assemblies, understood as a process of articulation. It therefore proposes a radical and plural feminism to refer to a feminism that articulates a plurality of demands in equivalential chains to create a hegemonic alternative that struggles against neoliberalism.
In that sense, this feminism would not take identity as its starting point, but rather the comprehension that unequal distribution of precarity is shared – for what gathers this movement together considers, in the first place, the different subjectivities that are in the margins of hetero-cis-patriarchal power relations and, in the second place, the different forms in which the sex-gender matrix intersects with race, class, age, capacity, among other subordination axes that distribute precarity differentially. As I have further developed elsewhere, I would suggest that Butler’s developments on plural performativity and precarity allow us to think of new ways of political agency, and therefore of resistance, that struggle from and against precarity, in accordance with a project of radical and plural democracy, as it is developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.
My article reads the massive feminist demonstrations in terms of a mobilization of vulnerability, as a political response to neoliberal technologies that undergird precarization as a form of governance. These public actions, rather than denying vulnerability, use it as a site of alliance building and therefore as offering the possibility of new forms of agency and resistance against a neoliberalism.
My hypothesis is that Ni Una Menos – that is, the struggle against femicide, which was initially one particular demand among many – became the site of articulation of multiple demands of feminisms. At a certain point, it acquired an unexpected centrality and began to signify something beyond itself, being the name of something exceeding it. It became an empty signifier: without completely losing its initial, particular meaning (an end to femicides), it has become the locus of articulations of a plurality of demands.
Read the full article here: Precarity and Counter-hegemonic Articulation: From the Massification of Feminisms toward a Radical and Plural Feminism
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Malena Nijensohn was born in Argentina in 1987. She has studied Philosphy in the University of Buenos Aires and has a PhD in Gender Studies from the same university. She has edited Los feminismos ante el neoliberalismo (2018, La Cebra) and recently published La razón feminista. Políticas de la calle, pluralismo y articulación (2019, Cuarenta Ríos). She earned a postdoc grant to research feminism and populism in Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau's theories.