by Ver\u00f3nica Gago<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This year, the cycle of protests known as Ni Una Menos<\/em> in Argentina will turn 10. The first march under that banner took place June 3, 2015. Then came the strikes and demonstrations: first the Women\u2019s Strike on October 19, 2016, then came the transnational and transfeminist mobilizations, which began on March 8, 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n The green tide\u2014so named for the green handkerchiefs worn by activists\u2014demanding the legalization of abortion, is embedded in that sequence of events, from Poland to Argentina (2016\u20132020), as well as in Colombia and Mexico. It seems important to me to read this cycle of protests as a decade of innovations<\/em> in organizational<\/em> terms.<\/span><\/p>\n On the one hand is the reinvention of the strike as a tool. This is something we debated as the actions were taking place<\/em>, which was no small feat. Strikes are a collective epistemic process\u2014in which the economically active population can understand and assume its capacity to shut the world down<\/em>\u2014as well as a space for pedagogical and political strategy in deciding how to narrate and express what is taking place, and how we translate our actions into organizational power in everyday life.<\/span><\/p>\n There is a history yet to be written of the political programme<\/em> of transfeminist strikes, one that examines how these actions have debated and elaborated demands and understandings of domestic work, pensions, the <\/span>travesti<\/em><\/span><\/a>-trans labor quota, public and household debt, housing and rent, migrant labor, comprehensive sexual education, reproductive justice, land ownership, the food model, social subsidies for single-parent households, anti-prison work, as well as organization in the context of social reproduction.<\/span><\/p>\n This political programme is a response<\/em> to systemic understandings around the interconnected violences of patriarchal and colonial capitalism.<\/span><\/p>\n It is important to consider how knowledge is accumulated<\/em> through struggle, applied collective intelligence and the elaboration of political programmes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Doing so allows us to ask questions that can be useful to understand this cycle of protest. How can we establish political processes in each country and at the transnational level? What are the temporalities of the strike, and how can strikes be maintained over time? What is its temporal role, and how does it function as a space of transnational analysis?<\/span><\/p>\n Aqu\u00ed hay una historia que hacer de la <\/span>program\u00e1tica<\/span><\/i> de las huelgas transfeministas, sobre el modo en que han discutido y elaborado demandas y conceptualizaciones sobre: trabajo dom\u00e9stico, pensiones, cupo laboral travesti-trans, deuda p\u00fablica y de los hogares, vivienda y alquileres, trabajo migrante, educaci\u00f3n sexual integral, justicia reproductiva, propiedad de la tierra, modelo alimentario, subsidios sociales a hogares monomarentales, antipunitivismo, sindicalismo de la reproducci\u00f3n social (sin agotar la lista).\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Esta program\u00e1tica es en <\/span>respuesta<\/span><\/i> a<\/span><\/i> diagn\u00f3sticos sist\u00e9micos sobre la interconexi\u00f3n de las violencias del capitalismo colonial patriarcal.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Es clave pensar en este <\/span>acumulado<\/span><\/i> de trabajo pol\u00edtico, de elaboraci\u00f3n de inteligencia colectiva y de programa. Es desde aqu\u00ed que podemos tambi\u00e9n lanzar preguntas que nos pueden servir para el an\u00e1lisis del ciclo: \u00bfqu\u00e9 relaci\u00f3n se puede establecer con los procesos pol\u00edticos en cada pa\u00eds y a nivel transnacional?; \u00bfcu\u00e1les son las temporalidades de la huelga y sus maneras de producir estructuras de duraci\u00f3n en el tiempo?, \u00bfcu\u00e1l es su rol como calendario organizativo y como instancia de elaboraci\u00f3n coyuntural transnacional?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This cycle of struggle has been highly networked, it has cut transversally<\/em> across issues, and it has been able to produce multiple variations<\/em> and changes in how we organize.<\/p>\n I\u2019m thinking of the impact of feminist strikes and mobilizations on Indigenous and working-class strikes in Ecuador (2019 and 2022); on the national strike and uprising in Colombia (2019\u20132021) and on the sequence that runs from the feminist strike (2016\u20132020)\u00a0 to the social uprising in Chile (2019), to name the most obvious examples.<\/p>\n This interweaving, which exhibits a range of temporalities, implies a deepening and organic connection with popular, anti-racist, anti-extractivist forms of protest<\/em>. To this, we can of course add the conflicting but evident<\/em> influence of these same processes in the presidential elections in Argentina (2019), Chile (2021), Brazil (2022), and Colombia (2022).<\/p>\n I will attempt to summarize what we might call organizational innovations in the processes in which feminisms integrate, expand, and engage:<\/p>\n changes in spokespersonships, including feminist and queer leadership;<\/p>\n<\/li>\n changes in how the tasks and infrastructure for the social reproduction of the struggles and in particular of the forms of occupation of the street are valued;<\/p>\n<\/li>\n reconsiderations of systemic violence,\u00a0 understandings which feminisms have expanded by exploring the meanings of war<\/em> against certain bodies and territories;<\/p>\n<\/li>\n explicit refusal to allow movements [that are not explicitly feminist] led by women as well as transfeminist movements to remain siloed by their \u201cagendas\u201d or disconnected from increasingly broad mobilizations;<\/p>\n<\/li>\n changes in collective understanding (active and\/or reactive) of gender-based violence as a structural expression of capitalist violence<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n In re-reading movement statements, texts, and events of this past decade, I\u2019ve noticed the emergence of a new dynamic that is at once process-oriented and disruptive, and which seeks to constantly expand<\/em> political alliances, processes of translation, and the resonances of organizational forms.<\/p>\n From the pandemic to the electoral victories of the far right, we can see a sequence of counterrevolutionary<\/em> twists and turns, that also display innovations, experiments, and new kinds of risk taking.<\/span><\/p>\n We have researched and worked to highlight three crucial aspects of the pandemic. First, key changes have taken place in the world of work, especially with jobs rightly deemed \u201cessential,\u201d a concept that claims visibility and legitimacy for work related to social reproduction (health, education, support in situations of gender violence, food, and care work), which is hyperexploited in times of global emergency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Second, we saw an acceleration of financial-real estate extractivism that targets women, lesbians, travestis, trans people, non-binary people, migrant and racialized populations, and produces predatory speculation around housing, evictions, and debt. [In Argentina, travesti<\/em> is not a slur, but a gender identity with deep political roots.]<\/span><\/p>\n Third, we saw a reconfiguration of the articulation between the financialization of everyday life and platform economies, which seek to claim the homes, community social spaces, and the most precarious work (paid and unpaid) as sites for the extraction of resources and energy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These changes are key to understanding the pandemic as setting a new threshold<\/em> for economic and financial violence, one which is is intertwined with an intensification of gender-based violence, and which has not relented since.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The pandemic and its (still present) ramifications amplifies the space of social reproduction <\/em>in an unprecedented way, revealing the infrastructure that sustains collective life, the territories and bodies involved, and the precariousness they endure. It also explores the ways in which these spaces and practices became politicized in response to the neoliberal crisis from a transfeminist perspective<\/em>. As if in an X-ray, the threads of our weavings were laid bare.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Based on the uses of the category of \u201cessential work\u201d that became popular during the pandemic, we can map a paradoxical reclassification of the crisis of wage labor and a tendency toward the intensification of work that is less recognized as such, and which is increasingly moralized and\/or criminalized.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The crisis created by the pandemic intensified the division between property owners and non-property owners on a family level. Housing has become an intensified source of new debt and a key element in the new cycle of struggles.<\/span><\/p>\n In Argentina, the figure of the \u201csingle-mother household\u201d has been popularized by feminists, as those who sustain families have organized to make their role visible, this was especially true after the pandemic. According to a 2020 report, 36 percent of Argentine households are supported by a single person, usually women, who have to solve daily problems of food, rent, utilities, health care, and schooling for children and adolescents. If we consider low-income households, this number <\/span>rises to<\/span><\/a> 60 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n In contrast to the ideal of the isolated professional male living in a studio apartment that is highly valued as a financial asset (according to current propaganda of successful, property-owning masculinity, which generally out of reach for younger people), the single-mother household appears as its invisible double<\/em>: a feminized household, burdened with debt, and unable to outsource reproductive tasks to the market.<\/span><\/p>\n When considering single-mother households in Argentina, it is worth noting a specific composition in terms of how care is organized, which can include female family members who are not in the household (like grandmothers inside and outside the country) who are part of an extended infrastructure of care. But there is also a community network structured by membership in social and political organizations. Alternative work and care infrastructures become evident, challenging a simplistic reading of a \u201cchange of leadership\u201d in family structure.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When male leadership is no longer present, there is not simply a sex-gender change that preserves the previous form. Rather, an alteration of the political order that sustained male leadership is produced. The idea of a \u201ccrisis of despotism in the factory\u201d was once used by critics of capitalism to explain why workers rejected discipline. We can now extend this to a crisis of despotism in families, which is partially resolved through single-motherhood and the construction of non-heteropatriarchal care networks.<\/span><\/p>\n This change in the affective-labor-political structure of households has been accompanied and sustained by processes of financialization that modify the relationship between the home and financial technology (for example, through virtual wallets, micro investments, and a wide range of apps available on cellular phones).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The financialization of everyday life, which became a way of navigating the crisis of reproduction in a pandemic, fuels a kind of civil war<\/em> that unfolds in precarious territories alongside the rise and proletarianization of criminalized economies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That brings us back to an organizational question. How can we rethink our strategies at a time when violence is a counterrevolutionary response<\/em> to the politicization of social reproduction and to the destabilization of racist and patriarchal hierarchies?<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Javier Milei won the elections in Argentina and took office in December 2023. Since then, the dynamics of state-led anti-feminism have been part of a brutal counterrevolutionary<\/em> attack. Argentina, together with <\/span>Ecuador<\/span><\/a> and El Salvador, is part of a fascist-influenced radicalization that has accelerated in the wake of Trump’s victory.<\/span><\/p>\n Milei\u2019s statements at the Davos forum in 2024 and 2025 are a clear sign of his alignment with the global far-right agenda, as well as of his desire to present himself as the leader of a country known worldwide for the mass character and the radicalism of its feminist movement. The first time Milei went to Davos, he spoke of feminist and environmental struggles as being radical forms of social justice, which he called \u201caberrant.\u201d In 2025, he asserted that there are only two genders and linked homosexuality with pedophilia. The response was a massive anti-fascist and anti-racist <\/span>march on February 1,<\/span><\/a> where, among many slogans, was: \u201cThere are only two genders: fascists and anti-fascists.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n By \u201cstate-led anti-feminism\u201d in the far-right government, I\u2019m referring to three elements.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n First is a systematic and institutional attack on public policies aimed at raising awareness, preventing, and addressing gender-based violence and its ramifications, as well as economic assistance for victims.<\/span><\/p>\n Second are personal attacks, including, in certain cases, the criminalization of leading figures in politics, journalism, art, and transfeminist organizations, especially those involved in the popular economy.<\/span><\/p>\n And finally there is a government discourse attacks and spreads hate speech, in particular, through presidential communications. This has led to an increase in institutional and social violence (<\/span>attacks on queer people<\/span><\/a> have multiplied).<\/span><\/p>\n State-led anti-feminism goes beyond the president\u2019s opinions or the so-called \u201cculture wars.\u201d It is a type of attack that is organically linked to structural adjustment, in which the subjects of \u201csacrifice\u201d are women, lesbians, travestis<\/em>, trans men and women, adolescents, children, and the elderly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The economic orientation of anti-gender policies exposes state-led anti-feminism as a fundamental dynamic of the global accumulation model. It is a war declared and waged with public resources against subjects marked by gender, which is always intertwined with class and race, allowing authoritarian neoliberalism to become more aggressive<\/em> under fascist modalities. In short, through state-led anti-feminism, an anarcho-libertarian government has intensified the authoritarian neoliberal project to the point of organizing it according to fascist logics of the annihilation of certain populations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The war against gender is an expansive logic: migrants, racialized people, state welfare recipients, and homeless people are all marked for sacrifice. All of these people are classified as degenerate, victims, or non-productive<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n Today’s far right is an expression of an amalgam in which family, biological, and natalist values express the core beliefs of owners of tech companies, in which the hyper-innovation of platforms converge with traditionalist claims about gender roles.<\/span><\/p>\n2.<\/strong><\/span><\/i><\/h2>\n
\n
3.<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n
4.<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n