Talk: A Wave of Difference: Language Expression in the Argentine Feminist Imaginary

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In the context of a disproportionate increase in sexual violence against cis, trans, and transvestite women since 2015, Argentine feminisms have prefigured the untimely irruption of public space in both process and form. The movements’ interventions not only impact the social conditions and the epistemic tools for popular intelligibility of language expression ​​of gender violence, through an innovative use of communication technologies and social networks, but also articulate, from the multidimensionality in which inequality operates by gender and more broadly, a transversal resistance to the oppressive characteristics that would accompany the neoliberal turn produced by public policy under President Mauricio Macri’s corporate governance mandate (2015-2019). This new state of public attention and mass representation allowed a reorganization of desires to spread and multiply across territories, professional careers, bodies, and communities throughout the country, which would forever transform the contours of a traditionally instituted political subject, expanding its affective capacity to rework new forms of connection between the personal and the political, extending the singular opportunity of its criticism to all spheres of social organization. In this way, local feminisms constructed networks of theoretical exchange and practical solidarity between cis and trans women, which to this day connect, in a complex way and not without tension, a concert of experiences that link and incorporate radical differences and specific demands of the sectors of working women, ecologists, diverse functional, queer, unionists, anti-racists, piqueteras, educators, prostitutes and racialized, among many others, in a structural critique of the functioning capitalist economic order.

This event is part of the Feminismos desde abajo, y hacia el sur/ Feminisms from Below, and Toward the South series, which welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, housing, debt, and more. This mass feminism has grown to be arguably the most insurgent political force across the continent.

Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB History Department, UCSB Feminist Studies Department, UCSB Latin American and Iberian Studies, UC San Diego Latin American Studies Program, UCSD Critical Gender Studies, and UCSD Institute for Arts and Humanities

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