Questions for a feminist future

A demonstrator walks with a bouquet of flowers on March 8, 2022, in Oaxaca, México. Photo © Naxhielli Arreola.

Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • April 12, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Our celebration of March 8 and our reflections on it go well beyond the date itself.

It is in March, when the feminist movement’s energy and power is at its height, that we can glimpse some of the challenges and problems that deserve our attention.

This year, there are four questions I consider central to our capacity to continue “staying with the trouble,” to use the words of Donna Haraway.

How can we sustain and expand radicalism in such a massive movement?

In Feminist International: How to Change Everything, Verónica Gago argues that when feminists returned to the streets with shared anger in 2016, a virtuous circle emerged in which the movement’s size and radicalism fed off of one another. Gago first presented this idea in 2019. Five years, a pandemic, and several wars later, it is worth revisiting her argument.

Our solid and shared rejection of violence—of all violences, from those experienced in the intimate and familiar settings to those unleashed on the land for the sake of dispossession and plunder—has been the target of an immense political operation designed to separate and disconnect. 

Many countries have passed laws against violence against women, but in most cases they were born as dead letters. New measures, which are needed to restrain the extractivist processes that devastate territories, have not accompanied laws against gender violence. In fact, the pillage has accelerated, which generates even more violence, as is evident in Argentina and Ecuador.

Local, state and federal governments have responded to our demands, but their fragmented and fractured interventions do not solve the problems that we have identified. On the contrary, they aim to undermine and rupture our alliances. 

This is yet another instance of the time-worn strategy of the Roman colonizing army: "divide and conquer."

Our struggles against all forms of violence do not seek apparent (and fallacious) state “protection.” On the contrary, we are pushing for the total disruption and contestation of relations of exploitation and expropriation on a systematic level. That alone will allow us to take control of our time so that we can organize together and sustain collective life in a more dignified way. New laws and regulations around violence, which tend to rely on prisons and surveillance, fracture, confuse and depoliticize the movement.

Coming together and mobilizing in the streets against all violence is a way of interrupting the order of domination and of opening ourselves up to new alliances. These alliances stem from our diverse, lived experiences and lend themselves to the construction of a range of spaces and decision-making processes that can help us overcome the intense difficulties that we face on a daily basis.

These powerful struggles are interconnected and amplify practices that prefigure collective and individual freedom. They expand the autonomy of our heterogeneous and diverse bodies and the ways that we choose to tell our stories. 

While there are issues that ought to become rights enshrined in the state, like the right to legal, safe and free abortion, this is not where the true power of the feminist movement lies. In incorporating rights, states are doing the absolute minimum to limit the worst forms of the negation of our bodies and desires.

The radicality of our strength is sustained by what we are able to create and compose together: multiple alliances, feminist homes and schools, co-operatives of many kinds, an so on. In these creative practices we nurture and strengthen our shared power.

There is no doubt that over the past years, it has been difficult to sustain collective discussions about what women, queer, non-binary, and trans folks need and want. We want to change everything and to collectively create dignified ways to reproduce our lives. This is why it is so important to continue pushing these debates forward and to nurture reflection on paths that we have yet to travel.

How can we avoid attempts to capture the feminist movement?

We know from our own histories and from different organizing experiences that those in power will always seek to undermine the radicalism of popular social movements and to co-opt the disruptive energy they display during periods of mass struggle. The energies of feminist movement have already been the target of strategies of capture and depoliticization.

The indifferent response to demands that we have made over and over again in the streets, workplaces, schools and homes can lead to fatigue and discouragement. The belligerent irreverence of the younger people who participate in the struggle can alleviate this feeling. 

In addition, there are often attempts to sow confusion from above. 

The renewed call for so-called "gender parity" is a case in point, as if substituting female bodies for male bodies in similar governmental roles would be enough to spark change. 

This kind of confusion is on full display in Mexico. We are in the middle of an electoral campaign in which two women are competing against one another to become president. At the same time, violence is accelerating in the territories; assassinations and forced disappearances linked to extractivism and exploitation continue unabated. 

The banquet of confusion has been served: women in office as paramilitaries and the armed forces exercise de facto rule through terror.

How can we get better at transmitting experiences from generation to generation?

There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the reconstruction of feminist genealogies, which are as diverse as our bodies and life experiences. Today, we require methods that can respond to the new strategies that younger women bring into play, and combine them with lived experiences inscribed in the bodies of older women. 

We are devoting time and energy to reflecting on our genealogies and understanding ourselves within lineages of struggle. 

As Uruguayan feminist Noel Sosa proposes, these efforts can soothe the sense of orphanhood, and give us terms with which to describe past conflicts and to identify urgent tasks.

Perhaps less has been said about the inverse movement, which is also relevant: the immense power that the enthusiasm and energy of the youngest feminists imprint on their more experienced—and perhaps more distrustful—elders. 

Younger women are saying out loud what their grandmothers kept silent. This was a common slogan in recent mobilizations. This perspective creates dignity for all: as they recognize their foremothers, younger feminists give new meaning to forms of disobedience and insubordination that predated them.

The profusion of attempts to encourage the transmission of experiences and energies is a source of great hope. Self-managed and autonomous feminist schools, gatherings, festivals, feminist markets, artistic efforts, social spaces, books, media and projects of all kinds are sprouting up. These doings are more numerous and frequent with every passing day.

All this is taking place in the midst of growing threats to the lives of so many women, non-binary, transgender and queer people. 

Declared and undeclared wars are being waged, reflected in increased militarization, and at a greater cost to public budgets, and this is taking place just as women have begun to talk among ourselves. We have begun to learn about our shared concerns and about everything that is at stake in these times of overlapping crises.

This is why it is urgent to encourage strategic thinking, to identify alternatives, and to practice attentive listening and careful debate.

How can we strengthen anti-war sentiment in the feminist movement?

Opposition to the genocide in Gaza was expressed in all of the feminist mobilizations that we documented this year, offering another glimmer of hope. 

Many feminists from previous eras centered an intransigent, lucid anti-war and internationalist politics. Today’s struggles against war, against those who fund it, against the draft, the arms trade and the nuclear industry are urgent. These struggles connect with anti-punitivism, and are based on confronting warmongerers in our own cities or towns, states, countries, and beyond.

The most vicious assault on life we have witnessed in a generation is taking place in Gaza; something not seen since the napalm bombing of Vietnam, or the scorched earth campaigns in Guatemala. What happens in Palestine matters, and stopping genocide in Gaza is a clear call to action. But war is also present in our region: in Haiti, in Mexico, in Ecuador, and elsewhere.

A feminist future demands that we sustain and deepen struggles against all violence while avoiding the poisoned traps of securitization, militarism, criminalization and punitivism. 

It is through struggle and shared decision making that we will distinguish ourselves from the false feminisms of capitalist bosses and the rightwing. It is how we will build a terrain in which we can renew alliances among those who sustain collective life every single day.

Being in struggle together allows us to stay alive and dynamic, and it will allow us to share our experiences with those who are now taking the streets to fight for what is theirs, and for those who have yet to come.