The reinvention of the strike: 10 years of feminist uprising in Argentina
Demonstrators hold their kerchiefs high as part of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion on October 12, 2024 at the 37th Plurinational Meeting of Women, Lesbians, Travesti, Trans, Bisexual, Intersex and Non-Binary people in Jujuy, Argentina. Photo © Susi Maresca.
Opinion • Verónica Gago • May 2, 2025 • Leer en castellano
Difficult times call for reflection and debate. We’re rising to this task by sharing this reflextion by Verónica Gago on 10 years of struggles led by feminists and gender dissidents. Understanding the tensions that mark these moments of intense rearrangements and changes in increasingly militarized capitalism is urgent. This is the first in a series of reflections we plan to publish in coming months.—Eds.
I.
This year, the cycle of protests known as Ni Una Menos 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’s Strike on October 19, 2016, then came the transnational and transfeminist mobilizations, which began on March 8, 2017.
The green tide—so named for the green handkerchiefs worn by activists—demanding the legalization of abortion, is embedded in that sequence of events, from Poland to Argentina (2016–2020), as well as in Colombia and Mexico. It seems important to me to read this cycle of protests as a decade of innovations in organizational terms.
On the one hand is the reinvention of the strike as a tool. This is something we debated as the actions were taking place, which was no small feat. Strikes are a collective epistemic process—in which the economically active population can understand and assume its capacity to shut the world down—as 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.
There is a history yet to be written of the political programme of transfeminist strikes, one that examines how these actions have debated and elaborated demands and understandings of domestic work, pensions, the travesti-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.
This political programme is a response to systemic understandings around the interconnected violences of patriarchal and colonial capitalism.
It is important to consider how knowledge is accumulated through struggle, applied collective intelligence and the elaboration of political programmes.
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?
Youth at the LGBTQIA+ Anti-Fascist and Anti-Racist Pride Federal March on February 1, 2025 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, fighting cuts in education, health and gender programming. Photo © Susi Maresca.
II
This cycle of struggle has been highly networked, it has cut transversally across issues, and it has been able to produce multiple variations and changes in how we organize.
I’m 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 (2019–2021) and on the sequence that runs from the feminist strike (2016–2020) to the social uprising in Chile (2019), to name the most obvious examples.
This interweaving, which exhibits a range of temporalities, implies a deepening and organic connection with popular, anti-racist, anti-extractivist forms of protest. To this, we can of course add the conflicting but evident influence of these same processes in the presidential elections in Argentina (2019), Chile (2021), Brazil (2022), and Colombia (2022).
I will attempt to summarize what we might call organizational innovations in the processes in which feminisms integrate, expand, and engage:
changes in spokespersonships, including feminist and queer leadership;
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;
reconsiderations of systemic violence, understandings which feminisms have expanded by exploring the meanings of war against certain bodies and territories;
explicit refusal to allow movements [that are not explicitly feminist] led by women as well as transfeminist movements to remain siloed by their “agendas” or disconnected from increasingly broad mobilizations;
changes in collective understanding (active and/or reactive) of gender-based violence as a structural expression of capitalist violence
In re-reading movement statements, texts, and events of this past decade, I’ve noticed the emergence of a new dynamic that is at once process-oriented and disruptive, and which seeks to constantly expand political alliances, processes of translation, and the resonances of organizational forms.
A woman holds a NI UNA MENOS banner in front of Argentina’s congress on June 3, 2024 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to honor women killed at the hands of macho and patriarchal violence. Photo © Susi Maresca.
III
From the pandemic to the electoral victories of the far right, we can see a sequence of counterrevolutionary twists and turns, that also display innovations, experiments, and new kinds of risk taking.
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 “essential,” 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.
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 is not a slur, but a gender identity with deep political roots.]
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.
These changes are key to understanding the pandemic as setting a new threshold for economic and financial violence, one which is is intertwined with an intensification of gender-based violence, and which has not relented since.
The pandemic and its (still present) ramifications amplifies the space of social reproduction 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. As if in an X-ray, the threads of our weavings were laid bare.
Based on the uses of the category of “essential work” 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.
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.
In Argentina, the figure of the “single-mother household” 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 rises to 60 percent.
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: a feminized household, burdened with debt, and unable to outsource reproductive tasks to the market.
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 “change of leadership” in family structure.
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 “crisis of despotism in the factory” 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.
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).
The financialization of everyday life, which became a way of navigating the crisis of reproduction in a pandemic, fuels a kind of civil war that unfolds in precarious territories alongside the rise and proletarianization of criminalized economies.
That brings us back to an organizational question. How can we rethink our strategies at a time when violence is a counterrevolutionary response to the politicization of social reproduction and to the destabilization of racist and patriarchal hierarchies?
International strike of Lesbian, Trans, Travesti, Trans, Bisexual, Intersex, Intersex and Non-Binary Women on March 8, 2024 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The sign reads: ‘we move the world, and we stop it too,’ Photo © Susi Maresca.
IV
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 attack. Argentina, together with Ecuador and El Salvador, is part of a fascist-influenced radicalization that has accelerated in the wake of Trump's victory.
Milei’s 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 “aberrant.” 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 march on February 1, where, among many slogans, was: “There are only two genders: fascists and anti-fascists.”
By “state-led anti-feminism” in the far-right government, I’m referring to three elements.
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.
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.
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 (attacks on queer people have multiplied).
State-led anti-feminism goes beyond the president’s opinions or the so-called “culture wars.” It is a type of attack that is organically linked to structural adjustment, in which the subjects of “sacrifice” are women, lesbians, travestis, trans men and women, adolescents, children, and the elderly.
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 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.
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.
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.
It’s absurd that some parts of the left and progressives cannot read this moment as counterrevolutionary. They limit themselves to speaking of “preventative” fascism (a fascism that contains the future impacts of current crisis), because they cannot see the revolution that is being responded to.
After cuts in gender and culture policies by Javier Milei's government, trans artists protest in front of Argentina’s National Congress on June 3, 2024 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photo © Susi Maresca.
V
It is no longer enough to speak of a “crisis of social reproduction” in order to explain the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism. We’ve witnessed a veritable war against social reproduction, of which the pandemic and the victories of the far right are both cause and symptom. These forms of war are exacerbated to produce what we might call, following Silvia Federici, the “fascistization of social reproduction.”
In Argentina, the crisis-war-fascistization sequence can be read as a counterrevolutionary response to forms of politicization of social reproduction that emerged in response to the crisis of legitimacy of neoliberalism in the early 2000s, as well as with the massive growth of the transfeminist movement.
We can speak of the fascistization of social reproduction in order to understand the simultaneous dynamic of impoverishment and exploitation of social reproduction, which leads to the emergence of modes of management using tools that accelerate financial violence.
Central to this is a war against populations that have woven alternative ways of addressing interdependence and set limits on violence in everyday life.
In order to talk about the fascistization of social reproduction, we must consider how anti-feminism has become a driving force in the intensification of exploitation and the extraction of value. This is linked to post-pandemic tensions contained in terms like “freedom” and “care.”
These contradictory dynamics have become entangled in the category of “essential work,” and are important to understanding the reconfigurations of labor struggles which have been raised by the feminist strike.
New levels of financialization of everyday life, as households acquire record levels of debt to cope with inflation and precariousness, have accelerated what Milei's government calls “financial freedom” for the dispossessed.
The organizational questions we must ask ourselves today arise within a horrific scenario: genocidal, racist, and patriarchal capitalism that have sought to capitalize on the experiences of a decade-long cycle feminist, popular and anti-extractive protests, which themselves are connected to other sequences of uprisings.
Asking these questions implies confronting the ways that transfeminist struggles have been blamed [for the current crisis], especially in their popular, anti-extractivist, and street-level expressions. It requires we understand how these struggles have been marginalized in geopolitical analyses which dismiss these movements and render them insignificant. It is up to us to rebuild our political programme and our organizing from a place of dignity with the radical presistance of life at its core.
It is up to us to continue weaving a concrete, antiracist antifascism that is proud of transfeminist struggles and that embraces their power, while also being aware of the limitations and failures which we carry on our shoulders.
