Feminist Breaking Points: Intersectional Pathways to Mobilization in Latin America

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Intersectional Activism

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze micro-level mobilization processes to understand how diverse individuals—across age, class, and gender identities—came to participate in “The Feminist Tide,” a decade of massive protest, media debate, policy change, and cultural transformation so sudden that some observers refer to it not just as a “tide” but as a “tsunami” in Latin America. While the movement may not have received much attention in North America, it has deeply impacted South and Central America, where demonstrations like “Ni una menos” (Not one woman less) have demanded an end to feminicide impunity, legal reforms for reproductive rights, and challenges to patriarchal labor division, the oppression of non-binary and transgender people, and the neocolonial treatment of Indigenous and Black people. My data includes 66 life-history interviews with cisgender women, transgender, and non-binary individuals aged 20 and older in Uruguay, one of the earliest and most active sites of the “Feminist Tide.” Rather than focusing on movement leaders, I examine the experiences of ordinary people, who make up the majority of the movement and whom the leaders seek to draw. I find that one reason the movement mobilized individuals with different gender identities, ages, and socioeconomic backgrounds is that it offered a reading of gender violence connecting its most extreme form, feminicides, with its most mundane forms, known as “micro-machismos.” While these experiences were widely shared, the movement that made them salient as a common experience related to gender, providing a framework for understanding them as part of a systemic problem that could and needed to be addressed. This research contributes to our understanding of intersectional mobilization by examining how a successful feminist movement has managed to mobilize individuals across diverse populations, a historical challenge for social movements, particularly in an era of identity-based politics.

Author

• Inés Martínez Echagüe, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill