Theorizing Collective Emotional Energy in Racialized Social Movements

• In Event: Black Women's Politics in the Americas: Emotions/Intellectual, Motherhood and Struggles for Territory.

Abstract

Thirty years after Argentina’s “Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres” (National Women’s Meeting), and not for lack of trying, black women finally were granted a space to hold a workshop dedicated to their intersectional issues. At the 32nd National Women’s Meeting, held in the province of Chaco in October 2017, an Afro-Argentine woman from Córdoba shared through joyful tears, “I never imagined I’d find a space where I’d be among so many black women.” “Neither did we. It gives me hope,” responded life-long Afro-Guaraní activist Gladys Flores. While this exchange illustrates an emerging black feminist mobilization in Argentina’s feminist and black movements, Gladys’ response encapsulates a pandora’s box of the affective and emotional domains of black women’s activism. How can we understand the thirty plus years of invisibilized resistance and activism of Gladys and her contemporaries at a collective level? Why now are black women participating in Argentina’s feminist and black movements at rapidly increasing rates? In this paper I examine the processes through which affective and emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in racialized social movements utilizing and expanding the concept of collective emotional energy levels (Summers-Effler 2002). Furthermore, I engage with Black Brazilian feminist Vilma Piedade’s (2017) concept of “dororidade” to illuminate why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to black women’s participation in Argentina’s feminist and black social movements.

Author

• Prisca Gayles, University of Texas/Williams College