e-flux Conversations has been closed to new contributions and will remain online as an archive. Check out our new platform for short-form writing, e-flux Notes.

e-flux conversations

"We are in the middle of a new historic feminist wave"

The US-based socialist magazine Viewpoint has released a dossier of articles about recent feminist organizing around the world. Entitled “New Dispatches from the Feminist International,” the dossier includes article from Chile, France, Mexico and elsewhere that examine both the specific local character and transnational resonances of major feminist protest actions that took place earlier this year. The dossier was compiled and edited by philosopher and feminist activist Cinzia Arruzza, who writes in her introduction to the dossier that “we are now in the middle of a new historic feminist wave.” Here’s an excerpt from the intro:

With six million people on strike in Spain, general strikes or work stoppages called by labor organizations in Italy, Argentina, and Chile, mass demonstrations in a number of countries including Turkey and Mexico, and a significant growth of mobilizations in the UK, Belgium, and Germany, this March 8 has demonstrated the expansive dynamic of the new feminist movement. This expansion should be understood through two aspects. One is what Argentine and other Latin American feminist movements have called “transversality”: namely the movement’s ability to spread across society, permeating pre-existing organizations and current struggles, and acting as a catalyst for their unification under an anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist feminist banner. Transversality can also be understood as the process of universalizing the feminist movement, which, beginning from a specific standpoint (that of gender and sexual oppression and of the identities that these generate) articulates a politics of liberation for everybody, or – to quote the slogan of the feminist strike in Spain – a politics that aims to “change everything.” The second aspect is the transnational dissemination of the movement, which this year saw calls for feminist strikes in new countries such as Germany and Belgium, and further spread across Asia and the Middle East.

Image: Spanish students protest on International Women’s Day, March 08, 2019. Via Jacobin.