A leader of Latin America’s powerful new women’s movement rethinks the meaning of feminist politics
Recent years have seen massive feminist mobilisations in virtually every continent, overturning social mores and repressive legislation. As women filled the streets of Argentina and Madrid, of Italy and Poland, they’ve transformed the meaning of radical politics and the grammar of various struggles.
In this brilliant and kaleidoscopic look at the emerging feminist international, Verónica Gago uses the women’s strike as both a concept and a collective experience. At once a gripping political analysis and a theoretically charged manifesto, Feminist International draws on the author’s rich experience with radical movements to enter into ongoing debates in feminist and Marxist theory: from social reproduction and domestic work to the intertwining of financial and gender violence, as well as controversies surrounding the neo-extractivist model of development, the possibilities and limits of left populism, and the ever-vexed nexus of gender-race-class.
Gago’s feminism is a powerful call to abandon the rhetoric of victimisation, and to instead mount a frontal challenge to both neo-liberal rule and the conservative counteroffensive. Feminist International asks what another theory of power might look like, one premised on our desire to change everything.
Verónica Gago is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and a professor at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales (IDAES), Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She was part of Colectivo Situaciones, a militant collective actively engaging with social and political movements in Argentina, which deeply influences her work. Gago has published numerous articles on issues of capital, social movements, and popular economies. Her book Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (2017) examines how Latin American neoliberalism is propelled not only by corporate and state institutions but also by popular and migrant economies that assume neoliberalism as a battlefield.
