There are alternatives : informing epistemic diversity through empirical detail about women’s mobilizations in Argentina

• The 2nd decade of the 21st century has ended marked by citizens' mobilizations worldwide. The continued rise and span of these mobilizations challenges both the governments that citizens protest and the scholars seeking to study them (Vanden et al 2017). Attention has been given to the role of the digital in the make-up and outcomes of protests, and to political activists' uses of networked digital media during condensed moments of collective action to explain the rise and trajectories of social movements. Studies have focused on the presumed revolutionary character of discrete mass protest actions (e.g. Tahrir Square, Occupy Wall Street, Gezi Park, the Umbrella movement) and kept track of key activists' communicative practices. The properties of distinct social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) have been foregrounded from a media-centric perspective keen on the tactical effects of technology's presumed power to drive socio-political organizing (Treré, 2019). More specifically, women's mobilizations have been a topic of considerable interest for gender/feminist scholarship, but the study of their communicative dimensions in recent years remains limited to analytically isolated elements rather than framed as an issue of democratic rights: misrepresentation in the news and other forms of misrecognition, online activism, and violence experienced in social media. A recent host of studies around the hashtag #MeToo has overrepresented the digital West (Fotopolou, 2018) while eluding the communicative complexity, diversity and adaptive dynamism mobilized by women and LGBTQ+ communities in the democratic laboratory constituted by the Global South to demand justice. To counter the epistemic narrow-mindedness derived from this imbalance, this panel presentation looks a case of collective mobilization emblematic of citizen-driven technopolitical efforts under way in the Global South to fix gender inequality and other broken elements of democracy (Reguillo, 2017): the #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneLess) movement that emerged in Argentina in 2015 to challenge the state to address a spiral of violence against women, and the wider mobilization that followed from it. Since 2015, Argentinian women, who constitute 51,1% of the country's population but are disproportionally affected by gender-based inequalities (poverty, discrimination and violence), have protested this state of affairs with persistence and increasing strength in alliance with LGBTQ+ communities.Forms of protest have included recurrent country-wide collective mobilizations held on March 8 (International Women’s Day) and November 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), activist art, street and digital mobilizations to raise specific claims (e.g. the legislation of the right to abortion or the public denunciation of rape) and year-on-year record high participation in the National Women’s Meeting, held annually since 1986 but never massive until 2015. Four themes that have received scant attention from Western feminist scholarship, fixated as it is on the so-called #MeToo movement, emerge from the study of #NiUnaMenos and its aftermath: 1) the struggle for collectivity (rather than individuality), 2) the emphasis on agency (rather than victimhood), 3) the intertwined immersion in street and digital action; and 4) the emphasis on local particularities without disregarding global solidarity. These themes inform epistemic diversity in the study of women’s struggles for equality worldwide.Fotopoulou, A. (2014) “Digital and networked by default? Women’s organisations and the social imaginary of networked feminism”. New Media & Society. Vol. 18, Issue: 6, pages 989-1005.Reguillo, R. (2017) Insurrectional landscapes: Youth, networks and revolt in the civilizational autumn. Barcelona: NED Ediciones [Published in Spanish]Treré, E. (2019) Hybrid media activism: Ecologies, imaginaries, algorithms. Oxon: Routledge.Vanden, H., Funke, P., Prevost, G. (2017) The New Global Politics: Global Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

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