A Power in Feminine: Women and Queer Subjects Transforming The Political Economy of Precarity and Violence into Life-Making – NiUnaMenos and the #FeministTide

Panel: Decolonial, Feminist and Queer Perspectives for Authoritarian Times: World Making as Politics The concept of precarity grew in salience dramatically in the wake of the global pandemic, and no less in the current era of accelerated globalised wealth extraction. Offering a critique and expansion of dominant precarity discourse (Standing, 2015; Butler, 2004), theorists Silvia Federici (2019) and Isabell Lorey (2015) generate incisive analysis of the political economy of precarity through a gendered lens. They illuminate how the burden of reproductive labour crucially troubles the overall position of women in the labour market. Indeed, neoliberal austerity intensifies this ‘shadow work,’ as both governments and employers off-load their responsibilities for the health and welfare of the workforce (Harcourt, 2009). Importantly, Ritu Vij (2019) conducts a critique of precarity from a global South standpoint, rejecting the presumption of a universalised-Western subject of precarity that marks the work of Standing and Butler. This paper foregrounds political subjects in the global South in the influential social movement #NiUnaMenos and the larger #FeministTide in which it flows, who are defying the ‘special’ devalued position of precarity which capitalism designates to their labour, by successfully reinventing the tool of the Strike to include all forms of labour. These movement protagonists achieved this by animating a constellation of pedagogies and resistance repertoires that politicise the work of reproduction and turn politics into cultures of affective care and aesthetic creativity. The creative artforms centre play and the moving body: dancing, music, theatricality in the streets, and have in no small part sustained the movement through a lifespan of over 10 years, revealing the potency of a collective politics of the self-determining body to enable protagonists to “feel the change you want to see in the world.” These practices and pedagogies are newly resurgent after a fraught period of entry into and exit from the State, and operate as life-making and world-making knowledges-in-praxis in a globally significant context.