Popular feminism makes a show of force

(Opening photo: MAFIA Collective)

With slogans such as "Freedom for political prisoners", "Not one less - We love each other alive", "No to real estate businesses in public spaces", "For the right to housing" and "Popular environmentalism", feminist organizations, most of them belonging to the Frente de Todos (Evita Movement, La Cámpora, Barrios de Pie, Mala Junta, Soberana and other grassroots groups), call for a Popular Feminist Encounter on October 30 at the Malvinas Argentinas stadium.

"We feminists want to meet again to discuss what country we want," reads the Twitter bio that disseminates information about the event. The organizers complete in more characters: "We want to reflect on how we got out of the crisis and it is also an implementation of how popular feminism is thinking and discussing the distributive agenda and the agendas that have to do with sustaining life."

The call had been discussed in a low voice between militants from the neighborhoods and officials from the second and third lines of the Government, but it took shape after the electoral defeat and the cabinet changes, which confirmed a second part of the campaign with a gender agenda. almost absent and with zero women in decision-making spaces. "We Peronist feminists should meet publicly," they suggested on social networks.

The omission of feminist demands and achievements in official advertising -with the exception of the Registered program for employees of private homes and the Recognition of contributions for care tasks of ANSES-, the difficulties for women within the Government to advance with Their own demands and the growth of right-wing and far-right political forces generated an internal murmur that consolidated the need to make some kind of show of force inside and outside.

The meeting in the Malvinas Argentinas is planned as a way to "take the streets again", explain its organizers. The lack of presence dismantled many of the ties built in popular feminisms and weakened a movement accustomed to making itself felt in the mobilization. In fact, this October 19 marks the fifth anniversary of the first women's strike in Argentina, which popular feminists claim as "the first strike against the government of (Mauricio) Macri." For the same reason, those who identify with popular feminisms maintain that resistance to neoliberalism is at the heart of the women's, lesbian, transvestite and trans movement.

The parliamentary advisor and trans activist Paula Arraigada (the first trans national deputy candidate in 2019) works in the electoral campaign of the Frente de Todos, she is one of the organizers of the Popular Feminist Meeting and defines the call as "a necessity". “A long time passed without meeting a lot of compañeras with whom we passed in the streets and in the assemblies and it seems necessary to us to create a space where the demands of popular feminism are outlined and where the achievements that we have had in this time are rescued. ", Explain.

For Arraigada, the Malvinas Argentinas is not a campaign event for several reasons: because it is open to "comrades who do not belong to the Front of All", because it does not carry party emblems and "because, if it were a campaign activity, it would not we would not be marking what is missing or criticizing the management”. "Popular feminism has some demands that have not yet fully crystallized," she maintains.

The agenda that this government must deepen, which directly affects women and dissidence in popular neighborhoods, says Arraigada, has to do with poverty and the lack of formal work as priority axes. "We cannot not notice that, because we are part of the management, but also of that town and of that demand."

The numbers prove him right: seven out of ten people in the poorest segment of the Argentine population are women and 55% of their income comes from non-work sources (social programs, retirement, etc.). According to data from the National Registry of Workers of the Popular Economy (ReNaTEP), they represent 57.4% of those who work in this branch of the economy and, according to the National Registry of Popular Neighborhoods (ReNaBap), 63. 7% of dwellings have a woman as head of the household. In the case of transvestites and trans, the situation is even worse.

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The list of demands to be transferred to those who work in management, maintains the former deputy candidate, continues with the need to give an "effective and immediate response" to the trans job quota and, of a longer nature, the -at the time- widely publicized “feminist judicial reform”. To debate these issues and others that arise on October 30, the meeting will be divided into around 30 workshops and commissions, whose axes will revolve around education, work, care tasks, economy/redistribution/capital flight, health, violence, access to land to live and produce, popular environmentalism, militancy and political and trade union organization, human rights, anti-punitivist feminism, security, the right to migrate and anti-racism, among others.

In workshops on access to land, for example, women producers and farmers participate. Rosalía Pellegrini, from the Union of Land Workers (UTT), will lead the meeting in a discussion related to the construction of "a model of food sovereignty in which women producers can decide on production and in that decision the axis is agroecology, is to build a link with nature, with the territory, with the crops, that is not mercantilist or extractivist". For the UTT referent, peasant women and farmers are fundamental "in an increasingly degraded economy, without access to land or housing."

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Along the same lines as Arraigada, the leader of the Mala Junta in the Frente Patria Grande and candidate for Legislator for the City of Buenos Aires for the Frente de Todos, Victoria Freire, wrote in Profile, a few days after the electoral defeat of the ruling party: “To To move forward on this path, we need to go out and listen to needs, improve government management and promote popular participation. Multiply the networks of organization and accompaniment that we have been building all this time collectively. The Frente de Todxs is the political tool where different experiences and ways of thinking come together, it is the necessary unity to build a present with rights and social justice”. And it closed: “Our task as feminist activists is to go look for each of the people who did not vote for the Front of All due to disappointment or anger, listen to them and convince them that the expansion of rights and the guarantee that a better life is possible only organizing ourselves, strengthening a popular government and stopping the advance of the conservative sectors even if they call themselves liberal. It is not just about winning the elections, it is about being protagonists of our time and taking care that no one is saved alone.

"We have lost part of the agenda of popular feminism by being management," says Arraigada. That is why, also, the insistence on recovering the initiative and acting as a transmission belt between those who are active in the bases and those who occupy spaces in the Government. “If we do not transfer the demands of our people to those who are in management, we would not be fulfilling our role. The goal is that in 2023 our government wins again, ”she concludes.