Tags
activism, affect, body-territory, feminism, feminist international, Gago, gender-equality, philosophy, women
Verónica Gago spoke at Duke’s feminist theory workshop two years ago (2021), but I’ve only just now scraped away the clutter of life and loss to get to her book, Feminist International: How to Change Everything (Verso, 2020; Spanish original, 2019). This book is fantastic. Gago writes with an urgency and anger born from her labor and experiences within the feminist movement in Argentina and in Latin America, generally. The book’s success lies in how Gago makes tangibly incontrovertible the obvious fact—which is nevertheless persistently buried or denied—that the waged labor of social production would come to a standstill without the ongoing unpaid labor of social reproduction. The power and threat of the feminist international is the refusal of “women, lesbians, travesties, and trans people” to inhabit the position of victim, instead of conjoining mourning with “transversal” actions that articulate multiple non-homogeneous solidarities between types of labor, modalities of struggles, and variations of lived oppression. The upshot is an account of how the feminist international reconceptualizes and differently practices the notion of “class” from below, and leverages these differences into on-the-street actions through the intense process of assemblies where grievances are aired, solidarities formed, and differences acknowledged without attempts to flatten or “sublate” them.
I learned so much from this book. Her most devastating lesson for me (because I didn’t know about it at all) revolves around the collusion between South American states and financial institutions in responding to early 21st century economic hardship. State “support” was delivered through phone apps that required a link to a bank account, thus mandating financial entanglements and practically guaranteeing debt incursion in households that were already unemployed, under-employed, or otherwise economically precarious. The sinister nature of this “aide” becomes clear when Gago delineates how many persons and families have come to borrow money through these apps to pay for basic daily sustenance (food, rent, utilities). Thus the offer of “help” from the state becomes the means by which the poor are lassoed into the relentless dynamics of neoliberalism: debt, self-blame, and the need to take on any labor whatsoever (in whatever conditions and for whatever wage) in order to make good on the monthly debt obligations.
Another incredible lesson from Gago is that of body-territory. This concept reconfigures the logic of possessive individualism without ceding the clear importance of “body” for women who seek to live without sexual assault, rape, and obstacles to freely available abortion. The body-territory is what Gago terms an “idea-force”:
“The notion ties together a perspective that explains how the exploitation of territories is structured in a neo-extractive mode today, and how that also reconfigures labor exploitation, mapping the ways the dispossession of the commons affects everyday life.” This idea-force sees bodies experienced as territories, and territories experienced as bodies. It insists that the financial and extractive logics of neoliberalism are violations of each person’s body and the collective body through dispossession.
Feminist International, 85.
This idea-force makes tangible how
“it is impossible to cut apart and isolate the individual body from the collective body, the human body from the territory and landscape. ‘Body-territory’ compacted as a single word, de-liberalizes the notion of the body as individual property and specifies a political, productive, and epistemological continuity of the body as territory. The body is thus revealed as a composition of affects, resources, and possibilities that are not ‘individual’ but are made unique because they pass through the body of each person to the extent that no body is ever only ‘one,’ but always with others, and also with other nonhuman forces” (86).
Feminist International 86
Religion does make an appearance in the book, mostly as the negative presence of the Roman Catholic church, which wastes its time and intellectual energy fighting against “gender ideology” instead of using its considerable institutional power to lobby for economic relief. (In this, Gago makes it clear that neoliberalism now requires reactionary, conservative politics to protect its policies.)
But Gago also dares a small venture into Foucault’s notion of “political spirituality,” a concept she notes arose after Foucault re-read Bloch’s The Principle of Hope in the summer just before the 1978 rumblings of the Iranian Revolution. In some of the most beautiful words of her book, Gago writes:
“For feminism, it is a political spirituality precisely because it does not separate the body from the spirit, nor flesh from fantasies, nor skin from ideas. There is a mystical dimension to feminism (as a multifaceted movement). It words from affects and passions. It opens the thorny field of desire, of relationships of love, of erotic swarms, of ritual and celebration, of longings beyond their sanctioned borders. Feminism, unlike other politics that are considered leftist, does not deprive bodies of their indeterminacy, of their not-knowing, of their embodied dreaming, of their dark potencia. And therefore, it operates on the field of the pliable, the fragile, what at the same time mobilizing the plane of spirituality.”
Feminist International, 222.
Gago offers so much in this text. By her conclusion, which summarizes the essential links of her argument in eight points, she has demonstrated the narrowness of unionized waged labor, broadened notions of “class,” “assembly,” and “strike” to inhere hard-won solidarities between race, gender, sexuality, and modalities of economic precarity, and visibilized the brutal, material connections between the machinations of abstract financialization, local resource extraction, and the painful lives of millions of persons who are forced into the violence and unfreedom of endless debt and bare life.