Evento

Through the post-colonial feminist scholars like Chandra Mohanty and others, the discussion regarding the intersectionalities in defining the identity of women in the global south and politics of equivalence came to the fore front, and also highlighted the sweeping character of the postcolonial non-feminist theories. In South Asia, Muslim women have always been found to be caught between political considerations and personal marginalisations. The politics of piety in the subcontinent has been a subject of constant suffering to the Muslim women’s ‘being’ and ‘existence’. In Afghanistan and Iran, women and other feminist groups have been voicing the dissent against the state forces instrumenting a strong control over Muslim women’s bodies through mandatory veiling and other women related legislations. Women’s bodies in particular have become the site of symbolic confrontations between a re-essentialized understanding of religious and cultural difference and the force of state power, whether in the civic-republican or in liberal-democratic form.
In India, there is a political domination for the Muslim women that takes the form of consent to a constructed ‘gendered common sense’, which is constructed precisely by the burgeoning of discourses that naturalise and normalise the existing order. 
The Muslim women’s identities and bodies have been othered to the advantage of politics, ‘republican motherhood’, sexual metaphors, and everyday governmentality. Unlike Muslim women in the other parts of South Asia, there has been limited instances of Muslim women’s mobilisation in post-colonial India. One such mobilisation was observed during Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Divorce Bill, 1986. This dealt with the legal identity of Muslim women and therefore most women associated with the movement were either educated or were urban middle class. But, in the last three years there has been a significant shift in the strategic essentialism in the Muslim women’s politics in India, by eroding the categorisation of silent subaltern.
In December 2019, the government of India passed amendments in the citizenship acts which were not non-compliant with the constitutional principles and were also intersecting with the fundamental rights of Muslims. The protests, which culminated as a response to these legislations have been proved to be watershed in the Muslim Feminism in India and through these protests Muslim women contributed to the 'overlapping consensuses’ with men in general and Muslim men in particular. In the similar discourse, in February 2022, one of the state government in Southern India issued a circular, restricting wearing of a Hijab in the educational institutions. A number of woman students challenged this order before the High Court of the state. Later a bench of three judges of the High Court ruled that wearing a hijab is not an essential practice under Islam. The court prioritised ‘uniformity in the uniforms’ vis-à-vis the right to education for Muslim girls while at the same time penalising girls for their choices of attire. The Muslim women here, caught between performative patriarchy on one hand and masculinist-imperialist ideology on the other, chose to resort to the strategic essentialist symbol of ‘Hijab’ as their assertion of their identity. The paper examines the cases of how Muslim women’s bodies respond to the patriarchal-masculine state through the framework of gender bargain using ‘Hijab’ as a symbol of resistance, and agency - as against reducing it just as the instrument of piety. It also presents the revision of Fraserian debate of subaltern-counterpublics through the case of Muslim women in India under the superstructures of nationalism and majoritarianism. It also analyses how politics of power and piety, which has been used as the argument for the invisibility of women from public spheres, can become a tool for them to bargain their space and citizenship rights, overcoming the intersectional layers of religion and gender in the postcolonial societies.

Multiple scholars have engaged with violence in Mexico after the so-called War on Drugs, as part of endemic/cultural corruption, failed state or even stateless geographies. In contrast, this project focuses on what violence does, connecting the overt forms of violence exerted on suffering physical bodies with larger political economic systems; i.e., structural violence.
Previous and current administrations in Mexico have supported the construction of mega energy infrastructure Comprehensive Morelos Project (Proyecto Integral Morelos [PIM] in Spanish) since 2012. (PIM) is a megaproject, part of Mexico’s ‘sovereign energy transition,’ but detractors have called it a ‘Death Project’ for endangering individual and collective lives in Central Mexico. In this process, indigenous and peasant opponents in Central Mexico have documented and denounced multiple (para)state sanctioned violent events against them, from incarceration and torture to assassination. Although mostly the direct targets of violence are men, I follow the political ecology theorists that highlight the collective and more-than-human suffering that results from this violence, and the feminist economy perspective that centers the material and emotional labor that allows for the continuity of life. By attending to caring practices women perform during and after these episodes of violence and how they require and promote collective action and organization, I argue that they effectively counteract the neo-colonial extractivist logics of energy megaprojects that seek to destroy their territories.
In this paper, I focus on the experiences of the women in Morelos and Puebla who have responded to state violence against their partners and comrades since 2014. Methodologically, I use archival and ethnographic research: public statements, legal process, and journal coverage; as well as interviews and participant observation. This research draws on a militant ethnography I have conducted since 2012 with men and women organized against PIM in the region. This paper relies on a feminist perspective of social reproduction and violence to engage with the relationship between energy infrastructure as ‘Projects of Death’ and the quotidian practices that sustain life and allow for its reproduction.

Over the past decade, multiple trajectories of feminist thought and praxis have converged in a historical moment characterised by massiveness, radicality, heterogeneity and transnationalism, and that sinks its roots in Latin America. As a contested space, Latin American cities have “been taken over by women’s bodies and, at the same time, women’s bodies have become spaces of struggles, creating urban landscapes that Latin American geographical sciences have had to negotiate, especially with younger generations” (Silva, Ornat & Mason-Deese, 2020 p. 270). Meanwhile, urban activism has expanded in Latin America, including a cycling activist movement that has configured a trans-local space of exchange and circulation of discourses, knowledges, and practices about urban mobility. This paper explores the meeting of feminist and cycling activisms and discusses a resulting double movement: on one hand, a critique of the patriarchal order of the city as lived in and through mobility; on the other, a challenge to the hegemonic discourses and practices of cycling activism. In the words of feminist cycling activists: “how can we demand more equitable cities if we reproduce within our organisations the same violence we experience on the streets?” The paper is guided by the question “what challenges and possibilities do feminist politics present to cycling activism?” and it emphasises two modes of intervention: the production of feminist-cyclist spatialities and the processes of gendering cycling. The paper also engages two strategies to repoliticise cycling activism towards just and inclusive mobilities: cultivating political transversality and generating conditions of possibility through mapping violences.

In the presentation, I will reflect on the experiences of young women participating in massive
feminist mobilizations in Argentina. In the context of the Ni Una Menos movement that emerged in 2015, and the great victory of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion, preceded by years of grassroots activism, I analyze what role this intensive time has played in young women’s everyday lives. In particular, I look at spaces of care and resistance by exploring the following questions:
● How the participation in street protests, and in a wider sense in the feminist grassroots
organizing, impacted the perception of urban spaces and the women’s right to the
city?
● How girls and young women active in the feminist movements in Argentina have
been redefining and reclaiming the concepts of care and safety?
● What are the spaces of care and resistance present in girls' and young women’s
everyday lives?
In my research, I attempt to conceptualize care as a political concept that resists gender-based violence and contributes to social change. As Tronto (2013) argues, care has a democratic potential to transform unequal and unjust societies under conditions of shared responsibilities and reciprocity. In the context of gender-based inequalities, the concept of democratic care does not aim to widen the scope of women’s caring obligation – from children, family, and customers to all other women. Care could be used as a strategy for undermining the patriarchal social structure. It could provide support to women experiencing gender-based violence in the context of withdrawn state and privatized public services, which deprive many women of the resources needed to receive support.
The massive feminist mobilizations in Argentina put at the forefront struggles for justice and the elimination of all forms of gender-based violence. Events such as street protests, interventions in public spaces, and massive assemblies became spaces of resistance (Gago 2020). These spaces were created and occupied by a significantly big number of girls and young women and consequently impacted their everyday lives (Acevedo and Bosio 2019). My presentation is based on sixteen months of fieldwork in Córdoba, the second biggest city in Argentina. I spent six months in total in 2017 and 2018 on ethnographic work with local feminist initiatives and one non-governmental organization, and ten months in 2022 on the continuation of the ethnographic work and conducting in-depth individual interviews and focus group interviews. The presentation is a result of a preliminary analysis of qualitative interviews with 29 young women (below 30 years old) that focuses on their experiences of
massive mobilizations for women’s rights in Argentina in the past seven years. In addition, I explore how these experiences of feminist activism impacted the everyday care practices and perception of safety in urban settings. The research contributes to the wider debate on what role feminist mobilizations for justice, reproductive rights, and the elimination of gender-based violence plays for young women. As a researcher actively engaged in the feminist movement in my country of origin, Poland, I have witnessed the extreme backlash again women’s rights in the past eight years. A few weeks after the restriction of abortion law in Poland in October 2020, the Argentinian feminist movement won the struggle for legal, safe, and free abortion. Young women in Poland were protesting on the streets against the right-wing government taking away their basic reproductive rights and many Polish feminist initiatives started to follow the strategies of the Argentinian campaign for legalisation of abortion. These massive political mobilizations do impact the everyday lives of girls and women. That is why I found it important to research, document, and exchange the experiences of various feminist mobilizations and strategies of resistance in order to create international alliances.