A professor of political science based at the University of Buenos Aires, Verónica Gago is among the most respected feminist activists in the world today. Part of her achievement lies in blurring the boundaries between theory and action, writing and protest. She is as likely to be found at a university seminar as at a demonstration against gender-based violence held by the organization Ni Una Menos (“Not One Women Less”), a collective in which she actively participates.
“I am inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s idea that each strike has its own form of political thought and that our historical task is to theorize the strike that we have led,” Gago said, in the context of the seminal International Women’s Strike that Ni Una Menos helped organize in Buenos Aires in 2018, which was attended by over half a million people.
“I am inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s idea that each strike has its own form of political thought and that our historical task is to theorize the strike that we have led."
Born in 1976, Gago came of age in the 1990s, as Argentina went through catastrophic inflation, then massive privatization of public companies, and slashing of welfare—a crisis which in turn led to mass protests that toppled the government in 2001.
Her first book, Neoliberalism from Below (Duke University Press, 2017), attempts to make sense of how neoliberalism remained alive in Argentine society as an ideology, perhaps a mentality, even as post-crisis governments adopted developmentalist policies.
Gago analyzes this contradiction as it played out in La Salada, a 20-acre-large informal market on the outskirts of Buenos Aires where neoliberalism is both enacted and resisted, with communitarian practices like mutual aid and barter coexisting with brutal self-exploitation. Her argument breaks, on the one hand, from leftist scholars who see the informal sector solely in terms of deprivation—an absence of workplace protections, labor unions, government subsides, much else—and, on the other, from the likes of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who romanticize it as a paradise of grassroots entrepreneurship.
Part of what attracted Gago to La Salada was its character as a “feminized” economy, largely run by those—women, youth, and migrants—who were historically denied access to waged labor. In this sense, traditional gender roles were reversed in the market: men—many having lost their jobs during the crisis—retreated into the home, while women emerged from the domestic sphere to run textile shops and food stalls.
This social transformation comes to the fore in Gago’s second book, Feminist International (Verso, 2020). A work of political analysis and self-reflection, it was written “from within” the massive feminist mobilizations that swept Latin America from 2017 onwards. Gago presents the seemingly inexorable rise of gendered violence across the continent as a conservative backlash, led by disenfranchised men, against the appearance of women in the workplace, specifically in the informal sector, as in the maquiladoras in Ciudad Juárez and other towns along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Ciudad Juárez functions as a sort of laboratory, anticipating how a certain labor and migrant energy of women expresses a political dynamism to escape from domestic confinement, of which transnational capital takes advantage,” she writes. “It is a desire for escape that the capitalist machine exploits, using the yearning for popular prosperity as fuel in order to translate it into dispossessive forms of labor, consumption, and debt—at its peak, becoming the femicidal machine.” (The term femicide refers to crimes motivated by the victim’s identity as a woman.)
Gago continued her investigation of how economic forces shape gender dynamics in her third and latest book, A Feminist Reading of Debt (Pluto Press, 2021), co-written with Lucí Cavallero. It offers a novel theorization of how debt disproportionally affects women, who face both rising costs of living as well as increased gendered violence, perpetuated by men who feel adrift in an economy that no longer has a place for them. Counterintuitively, Gago and Cavallero also argue against forms of “finance inclusion” practiced in the name of easing private debt by the Argentine government, which provides welfare recipients with debit cards, against which they are allowed to take loans.
“Ninety-two percent of the existing beneficiaries of the Universal Child Allowance requested (and received) loans,” they note. “That process of going into debt demonstrates how inflation, which affects the prices of food, medication, gas, electricity, and water, has created a situation in which social assistance primarily functions as a guarantee in order to take out more debt instead of as an income to cover basic needs.”
At a time when struggles for social justice around the world can seem disconnected, it is bracing that Gago stresses the “already-existing internationalism” of the feminist movement. By this term, she refers to horizontal alliances forged among women combating gender violence in particular contexts as part of different organizations.
“It is an internationalism that requires alliances in every possible place: with strawberry-picking day laborers, Moroccan women working during harvest times in Andalusia, and the peasant unions and activist collectives of the towns and cities; between women laid off from textile factories and students fighting against education cuts; between Indigenous women in rebellion and community organizers in each neighborhood of the urban peripheries” she writes.
Crucially, this is a model of grassroots solidarity that bypasses “a centralized structure or a party organization coordinating everything from some commanding height.” It acknowledges the differences between struggles—Indigenous women fighting a mining project are not in the same position as urban academics opposing sexual harassment on campus—while stressing what they have in common.
She focuses on how the patriarchal-financial apparatuses renew the colonial pact in the present, combining it with forms of domination and exploitation. In her argument, the patriarchal-financial apparatuses are revealed to be fundamental for understanding the counterinsurgent dimension of the war against women and feminized bodies. This requires that feminism be international too.
“The movement’s ubiquity is its true strength,” she writes. “It is that feeling when we shout, ‘We are everywhere!’”
“It is that feeling when we shout, ‘We are everywhere!’”
By Ratik Asokan, February 21, 2024