Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice

#BeatThePot: Strategies and Discourses of Women’s Protests in Zimbabwe

Rejoice Chipuriro — 2023-12-20

This paper focuses on strategies deployed by women and discourses of women’s collective action in the #BeatThePot strike which took place alongside popular protests against Mugabe and the failures of ZANU-PF led government in Zimbabwe. Using Judith Butler’s ideas on “bodies in alliance and the politics of the street,” I theorize how women as gendered “bodies congregate, move, speak and strike together as they claim public space into political spaces” (2015, 70). I interrogate women’s use of embodiment as a strategy involving the metaphor of both the “labouring mothering body” and as “bodies that strike,” which demonstrates how women in Zimbabwe confronted violent political, economic, and socio-cultural limits imposed on their bodies. In this strike, women challenged the silencing of women’s public political work and refused to be relegated to the invisible margins of domesticized and undervalued reproductive labour. Thus, through the #BeatThePot protest, I demonstrate how women in Zimbabwe have engaged in body work to a confront violent regime and how they have borne on their bodies violent reprisal through sexual attacks, abductions, incarcerations, torture, and even loss of life. The paper concludes that the feminized body is a site of violent struggle for autonomy and that through collective action women in Zimbabwe have sought to confront and transform the repressive state.

Odzyskać Noc.: Feminist Protests against Gender-Based Violence in Poland in the Late 1990s and Early 2000s

Barbara Dynda — 2023-12-20

The article analyzes the Polish anarcho-feminist idea of protest against gender-based violence during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Examining the oral history interviews with activists and grassroots cultural productions dating from the period of political transformation, such as zines, leaflets, and graphic images, the article focuses on various strategies and concepts of a feminist strike. These different historical sources emphasize multiple inspirations for the protest strategies employed by the analyzed collectives, including the tradition of women’s strikes during the socialist era, youth demonstrations of the 1960s, and Anglo-American feminism. They also enable revisiting the emotional dynamics and meanings of violence that emerged from the anarcho-feminist archival materials and memories of individual activists.

The Poetics and Politics of Interruption in the 2020-21 Belarus Uprising

Olia Sosnovskaya — 2023-12-20

The paper addresses the notions of interruption and exhaustion in relation to the 2020–21 anti-governmental uprising in Belarus. It examines various forms of protesting, such as marches, neighbourhood gatherings and strikes from a feminist perspective. It focuses on the dynamics of visibility and opacity, social reproduction and politicization of mundane gestures, and on questioning the notion of revolutionary event and its temporalities.

Unveiling Feminist Strike: The Case of "Woman, Life, Freedom" in Iran

Shirin Assa — 2023-12-20

In the wake of the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a powerful image emerged: women in Iran defiantly casting aside their hijabs and rallying under the slogan of “Woman, Life, Freedom.” This paper explores and reflects upon what I call following Verónica Gago, a feminist strike in Iran that organizes disorderly and cross-sectoral withdrawals of women from structures that exploit and assault them and restores their bargaining power and agency. Through the analytical perspective of intersectionality, this paper inquires into how the political underpinnings of the gendered apparatus in the Islamic regime of Iran have propelled the imagination of a common body among the diverse array of women. Further, it scrutinizes how the #WomanLifeFreedom uprising unveils a feminist strike and what it entails. This paper aims to show how the feminist strike in Iran expands the notion of strike as a tool against the conditions of work and showcases its all-encompassing basis against living conditions and restrictions on freedom.

“Derailing the Status quo.” A Conversation with Marwa Arsanios about Who’s Afraid of Ideology?

Judith Naeff — 2023-12-20

"It Felt like Strike Was in the Air at the Beginning of the Invasion." A Conversation with Sasha Talaver (Feminist Antiwar Resistance)

Ksenia Robbe — 2023-12-20

Formations of Feminist Strike: Connecting Diverse Practices, Contexts, and Geographies

Senka Neuman Stanivukovic — 2023-12-20

This introduction to the special issue on Feminist Strike takes up the question of what remains marginalized and overlooked within dominant discourses on contemporary feminist protests. Drawing on experiences of and approaches to feminist refusal that involve questions of labour, we propose the ways in which conceptualizations of feminist strike can be employed as a lens to build a conversation between different practices, scales, and geographies, particularly across postcolonial and postsocialist contexts. Through a reading of Aliki Saragas’s film Strike a Rock (2017) about the women living around the Marikana miners’ settlement in the aftermath of a major strike, we explore how notions of feminist strike can be expanded by situating Black women’s struggles in South Africa within a long tradition of women’s resistance and showing how political resistance is bound to questions of reproductive work. To understand the intersection of postsocialist, post-conflict, and (pre-)Europeanization transformations, we consider the case of a large-scale strike and public demonstrations against the bankruptcy of the Croatian shipyard Uljanik that took place in 2018 and 2019. Our perspectives on the Marikana and the Uljanik strikes show how women in both places practise a politics of refusal and resistance against ruination, violence, and defeat. In the last section, we summarize the contents of the articles that comprise the special issue.

The Politics of "Pombilai Orumai": The 2015 Kanan Devan Strike in Kerala, India

Anagha S. — 2023-12-20

Colonial hegemony was retained in the South Indian plantations of Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Limited, where the workers belonged to marginalized classes. The landless employees were given housing facilities, and this compelled them to remain there for generations despite poor wages. These uneducated and geographically secluded people found it difficult to come out of the plantation labyrinth, and the labour acts or land legislation acts were not much help. In 2015, around 5,000 women workers called “Pombilai Orumai” led a successful strike for a wage increase. The most remarkable aspect of this was the disassociation with political parties and trade unions and the solidarity of women workers despite all odds.

Feminist Strike: Liberia

Pamela Scully — 2023-12-20

This paper examines the notion of feminist strike in reference to women peacemakers in Liberia. It argues that women's actions to bring an end to the war both instantiates normative notions of the feminist strike and expands them. Drawing on literature which points to a long history of Liberian women organizing as women with special roles and responsibilities in society, the paper invites us to adopt a broad understanding of the feminist strike. It also suggests that women's mobilization around the concept of a sex strike to force the end of war in the early 2000s, was a powerful and savvy move which criticised sexual violence in wartime, leveraged international attention, and also highlighted, if implicitly, the issue of sexual rights in marriage.

The Shaheen Bagh Strike: Muslim Women and Political Protest in Contemporary India

Moumita Biswas — 2023-12-20

The Shaheen Bagh protest in New Delhi highlighted the changing dynamics of Muslim women’s participation in socio-political movements in India. This paper argues how Muslim women proved themselves to be concerned citizens while protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) and other forms of social discrimination. The paper analyses the Shaheen Bagh protest from an intersectional perspective to understand how Muslim women voiced their political opinions negotiating with gender and religion-based discrimination; they had to fight the multiple forms of patriarchy of Indian society while protesting against hypermasculine Hindutva politics. The Shaheen Bagh protest can be called a feminist strike of Third World women for the rights of their religious community in a particular socio-political context.

From Italy with Rage: Feminists Striking in Uncertain Times

Lidia Salvatori — 2023-12-20

In this contribution, I reflect on the significance of the Paro Internacional de Mujeres (International Women’s Strike) for contemporary Italian feminism. I draw from autoethnographic research within the feminist movement Non Una di Meno (Not One Less) to explore how the organization of the strike on March 8, 2017, contributed to the development of the movement's theorization and mobilization strategies. In this piece, I illustrate how digital connectivity had a central role in facilitating the expression of solidarity and processes of exchange and ‘contamination’ (Salvatori 2021) between movements across borders. I describe how the sharing of materials, slogans, hashtags, and songs centred on similar claims contributed to the construction of a transnational political subject. Through the strike, feminists analyzed and denounced how economic and patriarchal violence play out in the context of Italy, while highlighting the systemic and non-exceptional character of these forces within neoliberal societies more broadly.