The Transversal Spirit of the Feminist Strike

Amy Reed-Sandoval considers feminist anti-fascism in the writings of Verónica Gago.

By Amy Reed-SandovalMarch 20, 2025

• Politics

ON A COOL, misty afternoon in June 2024, a distinguished panel convened at the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in Bogotá, Colombia, to analyze the rise of the “nueva extrema derecha,” or the new far right, in Latin America—a political shift evinced by the ascent to high power of male, anti-feminist, authoritarian presidents such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Among the panelists was Argentinian feminist author, scholar, and activist Verónica Gago, whose presentation to the large, packed room in the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana focused, at least at first, on the anti-feminist threats posed by Miliei.

Gago argued that Milei’s rise must certainly be situated within the broader right-wing turn occurring in certain Latin American countries and across the globe. But it is also unique in many respects, she said, given Milei’s ardent libertarianism and his almost unparalleled admiration (among Latin American political leaders at least) for the governments of the United States and Israel and for businessman and provocateur Elon Musk. These features of Milei’s performative politics can be contrasted with, say, Bukele’s participation in left-wing social movements in El Salvador before he shifted to embrace right-wing authoritarianism. This diversity among right-wing powers presents an immediate challenge for feminists like Gago, who want to promote pan–Latin American and international feminist solidarity while attending to the divergent social conditions in which the world’s feminists and anti-fascists work.

Gago, a seasoned feminist activist and established academic, is exceptionally well suited for this task. She is a professor at both the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín, where she teaches courses in critical theory and gender studies. Gago is also an active member of the Ni Una Menos (“Not One Women Less”) collective, which began mobilizing against gendered violence in 2015 following the brutal femicide of a 16-year-old Argentinian girl, Lucía Pérez, and which has since gained widespread traction throughout Latin America. Gago’s published works—including her solo-authored Feminist International: How to Change Everything (2019; English translation by Liz Mason-Deese, 2020) and A Feminist Reading of Debt (2021; also translated by Liz Mason-Deese, 2021), which she co-authored with Lucí Cavallero, a fellow Ni Una Menos activist and University of Buenos Aires professor—forge transborder feminist alliances while drawing lessons from hard-fought feminist battles in Argentina.

Reading Gago from the United States, where I live (and where feminist morale is at a palpable low due to a fascist onslaught of our very own), I detect embers, even flames, of actual hope emanating from Gago’s writings, despite their theoretical density and the moral weight of her topics. Gago sometimes likens feminist work to a nourishing, communal witch’s cauldron, and her own boiling pot warms those of us outside Argentina’s borders. Indeed, Gago’s work is as much an abstract philosophical argument as it is a warm invitation to take action. In Feminist International, her assessment of global feminism is grandiose: “The current feminist movement is at once massive and radical,” she writes, arguing that it “achieves this rare conjunction because it builds bridges between very different struggles and, in this way, invents and cultivates a mode of political transversality.”

“Transversality” is a key notion in Gago’s work. At its core, it is an all-compassing energy that Gago calls feminist “potencia”—both a power and a force. This potencia emerges from within each of us as we engage in feminist struggles and yearn for political change. Our individual potencias actually become transversal, Gago explains, when we purposefully weave our own struggles with those of vulnerable others, crossing the borders that divide us and invade our “body-territories.”

Gago borrows the notion of body-territory from Central American Indigenous feminists who are waging anti-extractivist campaigns against Global North companies that ravage their lands without community consent. Still, she leaves the term underdefined, as if encouraging us to interpret it ourselves. I first read it negatively: as a recognition that patriarchy wants to conquer our bodies in the same way that it conquers our land. But I also read it positively: as a bold insistence that our bodies are, indeed, vital, indisputable parts of the territories that capitalist powers are seizing.

Given its transversal goals, Gago’s Feminist International is, to use the feminist philosopher Serene J. Khader’s term, a “transnational feminist ethic.” But her approach is also distinctively Argentinian. Gago was born in the town of Chivilcoy in 1976—the same year that Argentina became a military dictatorship under General Jorge Rafael Videa. Many of Gago’s family members were leftist political dissidents who feared violent persecution during the ensuing Dirty War that caused the death and disappearance of approximately 30,000 people, with left-wing activists and scholars, students, artists, union members, and Jews targeted in particular. Gago recalls attending her first mass mobilization at the age of seven, on the day the dictatorship ended. She told me in an interview after her LASA panel that she witnessed family, neighbors, and strangers pouring into the streets to celebrate, noting, with joy, that “there was so much collective energy.” This defining childhood experience may have been Gago’s first encounter with the surprising power of potencia.

Gago further explained that her approach to feminism was also inspired by the Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, or the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, of Argentina. In 1977, the Madres and Abuelas began protesting Videla’s dictatorship and demanding the return of their children and grandchildren who were abducted by fascists and forced into clandestine, illegal adoptions during the military junta of the 1970s and 1980s. The group became known for the white handkerchiefs with which they covered their heads in public protest. As Gago recounted to me,

in Argentina, [this] was a radical new way of doing politics, with women as the protagonists—women who knew how to politicize pain, how to keep a lucha [struggle] going for many years, and, most importantly, how to weave that fight for justice, memory, and truth with other, present-day political battles.

“For me and for so many others,” Gago added, “growing up with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo as a reference gave me a way of thinking about what it means to do politics that I would call profoundly feminist.”

Today, the Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo are continuing to search for hundreds of missing children. And yet, President Javier Milei—who is known for using a chainsaw as a prop to symbolize the huge budget cuts he is making to the state—has withdrawn funding from both the Madres y Abuelas and Argentina’s special investigation unit tasked with finding disappeared children. Milei’s refusal to help these families recover their grandchildren from state-condoned kidnappings is somewhat ironic given that Milei, who describes himself as an “anarcho-capitalist,” is also known for saying that “the state is the pedophile in the kindergarten, with the children chained up and slathered in Vaseline.” He also regularly calls his perceived political enemies “miserable rats,” “dirty asses,” “degenerate prosecutors,” or “filthy leftists,” and he has dubbed pro-choice activists “green scarf murderers” in reference to the symbolic garb worn by many Latin American feminists during protests.

At the LASA panel in Bogotá, Gago told her audience that, despite their differences, Milei and other far-right figureheads like Bolsonaro and Bukele have all embraced a politics of deliberate, performative cruelty with intention to destroy—a politics that contrast with previous generations’ “conservative” emphases on “law and order,” “statism,” and “traditional family values.” Gago wore a white cardigan and her characteristic large glasses, and her long, chestnut hair hung loose around her shoulders as she spoke into a handheld microphone. The room was humid; it had started to rain outside. Gago paused to let the audience take in her words.

Gago then explained that this new far right actually operates in a reactionary mode—one that is, in fact, striving rather desperately to respond to major gains made by feminists in recent decades. Along these lines, Gago and her co-author Gabriel Giorgi, in their essay “Disputed Subjectivities: Notes on the Expressive Forms of the New Right” (published in La reacción patriarcal, edited by Marta Cabezas Fernández and Cristina Vegas Solís, 2022; English tr. by Liz Mason-Deese in The Rise of the Radical Right in the Global South, 2023), argue that the new strategy of far-right reactionaries like Milei is to “signal feminists as the cause of Western and Christian decadence,” thereby “creating an ‘enemy,’ then promising the return of patriarchal subjectivities by blending many of the modes of neofascist expression: its theatrical masculinity, it violent exhibitionism, and its defiant posturing against the demands made by transfeminists, LGBTQ+ activists, migrants, and antiracists” (translation mine).

Admittedly, my interpretation of Gago’s words is influenced by my own political yearning to identify sources of feminist hope in terrible times. But Gago really seemed to suggest, in her Bogotá panel, that all of us who fall into at least one of these categories can be energized by the fact that they are responding to us. The fascists making us out as “the enemies within” are actually “on our turf,” so to speak, and this gives us strategic advantages. One of our main tasks is to keep ourselves from forgetting this. But in the face of a new, cruel far right, such remembering is becoming harder than it sounds.

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Gago’s philosophical ideas are almost always rooted in real stories. In Argentina, Chile, and other Latin American countries, feminists and anti-poverty activists often place “ollas populares” or “ollas comúnes” (which can be translated as “popular pots” of food) directly in the streets to feed people who are hungry. The “popular pots” function both as semi-improvised, open-air soup kitchens and as theatrical protests against the neoliberal economic agendas and staggering debt that keep people poor. In A Feminist Reading of Debt, Gago and Cavallero tell the horrifying story of schoolteacher Corina de Bonis, who was kidnapped, tortured, and mutilated in 2018 while protesting school closures using an olla popular in Moreno, Buenos Aires. As Argentina celebrated its National Teacher’s Day, Bonis’s assailants seized her and carved the words “no más ollas” (no more pots) into the skin of her stomach.

Bonis’s assailants mutilated her in this way, Gago and Cavellero argue,

because the pots—and that practice of collective cooking and eating—are seen from the position of power as the witches’ cauldrons were earlier: spaces for meeting, nutrition, and conversation, where resistance is woven together, where a common body is manufactured as a spell against hunger, where people cook in opposition and conspire against their condemnation to poverty and resignation.

They also contend that Bonis’s assailants and other neoliberal patriarchs actually fear the pots. This underscores, once again, how fascists and others on the far right make their patriarchal “statements” in a reactionary mode—cruelly and violently pushing their way into feminist spaces of political emotion, community, and resistance.

According to Gago and Cavallero, this violence exemplifies what Latin American feminists such as Argentine Brazilian social theorist Rita Laura Segato have long argued: that the intersection of sexist violence and “financial terror”—which often takes the form of femicides—has come to be literally inscribed on feminized bodies throughout Latin America. This often entails systematic killings—like the femicides of Ciudad Juárez that inspired powerful feminist resistance throughout Mexico, Argentina, and other Latin American countries. Women’s body-territories, then, become material sites of patriarchal and capitalist intrusion, and spectacles of sexist, classist loathing.

Gago and Cavallero take their arguments even further than this. They argue that the far right will never be satisfied with the body-territories it has already mutilated and sometimes killed. If feminist potencia is a great energy that fuses and collaborates with the potencias of vulnerable others, then capitalist, patriarchal violence is its sweeping, destructive counterpart, feeding on every precious web of solidarity it encounters. The authors painstakingly describe the financial terror invading more and more feminized space, anchoring their analysis in Rosa Luxemburg’s account of capitalist expansion in her 1913 book The Accumulation of Capital.

Luxemburg famously argued that capital can only expand by pervading previously noncapitalist spaces and, in turn, appropriating new sources of labor-power, as exemplified (in Luxemburg’s work) by the English textile industry’s colonial expansion into Africa, India, and the Americas. Gago and Cavallero explain that colonialism can, indeed, force noncapitalists to become exploited laborers, as Luxemburg maintains, but that it cannot make them become obedient, capitalist consumers. This can only occur through indebtedness. Today, when massive debt is practically the law of the land, we are approaching, in Gago and Cavallero’s reading of Luxemburg, “the catastrophic moment of the end of the non-capitalist world.” They warn that this has grave implications for transnational feminists.

While many readers in the United States and the Global North are quite accustomed to personal debt, A Feminist Reading of Debt urges us to consider the alarming specificities of indebtedness in Argentina. The book ends with interviews with women who must struggle each day under conditions of interwoven personal and political financial crisis. For readers unfamiliar with such struggles in the Argentinian context, translator Mason-Deese’s introduction helpfully explains “the invasion of debt into every part of [Argentinian] life.” She observes firsthand that “buying food is marked by constant, yet unpredictable inflation: never knowing how much a liter of milk will cost, only that it will be more than the day before, juggling multiple credit cards to be able to get the best deals and most affordable payment plans.”

Mason-Deese further explains the mental toll this takes on poor women:

Remember on Tuesdays if you use your Banco Ciudad credit card, you get a discount at Día Grocery store, but on Wednesdays you have to use your Tarjeta Galicia … and so on. Staying on top of the deals and discounts, managing a series of cards and accounts, making decisions based on guessing inflation and rate increases … all of this extra work (and associated anxiety!) falls primarily on women and profoundly shapes everyday life and your plans for the future.

Life under extreme debt forces many Argentinian women to remain in highly exploitative jobs and dangerous living situations. It deprives them of educational opportunities and access to adequate medical care. This is precisely why Gago calls upon us to literally change everything. Unfortunately, Gago also believes that one of Javier Milei’s greatest political gifts is the disarming of the very potencia-infused social movements that have long been a central part of Argentina’s political history and identity. Beleaguered by massive personal and political debt, people may be forgetting their own power.

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I interviewed Gago shortly after her LASA panel in Bogotá, months before Trump was reelected as president of the United States in a win that included the popular vote. Like the other far-right politicians of whom Gago writes, Trump has built his political career on “performances of cruelty” that included a deadly insurrection on the US Capitol. In reviewing my notes from our conversation, I couldn’t help but connect the painful bewilderment many of us experienced after Trump’s reelection to Gago’s own account of experiencing Milei’s win in Argentina. Gago told me that, even if you study the increasingly fascist political landscape with care, “until it happens, you don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Since taking office, Milei has eliminated Argentina’s Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, arguing that “violence does not have gender”; has viciously attacked prominent feminists, leading to their violent harassment by Milei’s followers; has banned the use of gender-inclusive language in government; has dismantled the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism; and has made massive cuts to higher education funding. Gago told me that she has experienced Milei’s presidency as a “cognitive bombardment”—exemplifying, yet again, how patriarchal capitalism invades our bodies and minds.

Still, Gago has refused to retreat in despair, continuing to advocate for what she refers to as the feminist strike. Such an action, Gago explains, is simultaneously intimate, local, and international, as evinced by Argentina’s massive feminist strikes and assemblies organized by Ni Una Menos since 2016, which have inspired hundreds of thousands of dissenting people to take to the streets. All of Argentina’s feminist strikes responded to local injustices—especially femicides in Latin America—but they are deliberately scheduled on International Women’s Day in solidarity with feminist causes across the globe. Gago believes that feminists around the world can take inspiration from this example: she and Cavallero have elsewhere argued that “Argentina is a laboratory for the rest of the world,” for the Argentinian experience shows that the real challenge for “anti-debt militants” everywhere is to continue to “do politics when the language of austerity becomes the popular language.”

In Feminist International, Gago argues that the feminist strikes generate a new language and perspective that does not come from the oppressor. Feminist strikes are not limited to a single workplace, group, or cause—they are far more massive than traditional strikes organized by unions. Instead, they aim to halt all business as usual and generate what Gago calls a new “situation” and a fresh point of view.

In my own reading of Gago, the transversal spirit of feminist strikes safeguards these spaces against a truly all-encompassing fascist invasion. For even as the new far-right forces promote their agendas with their fiery, theatrical appeals to “liberty” and “freedom,” their claims are derived from what Naomi Klein recently called the “mirror world”—“a mimicking of beliefs and concerns that feeds off progressive failures and silences.” Gago explains that the far right is taking up progressive ideals and infusing them with distorted meanings that generate widespread social confusion and ultimately serve right-wing agendas.

I want to suggest that, in feminist strikes, such far-right “mirroring” actually becomes impossible. For in these spaces, concrete words are attached to concrete bodies and body-territories—these strikes involve real people engaged in real mobilizations, in contrast to the far right’s emphasis on social media messaging that is often factually inaccurate. In a feminist strike, people’s diverse claims and demands are collectively developed into feminist agendas that are fresh and increasingly inclusive. On the other hand, fascists mimicking feminists in the mirror world cannot achieve the potencia that the feminist strike requires—for potencia, once again, comes from weaving an individual’s deeply held political desires with those of the collective to create something that is new and original. It does not come from shining a distorted image back to the place from which it came.

Gago’s work also reflects the deep emotional pull of the feminist strike, where so-called “victims” become knowers and survivors in a healing collective. I also read Gago as saying that the emotional appeal of militant feminist spaces simply cannot be replicated by vicious far-right social media attacks and the theatrics of Milei’s chainsaw. Furthermore, by foregrounding the voices of those whose labor is deemed marginal—such as informal and domestic workers as well as migrants—the feminist strike moves beyond the “progressive failures and silences” that, as Klein argues, perpetuate the mirror world in which fascism succeeds.

And so, in troubling times, I have chosen to read Gago with hopefulness. As a young child living under a fascist regime, she absorbed key lessons from the painful protests of the Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, who use their potencia to demand reunion with their kidnapped children in a big, against-the-odds campaign for political freedom—not only in Argentina but throughout the world as well. Gago’s writing provides a theoretical framework both for interpreting the emotional depth of such work and for putting it into action within and beyond Argentina’s borders. Like the Madres y Abuelas and Ni Una Menos, perhaps we, too, can weave our pain and our protests with those of vulnerable others across the globe—striving for the transversal perspective that is needed to initiate sweeping, liberating change. If nothing else, Gago’s works warn us against going into hiding. After all, ever-expanding fascism leaves us with few real places to hide. For Gago, we will only find our way home if we take to the streets together.