Feminist contentious politics in an infected planet: care and solidarity initiatives in Italy and Spain

This paper tries to detect shifts within the practices of contentious feminist politics in Italy and Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic. In so doing, it seeks to make a contribution at the theoretical level to social movement studies, by revising some relevant theories in the field in light of a most recent, yet undeniably important, transformation of social life. On the heels of the dialogue initiated by Ciccia, della Porta and Pavan (2021), this paper investigates instances of intersectional feminist solidarity, a “radical form of feminist politics that constitutively integrates concerns for other social inequalities, interrogates its own privilege and biases, and acknowledges as its own struggles for women’s rights that take place under a different name” (p.175). The pandemic context within which these feminist movements act is also explored – here, the paper draws both from the extensive literature on social movements in times of crises as well as from historical analyses of Latin America’s popular feminism, emerged in Chile after the 1973 coup (Waylen, 1997) and in Mexico city after the 1985 earthquake (Lamas, 2011). These are historical examples of grassroots mobilization of working-class women, mostly organized around social and economic issues, who developed a ‘politics of everyday life’ in response to the crisis they were facing and, in the process of doing so, increased significantly their level of politicization, adopting a more decisively feminist understanding of their struggles. The paper posits not solely that there have been changes in the repertoire of contention related to the pandemic context, but also that these changes influenced the interactions of feminist groups and activists with marginal urban spaces, as well as marginal urban communities. This is tested through a cross-national comparison of feminist solidarities within and beyond feminist movements in Italy and Spain. Particular focus is dedicated to examples of grassroots organizing which have helped communities respond to and survive the crisis. These (only apparently novel) forms contentious actions are understood through the frame of social direct actions, as suggested by Bosi and Zamponi (2015, 2019). Social direct actions “focus upon directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself” (Bosi & Zamponi, 2015, p.369), involve a variety of alternative forms of resistance, and, interestingly, the socio-economic context plays an important role in their extended use. Around these political experiments, feminist politics created alliances and reinforced networks. Italy and Spain are chosen because they both retain strong feminist movements, and both hosted pervasive campaigns of mutual aid during the pandemic (Martinez, 2020; Gainsforth, 2021). The two, moreover, saw the emergence of vocal anti-austerity movements in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and those mobilization are understood as instrumental in reinforcing more contemporary (and feminist) ones (Chironi & Portos, 2021). This is particularly interesting in the present conjuncture, as both countries are recipients of the Recovery and Resilience Facility’s funding within the context of NextGenerationEU.