Feminist fury amid unbridled violence
Illustration of women embroidering a banner that says "the militarized state is patriarchal culture," © @PazConNadie.
Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • March 7, 2025 • Leer en castellano
On March 8, International Women's Day, we’ll return to the streets to condemn the multiple forms of violence that rage against our bodies. We’ll come together to continue to forge justice, a process at once uncomfortable and life-affirming. And together, we’ll take the time to feel our collective strength.
The old world is dying. The patriarchal, capitalist and neocolonial structures that have governed individual nation states and the international order over previous decades have ruptured.
A group of male millionaires, many old and some younger, is destabilizing the old scaffolding. They are interested only in increasing their holdings and profits. In order to do so, they can draw on immense military power.
Let’s call this group of conmen, who are intensifying the war against women, against gender dissidents and migrants, against territories and against minimum material guarantees for the conditions of social reproduction, the “chainsaw gang,” after the phallic instrument they wave around as a sign of their contempt for life, for rights, for women and for dissidents. The chainsaw gang is pathetic, ridiculous and, unfortunately, very dangerous.
Members of this gang include rulers like Javier Milei, Nayib Bukele, Daniel Noboa and, of course, Donald Trump. They believe that everything from the natural wealth of vast territories, to the bodies, dreams and diverse peoples that inhabit the world, exists only for their service and enjoyment. Their arrogance is as vast as the fortunes they possess.
Through their assertion that there are only two genders, they have set in motion a revanchist process of colonization. In doing so, they ignore the overflowing of historically fixed gender roles, a process led by the diverse multiplicity of bodies that we are, and which have mobilized intensely in recent years. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explains, reinstalling the monopolization of “naming and norming” is at the core of the colonial process, which is what excluding everything that exceeds and challenges gender binarism attempts to do.
Banning anti-racist education, as is happening today in the United States, as well as striving to erase the memory of recent and earlier anti-racist and Indigenous struggles, is another step in the colonial and capitalist restoration of a patriarchal order in decline. The actions of the chainsaw gang expose the fear felt by its members and their followers in the face of destabilizing mass movements that have erupted over the past decades.
In countries like Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Mexico, where voters have expelled the most delusional versions of right-wing corporate governments from power, those who govern continue to plunder territories and encourage militarization. The rulers who today claim to be left-wing also ignore and deny the rights and desires of women. They have been unable to break with economic models based on extractivism and sweatshops that prey on the fabric of life and undermine the possibility of dignified life.
There is a transparent need for an internationalist, anti-racist and anti-militarist trans-inclusive feminism that takes a stand against the advance of the far right and war, that is critical of the left-in-power, and that firmly supports migrants.
Times of realignment
We call the hegemonic economic and social order the colonial patriarchy of finance, which is sustained by draining, expropriating and exploiting our bodies and energies. Systematic attacks on the reproduction of the web of life and the minimum conditions for social reproduction as a whole have characterized the rise of finance. The financial sector, which has been at the head of this aggression for several decades, is undergoing a process of readjustment and accelerated expansion. This sector seeks to recolonize the world with sweatshops, logistics corridors, and tourism enclaves. This change requires adjusting the patriarchal pacts that sustain it. Some members of the elite are expelled and humiliated, others are incited to participate in the delusional dream of endless profit that requires constant violence against the conditions of social reproduction.
Struggles over water and energy remain crucial battlegrounds. The virtualization of broad and important areas of social and working life, which are imposed through platforms and social media that are also often owned by members of the chainsaw gang, concentrate and monopolize computing and information processing capacities. This process requires immense amounts of water and electrical energy.
These powerful men do not value life, its cycles or its rhythms, and they ignore peoples’ needs and desires. Their modus operandi is to violently appropriate goods that are essential for the sustainability and equilibrium of the fabric of life of which all of us are part. They impose frenetic work rhythms and ever more exhaustive forms of control on some. On others, they impose expulsion from their lands and dispossession of their material and social wealth. In both cases, the owners of these technologies compel governments to expend immense amounts of public resources on securing military control over the whole arrangement. And, of course, they ignore the massive environmental and social costs, including climate change and the recurring catastrophes it causes.
For our part, women and feminists continue to come together to create publications, conversations and workshops that seek to understand the persistent war against the fabric of life and the conditions for social reproduction. Time and again we realize the dangers of the accelerating times and rhythms imposed by financial colonization. Far-reaching metabolic cycles, which are carved out over a very long time and which have guaranteed the sustainability and proliferation of multiple species, including humans, are being ruined, as Anna Tsing explains.
The control of this absurd social organization is in open dispute today. We are experiencing a tornado of readjustments of the norms that have regulated relations between states (since 1945 at least) and of the terms of political life within individual states. The production of capital in its financialized form wholly ignores the needs that arise from complex processes of social reproduction. All of this generates uncertainty and increases violence. It is worth noting how governments funnel public resources toward the production of arms and other tools of control. And in spite of all of this, diverse women continue to organize and support one another.
We come together to reflect and debate, to discuss what’s happening, to document the dangers we face, to take back our time and to glimpse the possibilities that could come out of the current moment. We know that the conditions of dignified existence are being stripped away, and that we need to deepen our struggles. This is not the time for us to become stuck. It is clear that we need to continue weaving together and collectively charting our demands and desires.
How do we reorganize as dangers increase?
This question has marked the preparatory meetings and discussions prior to 8M in gatherings and assemblies in many cities. We must strengthen a feminism that rejects compulsory motherhood, that expands networks of collaboration to ensure safe conditions for abortion and that encourages communal care for those who choose to have children, all while doing so in a way that overflows the antiquated gender binary.
We repudiate and mobilize against the violence that is all around us and seek to produce justice on multiple levels. We reject the exploitation of our energy in the workplace and the increasing expropriation of our time through the expanding burden of care in indebted households in which more and more people are ill. We must strengthen defense in territories that have been historically expropriated or are currently under threat of plunder and destruction, and fight for the right to migrate safely.
We have an immense capacity to nourish the bonds that feed rebellion, but we also need time to cultivate these capacities. In turbulent times, providing refuge and support for one another is an important choice.
Ojalá is now in its third year, and on March 8 we will march again in the spirit of producing hope in this world in crisis.
As women and gender dissidents take to the streets on International Women’s Day, I’m asking for your support in amplifying feminist voices across Latin America.
Ojalá launched two years ago to cover this growing global movement, which is more urgent than ever as the empowered far right lashes out against those who challenge patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and domination. As difficult as things are we can’t lose sight of the fact that even in these difficult moments folks are pushing back.
Every dollar you contribute strengthens our ability to share knowledge, inspire action and bring voices in movement to the fore.
In gratitude and struggle,
Dawn Marie Paley, Editor, Ojalá
