From assembly to action on March 8

This year’s first Transfeminist Assembly toward March 8 took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina on February 14, 2024. Foto © Marita Costa.

Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • March 6, 2024 • Leer en castellano

March 8 is upon us once again—a festive moment of mass, radical renewal of the diverse forms of feminist practice and debate in the Americas.

Eight years have passed since we broke the narrow confines of hegemonic and racist liberal feminism, enthusiastically repudiating all forms of patriarchal and sexist violence. 

Since then, on every March 8 (8M), we have come together into immense, abundant rivers of women and dissidents of various ages, backgrounds and professions, gathering noisily in the streets to defend our right to choose whether or not to become a mother and to experience pleasure in a diversity of forms.

We have mobilized in various ways to defend our lives—and life itself—from political and economic practices that undermine and threaten the possibilities of dignified sustenance and daily joy. 

From rural territories and urban collectives, we fight extractivism and war, which are mechanisms of subjugation and death.

In the courts, streets and schools, we demand and produce justice, creating forms of action that simultaneously repudiate impunity and punitivism. 

In practice as well as theory, we criticize the exclusionary binaries of reason and gender and we turn public debate on its head by asserting the centrality of issues that subvert the calcified elements of orthodox thought.

The manifold, tenacious practices of our feminisms in all facets of life, including in our homes and with our friends and families, erupt into energies we release together on 8M. It is there that we challenge the patriarchal structures of social life that rest on violence, war and the colonization of our time and energy. 

March 8 has become an educational act of immense creativity. It demonstrates our ability to join forces, to come together amidst our diversity and to feel our common strength.

Over the last few years, we have come together in the midst of debates in which we exhibit and explore our differences. Our movement is not one that unifies and disciplines, but a noisy, sometimes unstable convergence that also allows us to distinguish ourselves.

This month marks four years since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the isolation measures that shook the foundation of our collective existence. Four years during which daily life became even more unstable and precarious, during which living conditions worsened and extreme violence surged.

This year’s 8M occurs as the unbearable genocide in Gaza occupies the center of global concern and as terrible images come out of the Salvadoran mega-prisons under recently re-elected President Nayib Bukele. 

War and imprisonment is what the colonial and capitalist patriarchal regimes have on offer in 2024. This is certainly the case in Ecuador, Argentina, Haiti, Peru, Mexico and beyond.

This year’s second Transfeminist Assembly toward March 8 took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina on February 21, 2024. Foto © Marita Costa.

An annual process of renewal

8M is a watchword for women and dissidents in struggle. We are disputing time, the time and the possibility of dignified life. Preparations for the largest annual feminist convergence begin in a process of listening, debate and acquaintance. To coordinate it all, feminists mobilize anew in cities and towns.

Diverse feminist collectives and nodes of organization convene autonomously and come together. Their daily actions of support and reciprocity nourish the feminist mobilizations that lay the foundation for 8M. They discuss pressing issues and create a plan and path for moving forward. 

Feminist mobilization does not happen spontaneously; actions and debates that have occurred throughout the year create the basis for the capacity to autonomously convene. They are strategic fora that multiply collective capacity by linking and amplifying the strength of all of those involved. Sometimes this interweaving is difficult, sometimes it is fluid, but it is always fertile.

It is feminist mobilizations, which begin to bloom like jacarandas in February, that revive the struggle to prioritize the sustenance of collective life against the forces that deny and crush it.

From one country to another, similar sentiments are expressed in different terms. 

In assemblies in Buenos Aires, as Verónica Gago has explained in her dispatches, organizing in the face of the economic crisis, which ultra-liberal Javier Milei intends to worsen, is the main topic of discussion.

The needs of unionized workers and those who have been recently fired from their jobs are heard and connected. There is discussion of the difficulties faced by those who run soup kitchens, who can no longer provide enough food to feed the population as inflation continues to rise. School supplies are exchanged when families can’t afford to buy what they need.

This is how the feminist repudiation of Milei's right-wing government is occurring—in a way that reinforces mutual aid while also strengthening the belief that limits must be set to avoid the destruction of the country.

In Cochabamba, Bolivia, reconvened assemblies are linking what is happening in participants’ lives with what is happening in the country as a whole. The precariousness of life is a central problem. There seems to be no time, no money, no stability, and no way to acquire these things. This widespread feeling puts Bolivia’s critical economic crises into relief.

In Mexico City, we’re waiting impatiently for the purple flood that occurs on March 8. In preparation for the march in this enormous city, the importance of taking an independent position without the involvement of political parties, and refusing subordination to progressive promises, shone through. That’s especially true in regard to the struggles for truth and justice led by mothers and families of victims of disappearance and death, which have intensified as election campaigns begin.

We must take time, after 8M, to understand and interpret what happens that day in the streets. We know we are not coming together to demand equality in a state of disaster, rather, we are doing so in order to transform everything.