Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 4

Rebellion of the Girls: Traces of Feminist Memory in Argentina Paula Andrea Lenguita Abstract - Following the people’s outcry of the Not One Less movement in Argentina, the question has arisen of how to construct a history of Argentine feminism that contains the antecedents of this manifestation. In this sense, this paper has adopted a combination of theoretical approaches to the militant heritage of the political movement in the last half century, re-establishing the contributions of the Argentine Feminist Union (1970-1976) and the National Encounters of Women (1986-2019). The hypothesis is that in these legacies lie the organisational keys to the women's movement and the antecedents of the so-called Rebellion of the Girls in the Not One Less movement. This is a brand new political phenomenon for national feminism, which has had international repercussions due to its narrative power through social networks. Different testimonies of leading participants have been considered, with the aim of contributing to a remembrance of the deliberative and narrative modes of the recent feminist experience in Argentina, associated with horizontal participation and heterogeneity in ideological positions providing people' support for the political scope of these manifestations. Keywords: feminism, argentina, girls movement, rebellion. I. I ntroduction or the last six years, feminist protests in Argentina have been definitively integrated into the map of national popular movements with the emergence of the Not one less movement ( hereinafter NUM for the acronym of Ni Una Menos in Spanish). The scope of this demonstration was so broad that it has even been replicated in other places more or less immediately, becoming an indisputable reference for the international feminist movement. This notoriety was achieved through the potential for communicating its demands, but also through the renewal of organizational and participatory practices carried out by the movement. This irruption raised the question about feminist memories being the political background of this Rebellion of the Girls. Our study has reconstructed some traces of these past experiences, fundamentally linked to the activism of the Argentine Feminist Union (hereinafter UFA for Unión Feminista Argentina ) between 1970 and 1976, and the organizational modality that has been deployed for more than three decades in the National Encounters of Women (Encuentros Nacionales de Mujeres , hereinafter ENM), between 1986 and 2019. We have worked under the assumption that these experiences have constituted a large part of the modalities of participation of today’s feminism, materialized in the NUM movement. With this in mind, we have considered some of the testimonies provided by the militant press in these years, which stand out for their ability to distinguish feminist activism from other expressions of national political practices. In short, all the organizational structures -UFA, ENM and NUM- are the expression of a continuity in Argentine feminism and, at the same time, a particular example of how the demands and the ways of expressing them in the politics of the women's and feminist movement have changed. II. F eminist M emories in T imes of P olitical R adicalization in A rgentina In Karen Offen’s contribution (1991), dedicated to defining feminism from a relational point of view, the polysemic key of a political expression with so many centuries of existence have been pointed out (Mitchell, 1966). In the same sense, the stakes of feminism in times of political radicalization (Chaperon, 1995; Pedro, 2006), between the sixties and seventies, have been an inalienable legacy for activists in democracy and even today in times when the NUM is broadly disseminated. In particular, the combination of militant polyphonies and democratic styles of political organization have strongly marked the activism of Argentinean feminists. However, from the most embryonic structures in the seventies through the enormous social engineering of women's encounters, recruitment methods and deliberative practices have been a constituent part of feminist activism for years, even as they have now reached a widespread that makes it more notorious. With State Terrorism, these experiences of the seventies have lost appropriate recognition (Chejter, 1996; Nari, 1996; Barrancos, 2014). For this reason, it has been necessary to retrace their steps to understand how from the initial "entryism" of the left (Bellucci, 2014) and the "double militancy" (Grammático, 2005) in that "myth of origin" (Vassallo, 2005), Argentine feminism has brought novelty to national politics in the years of democracy (Trebisacce, 2010; 2014; Rodríguez Agüero and Ciriza, 2012). With the transition to democracy in the eighties, these horizontal and deliberative practices prior to State Terrorism were taken up again, in order to shift the underground construction to the training and recruitment of ENM activists. F © 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue IV Version I 21 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 A 9 Author: e-mail: paulaandrealenguita@gmail.com