The Feminist Strike–A Political Innovation

Abstract

Using the strike as a counterpoint is not simply conspiratorial. It is a diagram in whichwhat a transborder feminist movement has been raising is traced in reverse. I want then tofirst indicate what I think are the most important elements of the feminist strike -itspolitical alliances and programmatic drive- to later ask how the pandemic has intervenedin those same elements and what it means to rethink our modes of intervention, protest,social reproduction, and strike today. We must also take into account that the time of thepandemic has still been filled with calls to strike: by renters, by Amazon workers, by healthcare workers, by domestic workers, by students. And the even fresher images that havegone viral of the general strike in South Korea and the debates about a diffuse mode of therefusal of work faced with the conditions of extreme precarity and risk that are alsoexpressed through modes of strike in different places.The “normality” of capitalism is in crisis and at the same time attempting to produce amore conservative-patriarchal and extractivist new order. So, the feminist strike, itstheorical innovation and the current crisis function as a triangle of issues to deploy tounderstand in what sense feminist struggles play a role in the current diagnosis andpolitical action in systemic terms.