‘Ni Una Menos’: Practices, Aims and Achievements of a Grassroots Women’s Movement Against Femicide and Patriarchal Relations in Argentina

TOSCANI, MARIA DE LA PAZ; ROSA, PAULA; VIDOSA, REGINA

Unsettled Urban Space Routines, Temporalities and Contestations

Taylor & Francis.

Lugar: New York; Año: 2022; p. 1 - 303

This paper explores the actions of #NiUnaMenos [‘Not One (Woman) Less’, hereinafter #NUM] a grassroots women’s movement that emerged in 2015 in Argentina to raise awareness regarding femicide, an issue that has plagued the country for decades. The recent emergence of #NUM has reenergized Argentine feminism, by synthesizing and increasing the visibility of some of the movement’s historic claims, specifically through tactics of mass mobilization. #NUM can be interpreted as a set of unsettling practices that question traditional conceptions of gender and existing power structures, allowing new spaces of struggle to emerge. Emphasis will be placed on these ‘unsettling practices’ of #NUM in order to give an account of the movement’s aims and achievements in generating institutional changes that have the potential to foster women’s rights and build a more egalitarian social order. This chapter draws on a qualitative analysis of the vision and action of #NUM, based on the analysis of documents published by movement organizers, as well as observations of marches and demonstrations in Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. This is complemented by an analysis of newspaper articles and reports prepared by public and private institutions. A sociological perspective on femicide, the social context of patriarchal society, and the culture of machismo is first presented, followed by an analysis of #NUM’s practices—forms of expression in the public sphere, on social media, and on the streets—and its aims regarding the institutionalization of its claims.