Together and Rebellious

Exploring Territories of Feminist Economics

Jun 9th, 2021
Colectiva XXK - Feminismos, pensamiento y acción y SOF Sempreviva Organização Feminista

When we started thinking about this text, we posed three ambitious questions: How are patriarchal capitalism’s forms of control, and consequently, the attacks against life, being reshaped? How are forms of sustaining life being re-articulated, deepening the invisibilized, feminized, and racialized dimensions of the system? And, finally, how are forms of resistance reinvented that attempt to put life in the center in opposition to global patriarchal capitalism? Obviously, this text does not resolve these three enormous questions. But they have driven the initiation of the process of joint reflection that gave rise to these pages.

In the first section, we delve into the ideas of sustainability of life and the capital-life conflict. We think that these concepts currently constitute a sort of “common good,” a shared language from which we can attempt to understand the current form of colonial patriarchal capitalism. Next, we enter a more novel terrain: the tripartite conception of body-time-territory, which we think opens up new directions, not only for reflection, but also for mobilization. Then, we explore two phenomena that we think require particular attention, because fundamental elements of the re-articulation of the system at the global level spill over into them. On one hand, we ask if we are witnessing a “scale jump” that encloses the processes of sustaining life in the narrow framework of nuclear households, emptying out the sphere of the common, at the same time as it subjects those households to the vigilance and control of strengthened states. On the other hand, we inquire into digitalization processes, which constitute a key element of the re-articulation of corporate control. In our analysis, we insist on the material foundations of digitalization and ask what it means to articulate feminist resistance in that sphere.

Today, perhaps more than ever, we need each other; we need to feel together and rebellious to be able to open up views and avoid the construction of walls that prevent us from seeing that the world is big and that there are many of us. These pages are an attempt to continue the conversation with those women who, rooted in their territories, but connected across distances, are trying to make collective life, and our own lives, more livable.

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