Intersectional Politics of the International Women’s Strike

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, progressive organizing faces pressures to adopt intersectional forms of solidarity. Intersectional solidarity consists of an ongoing process of creating ties and coalitions across social group differences by negotiating power asymmetries. This approach to organizing is not a static outcome that movements achieve and preserve. Movements that seek to enact intersectional solidarity must engage in ongoing struggles to sustain it. This article focuses on the case of the International Women’s Strike (IWS) of 2017 and 2018 in Spain. We use this case to identify circumstances that can lead to failures to sustain intersectional solidarity and the consequences of the ruptures that follow. In the case of the International Women’s Strike, initial calls to organize around the subject of women and women’s labor mobilized broad support in 2017. Black women in Spain affiliated with a group known as Afroféminas called on expanding the subject of local IWS mobilization to center the experiences of Black subjects. In a broadly circulated announcement, Afroféminas called out this experience and announced that they would not participate in the International Women’s Strike. The case of the International Women’s Strike in Spain showcases an instance under which the search for intersectional solidarity can generate broad intersectional consciousness even when it leads to separate organizing tracks. The development of autonomous Black activist spaces informed the continuity and deepening of intersectional consciousness but limited the magnitude of the praxis (e.g. Afroféminas did not participate in the broader praxis that generated disruptive tactics and mobilized larger masses). In choosing to consider racism as a form of violence within one system of capitalist exploitation, limited notions of subjectivity dominated IWS. On the other hand, Afroféminas’ withdrawal of participation limited the scope of praxis and raised questions about the representativeness and inclusiveness of the broader movement. Thus, intersectional and oppositional consciousness can emerge from the withdrawal of intersectionally marginalized groups from coalition work while challenging the enactment of mass intersectional praxis.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• intersectional solidarity
• international women’s strike
• intersectional praxis
• feminism

Introduction

Increasingly, progressive activists are under pressure to adopt intersectional forms of solidarity. Intersectional solidarity consists of an ongoing process of creating ties and coalitions across social group differences by negotiating power asymmetries (Tormos 2017). This approach to organizing is not a static outcome that movements achieve and preserve. Movements that seek to enact intersectional solidarity must engage in ongoing struggles to sustain it. Movements that fail to enact or sustain intersectional solidarity tend to face critiques about their representativeness (authority that a movement has to make claims on behalf of various groups), thus affecting their standing in the public eye and among policymakers. Further, those excluded from broader movements face challenges mobilizing broader masses and diffusing their ideologies and goals. Failures to enact intersectional solidarity weaken movements all around.

This article examines the intersectional politics of the international women’s strike (IWS) in 2017 and 2018. We draw from original interview data, news articles about the strike, and social media observations to theorize how progressive movements, such as the IWS, articulate and seek to sustain popular mobilization. We are particularly interested in a phenomenon we term intersectional synthesis, which refers to the dialectical relationship between an intersectional consciousness and an intersectional praxis (Tormos-Aponte and Ferrer-Núñez 2020). Focusing on how movements develop an awareness of oppression and how these consciousnesses motivate and are motivated by praxis provides critical insight into the ways movements build their agendas, prioritize certain issues and tactics, choose and promote leaders, and make space for different social groups and perspectives.

We seek to build on our initial efforts to identify and theorize the dialectical relationship between intersectional consciousness and praxis. We use the case of the IWS of 2017 and 2018 to identify circumstances that can lead to failures to sustain intersectional solidarity and the consequences of the ruptures that follow. We find that the dialectical processes that we describe as intersectional synthesis can have different outcomes. In instances when movements are able to cope with internal differences through effective negotiations and redistributions of power, intersectional syntheses can sustain solidarity across differences. In instances in which activists do not deem power to be adequately redistributed, the experiences of the multiply marginalized in praxis can further shape their consciousness in ways that signal a need to rupture coalitional approaches to addressing their distinct issues, thus weakening solidarity across differences.

Power negotiations within movements can expand or contract the subject of their struggle. Bridge builders, who tend to be women of color, often seek to expand the subject of a movement and spread awareness of intersectional forms of oppression and approaches to building solidarity. However, this labor can be ineffective when dominant groups reject pressures to redistribute power among social groups in movements. Limited notions of a movement’s subject that focus on the issues of dominant subgroups can mobilize broad support across different social groups, but movements struggle to sustain solidarity across differences without expanding the subjective focus of their mobilization and developing new consciousness through awareness of the experiences of multiply marginalized groups in ways that inform future praxis.

IWS efforts to mobilize as women with platforms that recognized shared and distinct experiences were sufficient to ignite broad mobilization in 2017. Once mobilized, new experiences are gained in coalitional politics, and these form new consciousnesses and claims for shifting the way the movement is organized and the issues that are prioritized. Moving forward, these experiences leading into the 2018 strike had shaped consciousness and praxis in ways that signaled to some multiply marginalized groups that pursuing a coalitional approach within IWS was not aligned with their political objectives to subvert intersectional forms of marginalization.

Intersectionality and intersectional consciousness

We build on the tradition of the project of intersectionality. Intersectionality is a political project with activist and intellectual roots that emerged from the critiques Black, queer, and Latina feminists levied against second-wave feminism and civil rights organizing (Combahee River Collective [1977] 1995). This project brought light to the lived experiences of multiply marginalized subgroups (Cohen 1999a, 1999b). Black and Latina queer feminists especially highlighted the need for movements that centered lived experiences shaped by the interactions of multiple systems of oppression, including but not limited to gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality, among others (Collins 2015).

Analyses of policy silences, how policies neglect and oppress multiply marginalized groups, led Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) to coin the term intersectionality, thus naming a project whose tradition has been traced back to the centuries-old activism of leaders like Maria Stewart, Savitribai Phule, and Sojourner Truth, and contemporary manifestation of intersectional praxis like the Combahee River Collective. Intersectionality is a project that focuses on identifying, critiquing, and subverting advocacy and policy silences (Einwohner et al. 2021; Hancock 2011; hooks 1981; Strolovitch 2007). It is a project that resists essentialism, thus rejecting biological, static, and additive notions of identity (Hancock 2007; Weldon 2006b). This project also raises awareness of the subjugation and appropriation of the knowledge that multiply marginalized people produce (Alexander-Floyd 2012; Collins 1990, 2015; hooks 1981).

Emerging from social movements, scholars working at the margins of higher education have pushed to sustain and grow the project of intersectionality (Beaman and Brown 2019). These efforts face numerous challenges, including neglect of intersectionality as a framework for the study of social movements (Irvine, Lang, and Montoya 2019; Liu 2017), the term’s capture among non-Black academics, and a dismissal of Black women’s activist and intellectual labor that led to the term’s growing popularity (Alexander-Floyd 2012).

Intersectionality has now garnered significant attention among social movement scholars. Studies on intersectionality and social movements include those that conceptualize intersectionality as a kind of coalition (Adam 2017; Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013; Cole 2008; Gawerc 2021; Laperrière and Lépinard 2016; Luna 2016; Roberts and Jesudason 2013; Roth 2021; Tungohan 2016; Verloo 2013), an organizing approach (Çağatay 2023; Einwohner et al. 2021; Tormos 2017; Tormos-Aponte 2019), a distinct way of shaping a movement’s agenda (Strolovitch 2007; Smooth and Tucker 1999), a series of issues that motivate movement participation (Fisher et al. 2018), a kind of discourse that movements use (Fisher, Dow, and Ray 2017; Heaney 2021), or a framework that scholars can use to study movements (Liu 2017).

In our view, intersectionality proposes a distinct approach to building solidarity among activists. We term this approach the intersectional solidarity organizing approach. We refer to the consciousness that motivates critique and organizing against multiple, compounding sources of oppression as intersectional consciousness and the agency associated with this approach as intersectional praxis. The idea of intersectional solidarity stems from the pioneering work of feminist scholars of color who have theorized about this approach to building solidarity (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, Collins and Chepp 2013; Hancock 2011; Townsend-Bell 2011). Intersectional solidarity is a form of solidarity that places the issues of multiply marginalized groups at the center of organizing. Although movements vary in terms of how they enact intersectional forms of solidarity, this organizing approach tends to prioritize the issues of multiply marginalized groups, promotes their leadership, respects their autonomous spaces, and seeks consensus while avoiding the practice of suppressing difference and dissent (Dhamoon 2011; Einwohner et al. 2021; Strolovitch 2007; Tormos 2017; Tormos-Aponte 2019; Weldon 2006a; Smooth and Tucker 1999). Activist labor to enact and sustain intersectional solidarity consists of iterative negotiations of power differences in the quest to cope with and address unequal social formations. Enacting intersectional solidarity is not a linear process that reaches a static and final outcome. Movements that enact this approach to organizing can fail to sustain it, while those who fail to enact it can find ways to adopt it in subsequent struggles.

We argue that the process of enacting and sustaining intersectional solidarity is a dialectical process whereby notions of oppression within movements interact with efforts to enact anti-oppressive praxis in ways that mutually inform and shape each other. This process, which we refer to as an intersectional synthesis, is the dialectical relationship between intersectional consciousness and intersectional praxis. Intersectional consciousness refers to the awareness of multiple marginalizations that exist in societal and movement settings. These are individual and collective understandings of oppression that consider how interacting systems shape lived experiences and conditions of marginalization. These complex understandings of oppression can emerge in movement settings through ongoing deliberation processes and efforts to achieve social justice. These understandings of oppression can deepen activist engagement (Earl, Maher, and Elliot 2017), generate new coalitions (Roberts and Jesudason 2013), and foster solidarity across different social groups. Intersectional consciousness emerges within movements among individuals and collectively (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Cole 2008; Curtin, Stewart, and Cole 2015; Greenwood 2008; Irvine, Lang, and Montoya 2019; Tormos-Aponte 2019). The labor of raising intersectional consciousness and brokering relationships, also known as bridge-building, tends to rest on the shoulders of women of color (Daniel and de Leon 2020; Montoya and Seminario 2022; Moraga and Anzaldua 1983; Robnett 1996; Terriquez 2015). Movement participants and organizers engage in collective action with a priori understandings of oppression, which can evolve as they engage in internal movement deliberation, contention, and praxis (Tormos-Aponte and Ferrer-Núñez 2020; Townsend-Bell 2011). Townsend-Bell (2011) describes this as a process of identifying what is relevant to activists. Engaging in contention is a process that generates solidarities (Fantasia 1988) and understandings of the marginalized lived experiences that motivate activism (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013).

Impactful efforts to develop intersectional consciousness can inform praxis within movements and coalitions (Gawerc 2021; Roth 2021). An intersectional praxis refers to the actions that movements and organizers take to confront the systems, institutions, and norms that produce intersectional forms of marginalization. Movements and organizers can strive to enact intersectional praxis through recognitions of intersectional marginalization, representation of multiply marginalized groups in movement leadership, prioritizing the issues of multiply marginalized groups, allocating resources and energies to addressing these issues, compensating the labor of bridge builders, enabling inclusive and deliberative decision-making processes, and making space for the autonomous organizing of multiple marginalized groups (Laperrière and Lépinard 2016; Roberts and Jesudason 2013; Strolovitch 2007; Tormos-Aponte 2019; Weldon 2006a).

Methods: case and sources

This article draws data from public declarations of activist groups, media interviews, news reports covering the strike across Latin America and Spain, blog posts, existing literature on the IWS of 2017 and 2018, and interview data. We use these sources to identify themes that emerge from the data, paying particular attention to issues of representation, agenda setting, and autonomous organizing of multiply marginalized groups in the movement. This analytical approach allows us to build on the notion of intersectional synthesis, identifying dynamics that precede and follow instances in which movements struggle to cope with challenges associated with adopting intersectional approaches to organizing. This article also engages in collaborative ethnography among the authors, allowing reflection on experiences in organizing and embracing the development of movement-generated theory. Further, we build on Shariana Ferrer-Núñez’s autoethnography as an organizer and founder of the Puerto Rico-based Colectiva Feminista en Construcción. In doing so, we take activist insights as crucial sources of knowledge production and theory generation and seek to prefigure reciprocal scholar-activist relationships that break with extractive academic traditions that take activist knowledge without attribution.

Autoethnographies have advanced the study of intersectional solidarity (see, for example, Tormos-Aponte and Ferrer-Núñez 2020; Tungohan 2019). This method combines “the personal and the scholarly” in aims of strengthening and promoting movement-emergent theory by taking lived experiences as key sources of knowledge generation (Burnier 2006, 412; Tungohan 2019). Natasha Behl describes it as a “practice of critical reflection on the embodied experience of knowledge making” whose goal is to disrupt the “subject – object separation by placing the researcher’s experience at the center of the phenomenon under investigation” (Behl 2017, 584).

International women’s strike

The IWS emerged from a global context marked by the relative strength of right-wing and neoliberal forces, which had come to power in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, and the US, among other contexts. This wave of right-wing ascensions to power ignited a sense of urgency and threat against marginalized peoples. In Poland in October of 2016, more than 100,000 rose against the country’s ban on abortion. That same month, violence against women, including the violent murder of Lucía Pérez, ignited mobilization under the slogan #NiUnaMenos in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, and Uruguay, among other countries. This slogan continued reverberating globally, deployed again as feminists called for action. In November 2016, Donald J. Trump’s election signaled a turning point in US politics for many, igniting the largest mobilization in US history at the time – the Women’s March in January 2017. The Women’s March, following the Trump presidential inauguration, mobilized more than four million marchers across the US.¹ and formed part of what became known as The Resistance (Fisher 2019).

Social movement scholarship has debated about what constitutes an opportune international climate for mobilization. Theorized elements of these transnational opportunity structures include the creation or changes of institutions of global governance, whether activists think that they can succeed, the support of powerful states, the adoption of international trade agreements, whether activists are subject to repression, and shifts in international conflicts (Bartley 2007; Carothers 2016; Kay 2005; O’Neill 2004, Simmons 2009; and; Von Bülow 2010). Transnational IWS mobilization emerged in spite of the inopportune national and international political climate. Activists faced the rise of right-wing national governments in Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, and the US, among other contexts, and the continuity of right-wing forces in various powerful states, thus, obstructing the ability among activists to rely on the support of a powerful state, a theorized element of transnational political opportunity structures. No major changes had taken place in the intergovernmental landscape. The Trump administration had blocked the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and announced the intent to withdraw from the Paris Accord on Climate. The emergence of a transnational mobilization of the breadth and magnitude of the IWS was not theoretically expected. While the strength of right-wing forces at this juncture did not signal obvious openings for transnational mobilization, it was precisely the increased strength of right-wing forces internationally that motivated activism to resist these forces. The hostile climate for transnational feminist mobilization did not preclude the struggle to build intersectional solidarity across differences.

As a transnational campaign, IWS sought to move beyond resistance. IWS gave substantive content to the resistance to right-wing forces by articulating grievances and agendas for just futures. Doing so in a hostile political climate required organizing labor. This labor intentionally sought to articulate an intersectional form of solidarity. Leaders of the Una Menos (2018) movement wrote:

As women of the world, we find ourselves in a process of existential revolution. On March 8, 2017, we united to show our force: we staged the first international women’s strike, in a transnational, multilingual, intersectional, and heterogeneous articulation, in which fifty-five countries participated. We began to forge a new internationalism.

Through participant-observation of the IWS, Çağatay (2023) found that an intersectional understanding of solidarity was among the three guiding principles of IWS organizing.² This intersectional approach to organizing made space for the co-existence of distinct notions of systems of oppression among organizers. One perspective pushes for a dynamic understanding of oppression resulting from multiple interacting systems of oppression. On the other hand, a Marxist feminist approach promotes the notion that only one system of oppression exists, capitalism, and that racism and imperialism are constitutive of the latter. Proponents argued: “the root of the problem is capitalism, and that racism and imperialism are integral to the latter” (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019). This approach has called for a greater recognition of social reproductive labor.³ Despite these differences of perspectives, power asymmetries across social groups, and the decentralized approach to organizing transnationally, organizers across distinct national and regional settings and social groups coordinated mass mobilization, recalling and building on histories of transnational feminist movements.

The 2017 IWS was born out of a context of heightened mobilization against capitalist exploitation, the right-wing’s ascendance, gender-based violence, and authoritarian repression. In the weeks prior to international women’s day, activists issued broad calls to strike and mobilize against right-wing and neoliberal forces across the world. In the United States, the Women’s Strike Platform centered around five main points – a demand to end gender violence in institutionalized and domestic life, a call for reproductive justice for everyone, to institute labor rights and a robust welfare system, a commitment to anti-racist and anti-imperialist feminism, and a call for environmental justice. The platform connected each issue to the struggles of women of color, immigrant women, and trans women. In the demand to end gendered violence, the IWS noted that this meant an end to police brutality and immigration raids. In the call for reproductive justice, the platform emphasized a definition of women that included women of color and both cis and trans women. The platform highlighted the need for free abortion access and affordable healthcare. Further, the IWS platform emphasized women’s autonomy over their bodies. Organizers tied the history of forced sterilization for women of color to the attack on abortion rights as issues rooted in control over women’s bodies.

The labor and reproductive labor rights contained in the platform demanded a 15 USD minimum wage, free universal childcare, maternity leave, paid sick leave and family leave, and the right to organize a union in the workplace. It also recognized that formal and informal labor must be paid fairly and equally. Additionally, the extensive 2017 US platform centered an anti-racist and anti-imperialist feminism that distinguished it from neoliberal approaches to feminism, which focus on women’s incremental progress within existing systems of oppression. The platform tied White supremacy to a history of colonialism in the country, and argued that this legacy manifested in the present day as police brutality, militarization, and mass incarceration. The platform’s call demanded the decolonization of Palestine, support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and support for Immigrants’ rights. The list of demands also included a demand for a sustainable future and the protection of natural resources. This was especially critical after the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016 where police brutality and violence against Water Protectors followed the protests.⁴

Throughout the world, other IWS platforms shared a call for a new feminist internationalism, where women’s issues were articulated as intersectional and heterogenous. These IWS platforms called for freedom from racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation and argued that these freedoms go hand in hand with liberation from gendered oppression. The strike then, strived to be more than a singular event, but a sustained movement and effort to disrupt other forms of violence.⁵

IWS in Spain and Latin America

This call resonated with Black feminists, who recognized the global nature of the crisis affecting women and rejected being victimized as part of it. Building off of centuries-long organizing traditions against imperialism, colonialism, racism, human rights violations, and sexism in Latin America (Laó-Montes 2016; Marino 2019), Black feminists articulated platforms and mobilized struggles that centered community autonomy and multiple forms of marginalization. The prominent Black feminist collective, Afroféminas, announced that they would join the 2017 strike in Spain, urging world governments to take immediate action to ensure women’s well-being. Their demands emphasized immediate access to free healthcare, including reproductive rights, protection of the planet, a stop to domestic violence, and an establishment of serious legal sanctions for criminals in cases of rape, domestic violence, and other kinds of gendered crimes.⁶ In Nicaragua, the Afrolatinamerican, Afro-Caribbean, and Diasporic Women’s Network joined the call of “Not one less!” The call to end all forms of misogyny, femicide, and violence against women especially resonated amongst Black Nicaraguan women given the then-recent assassination of Vilma Trujillo, a young woman tortured and assassinated at the hands of a religious leader who claimed to be conducting an exorcism.⁷ Organizations like La Via Campesina brought together peasant, indigenous women, and afro-descendant women in Honduras to march against gendered violence and corporate exploitation. Their call included a demand for reproductive justice, just agrarian land reform, and environmental protections given the recent death of Indigenous environmental activist Berta Caceres.⁸ Across the Caribbean, Black feminist organizations created their own hashtag, #LifeinLeggings, to protest sexual violence, rape culture, and to overcome the myth that sexual harassment only occurs because of women’s choice of dress. The hashtag united hundreds of women and emphasized women’s autonomy, equal education for women, reproductive justice, LGBT rights, in addition to protesting all forms of violence against women. As in Nicaragua, Jamaican women like those in the radical organization Tambourine Army, also protested gendered violence in religious spaces.⁹ Strike organizers managed to mobilize demonstrators in the Global North and the Global South while using discourse that recognized differences among women and called for solidarity across these differences (Çağatay 2023).

Demonstrators in over 50 countries echoed these calls for action, creating a transnational mobilization (Ni Una Menos 2018). In Spain, a general strike backed by unions mobilized more than 5 million to engage in work stoppages, garnering widespread support according to public opinion polls, with one poll estimating strike support at 83%, becoming the movement with the highest mobilization capacity in Spain (Portos 2019).¹⁰ In the US, more than 60 demonstrations mobilized thousands.¹¹ In Brazil, the 2017 IWS brought hundreds of protestors out. Demonstrators called for the resignation of conservative president Michel Temer, notorious for taking office after the impeachment and removal of President Dilma Rousseff, his misogyny, reflected in his mostly male cabinet, and his initiatives cutting gender equality programs and ministries around racial, women, and human rights. In Nigeria, students and activists joined the international ONE campaign protesting disparities in women’s education by staging walk-ins and a 5 km march. In Turkey, a politically diverse set of women’s rights groups under the coalition “Women are Stronger Together” (KBG Coalition), mobilized over 10,000 demonstrators in Istanbul to march in protest of violence against women.¹² The march also included men and women from labor unions, student groups, and LGBT groups (Çağatay 2023). IWS showed promise of becoming a popular vehicle for social change that mobilized the type of alliances that many recognized were needed to transform intersecting systems of oppression.

For instance, Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser (2019) feminist manifesto (Feminism for the 99%), inspired by the IWS for which they organized, calls for broad-based alliances that take differences seriously in efforts to build transformative mass mobilization:

…the differences, inequalities, and hierarchies that inhere in capitalist social relations do give rise to conflicts of interest among the oppressed and exploited. And by itself, the proliferation of fragmentary struggles will not give birth to the sort of robust, broad-based alliances needed to transform society. However, such alliances will become utterly impossible if we fail to take our differences seriously.

Similarly, Taylor (2017) recognizes the need for a “much bigger movement to win.” Emejulu (2017), however, raised concerns about the use of populist politics in efforts to build broad mobilization under the Feminism for the 99% banner. In Emejulu’s view, Feminism for the 99% sought to combine populist and feminist approaches to building transnational solidarity for gender and racial justice. Yet, populism’s long standing reliance on homogeneity as a motivation for broad mobilization stands in contrast to the recognition and negotiation of differences that intersectional feminist politics seek to place at the center of efforts to build movements that avoid neglecting the issues of multiply marginalized groups. The promise of Feminism for the 99% as a new form of populist and feminist politics, Emejulu (2017) argues, is its effort to build a majority consisting of the dispossessed and multiply marginalized. Çağatay (2023) observes that IWS enact solidarity amongst multiply marginalized groups in three ways: through coalitions across political identities, linking struggles across scales (from local to global), and by expanding the traditional reach and subject of disruptive tactics and labor solidarity.

Scholars and activists calling for intersectional approaches to building solidarity found promise in broad-based mobilizations like the International Women’s Strike, which sought to center intersecting issues of oppressed multitudes and ground itself in grassroots mobilization. Yet, calls for mobilization and platforms paid less attention to the means that would enable such alliances and sustain a movement that draws support from, addresses the issues of, and mobilizes different multiply marginalized social groups. While some deploy notions of shared experiences under authoritarianism and capitalist exploitation to motivate mobilization, emphasizing commonalities while discursively recognizing differences did not sustain mobilization of the magnitude of 2017. In the following section, we examine the challenges that marked efforts to enact intersectional solidarity and sustain solidarity across difference in the IWS.

Challenges of enacting intersectional solidarity

The 2017 IWS was notable for its attempts to bridge distinct struggles under the broader umbrella of a feminist labor strike. Drawing support from some labor unions, women’s organizations, and collectives, the strike brought hundreds of thousands of women to the streets in protest and millions to strike. In Spain, the 2017 IWS consisted of a coalition of over 400 groups, which made up the 8 M (8th of March) Commission. The 8 M Commission: ”As part of a lengthy preparatory process,” so the sentence reads ”As part of a lengthy preparatory process, the 8M Commission sought to organize women across distinct struggles under the themes of the rejection of gendered violence and discrimination in the workplace, rejection of neoliberal policies and anti-LGBT legislation, a call to legal access to abortion, and a protest of the feminization of poverty, amongst other causes (Campillo 2019).¹³ The 8 M Commission released a Manifesto outlining the IWS’s demands (Sandu and Fernández 2021). The IWS encompassed diverse sets of issues under the banner of, “We, the women of the world…” It was an opportunity for multiply marginalized women to come together and join against intersecting structures of oppression. The IWS was seen as evolving from a 4th wave tradition of feminist practice based in social group difference and an intersectional analysis of how gendered issues are compounded by other systems of power, such as colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, class, nationalism, among others.

Initially, various Black feminist organizations, joined the strike given the initial intersectional frameworks of the Commission. However, in practice, multiply marginalized participants of the 8 M commission and IWS took issue with what Sandu and Fernandez (2021) describe as a “sisterhood solidarity” approach that subsumed the unique concerns of Black, racialized, and immigrant women under a hegemonic category of “women.” In this approach, issues of gender violence, gendered workplace harassment and discrimination, and queer issues were posed mostly in relation to White middle-class women and without referencing how marginalized women experience these issues in compounding fashion. These issues were further compounded by experiences of exclusion of Black women organizers in broader women’s movement organizing spaces and exhaustion stemming from their unsuccessful attempts to move dominant subgroups to center the struggles of multiply marginalized groups.¹⁴

The discontent with the 8 M’s insufficient focus on minority women was only exacerbated by the Spanish and international media’s refusal to cover non-White middle-class women’s issues because they were deemed outside of the feminist movement and too complex for audiences (Sandu and Fernandez 2021; Fernandez 2018). Sandu and Fernández (2021) note that by using a master frame of “women ’’ and “sisterhood” for the Strike, the 8 M Commission took an additive instead of an intersectional approach. The collective identity of “women” was assumed to stem from a central shared experience, primary to all other experiences of oppression even along the lines of race, class, and disability. The experiences of Black, immigrant, trans, disabled, and working-class women within the 8 M strike therefore lacked visibility. Further, the 8 M Strike missed an opportunity to demonstrate how issues of gendered violence and gendered oppression are connected and deeply interrelated with other systems of oppression.

By 2018, AfroFéminas released a statement announcing that they would not join the 2018 IWS. Stating, “We believe that our decision is the only possible decision we could make as Black and racialized women in this country [Spain],” Afrofeminas cited the lack of representation and “complete invisibilization” of Black women in the movement, in addition to the lack of media coverage and prioritization to the issues of racial inequality as a feminist issue (Afrofeminas 2018). Other groups emphasized these claims. Spanish minority feminist groups such as Afroféminas, Spanish Roma Serseni, Black Feminist Association EFAE, and Gitanas Feministas por la Diversidad, were left to do the bulk of the bridge-building work within the 8 M Commission to bring critical awareness to issues of racialized gender discrimination and violence against immigrant agricultural and domestic laborers (Sandu and Fernández 2021).

Interactions with groups who withdrew their participation focused on asking for explanations for their withdrawal, instead of engagement in inclusive deliberative processes aimed at reshaping movement praxis in light of these discussions.¹⁵ These interactions stemmed from the expectation among dominant subgroups that those withdrawing had a duty to explain themselves. Black women who opted to withdraw assumed a burden of explaining their exclusion through constant media inquiries, social media exchanges, and private communications. Black women organizers did not perceive that these requests for explanations for their withdrawal were genuine, particularly after their explanations were met with responses that attempted to dissipate concern by pointing to the existence of a committee that dealt with the issues of immigration and racism. Instead, these responses were deemed to be instances of tokenization.¹⁶

Discussion

The 2017 IWS and the instances of mobilization that preceded it demonstrated the possibility of mobilizing broad-based demonstrations across social group differences and national contexts. Yet, by 2019, these mobilization efforts had significantly diminished in magnitude and geographical reach. Various multiply marginalized groups had abstained from rejoining the strike while others publicly announced a rupture with IWS groups. Here we seek to make sense of this rupture in light of notions of intersectional solidarity. If intersectional solidarity refers to an ongoing process of creating ties and coalition across social differences by negotiating power asymmetries, we ask: what does this negotiation of power asymmetries look like in this context? What happens when negotiations do not take place or when parties to these negotiations do not agree with the process and how it shapes movement praxis? Intersectionality can be a critical lens that helps us understand the differences between social groups in relation to structures of power and how these differences shape organizing structures, discourses, agendas, and social movement politics more generally. The ways in which organizers approach negotiations of difference can shape the extent to which building and sustaining coalitions is possible. How organizers issue, treat, and reject or embrace criticism can shape the course of negotiations of difference and whether those who hold the power reshape power asymmetries in movements.

Organizers come into mobilization having developed consciousness that may align with distinct intellectual and activist traditions. In the case of Spain’s IWS, Afroféminas collective Antoinette Torres emphasizes that Black feminism has its own history, rooted in racial and anti-colonial struggle, a parallel history that is separate from the White feminism portrayed by the strike. In Torres’ view, these differences aided the lack of representation and visibility of Black women in the movement and the failure to prioritize the issues of multiply marginalized groups beyond the discourses deployed to mobilize them.¹⁷ Afroféminas’s experience in IWS organizing spaces shaped their decision to withdraw from 8 M coalitional work in 2018. These accounts of the experience of Afroféminas in Spain’s IWS signal the need for movements to adopt intersectional forms of solidarity in their praxis, and that recognizing intersecting forms of marginalization in platforms might ignite mobilization but is not a sufficient condition to sustain it.

8 M organizer June Montero responded to Afroféminas withdrawal and argued that it did not signal the 2018 strike’s failure. Rather, she argued:

The strike’s proposals were clear–that all women would have a voice and that they could participate in one form or another. In respect to whether all women felt included, I think that racialized women did have a lot of voice; in fact, inside of the 8 M Commission exists the Comission of Migration and Antiracism, which was also very active during the entire process and participated from the core of the 8 M Commission. Thanks to this we are all part of the process, and there are no borders, like last year. Instead, the perspective of racialized women and the fight against racism is transversal. At the start of the Commision, the first action of the week was a feminist protest against the CIE Aluche.

(Madrid’s Immigrant Detention center)

Yet, the presence of a committee on migration and against racism was not enough to signal a broader commitment to anti-racism and immigration justice. Sandu and Fernández (2021) point to the work that minority feminist groups such as Afrofeminas, Black Feminist Association EFAE, Roma Serseni, Gitanas Feminstas por la Diversidad did to bring awareness to issues of gender discrimination and violence against immigrant agricultural and domestic laborers within the 8 M Commission, reproducing dynamics whereby bridge-building and intersectional consciousness raising work predominantly falls on women of color who are not made visible and substantively represented in movement leadership.

Media portrayals of the strike also posed challenges for negotiations among different social groups. June Fernández recalls that media reports ignored demands specifically calling to address issues of multiply marginalized groups.¹⁸ Media portrayals of IWS tended to ignore trans issues, issues at the intersection of gender and race, and colonialism, among other issues for which outlets used their discretion and power to determine what would be too “difficult” for popular audiences. In doing so, IWS faced obstructions to its efforts to popularize an intersectional agenda for justice and shift public consciousness about intersecting forms of oppression. In turn, these obstructions shaped the extent to which IWS and its coalition partners were able to represent and advance the demands of multiply marginalized groups publicly.

Ultimately, these challenges led to an “us vs them” dynamic within the organizing 8 M Commission. Autonomous organizing spaces are not antithetical to intersectional solidarity. Rather, many argue that autonomous organizing spaces help engender forms of oppositional “double consciousness” or “mestiza consciousness” for marginalized groups (Mansbridge 2001; Martinez 2002). Oppositional consciousness allows marginalized groups to articulate the dynamics of their oppression and mobilize broader coalitions to stand in solidarity with their struggle (Weldon 2006a). Marginalized groups or “internal minorities” within movements have found effective ways to push for prioritizing their demands within movements through autonomous organizing (Ferree and Ewig 2013 Weldon 2006a, 2011). Autonomous spaces for organizing allow multiply marginalized groups to create counter-publics where they can develop counter-hegemonic ideas and strategize ways to advance their claims within and beyond movement and coalitional spaces.¹⁹ Autonomous organizing allows multiply marginalized groups to speak for and represent themselves, thus enhancing the standing that anti-oppressive movements have as representatives of those they claim to advocate for. Non-additive historical perspectives that decenter white women’s organizing reveal autonomous organizing spaces to be critical components of building intersectional feminist movements (Blackwell 2011).

Autonomous organizing need not entail a complete rupture from broader movement bodies. Activists and intellectuals working within Black feminist traditions have simultaneously organized autonomously while calling on broader movements to enact solidarity with multiply marginalized groups (Combahee River Collective [1977] 1995). Transnational feminist organizing had successfully adopted autonomous organizing of multiply marginalized groups as a norm of inclusion, enabling their enhanced political impact on the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (Weldon 2006a). Yet, transnational feminist organizing had often struggled with tensions in its efforts to sustain solidarity across groups (Weldon 2006a), including but not limited to in Latin American human rights organizing (Marino 2019). These experiences signal the non-linear dynamics of enacting and sustaining intersectional solidarity.

Afroféminas founder Antoinette Torres recalls how Black feminist traditions informed their decision to withhold their labor from 8 M organizing, recognizing its “history, rooted in racial and colonial struggle, a parallel history that is separate from the White feminism portrayed by the strike. That is why Black women decided to go their own way for 8 M 2018.”²⁰ For Blakey, Machen, Ruez, and Montoya and Seminario (2022), Afrofeminas’ decision to break from the strike demonstrates the political enmeshment of subjectivities. Afrofeminas rupture from the 8 m Commission built off of a long history of Black feminist resistance to systems of oppression and white supremacy. Critique and disruption challenge eurocentric hegemonic assumptions of a White middle class feminist norm, and was a way of negotiating differences of power across spheres of political life.

We theorize that rupture, such as the one observed among Afroféminas and 8 M, can be an act of intersectional solidarity insofar as it is an instance of the processes of negotiating power asymmetries intended to insist on the need to recognize the issues of multiply marginalized groups, represent them in movement leadership, prioritize their issues in movement agendas and actions (not just mission statements), and allocate support for the labor of multiply marginalized groups. Çağatay (2023) observes similar dynamics in IWS organizing in Turkey, where “inclusive agendas were easier to maintain than inclusive organizing on the ground.”

Afroféminas did not signal a complete rupture and unwillingness to engage in future coalitional work. Rather, as Yania Concepción of Afroféminas argues, the separation from the strike after being invisibilized is not an act of isolation. Concepción affirmed the possibility of forming alliances and joining future struggles.²¹ Yet, the conditions for sustaining the bridging, intersectional consciousness-raising, and intersectional praxis labor of Black women had not been generated. This case suggests that the degree of organizing autonomy can shape the progress of negotiations of power differences. Further, the presence of committees and caucuses focused on the issues of multiply marginalized groups may not be enough to build oppositional consciousness if they are not sufficiently autonomous from dominant subgroups.

The imminent and recurrent nature of an annual strike posed yet another challenge for organizing. The recurrent character of an annual strike created pressures and reminders to consider whether the dialectical relationship between intersectional consciousness and praxis had advanced sufficiently to merit renovating activist commitments to the tactic and movement leadership. Upon reconsideration of the political goals that IWS advanced, groups like Afroféminas determined that the coalitional approach to advancing Black women’s struggles was not effective. Disruptive tactics can create a kind of binary whereby supporting the strike becomes a choice. The imminence and recurrence of this decision can limit the time and space that movements might need to engage in the complex dynamics of intersectional coalition building and solidarity.

Conclusion

Coalitions and alliances are strategic, and in this case, militant. Their creation need not to emerge from opportune contexts. IWS organizing emerged forcefully in spite of a hostile political climate. Complete agreement on all issues and movement agenda priorities among activists is not a precondition of coalition-building, and yet, experiences of disagreement in praxis can be indicative of the possibility of collaborating to advance shared political objectives.

Those who withdrew publicly from IWS no longer saw in IWS a praxis that informed and was informed by intersectional consciousness. This withdrawal is not a refusal to be in solidarity, but a rejection of being in coalition and participating in a particular action because Afroféminas did not see themselves reflected in the movement’s priorities, and instead, saw themselves excluded. Further, activists raised concern about experiencing violence in coalitional work, where their identity as political subjects was being compromised. Black feminist organizers did not conceptualize their withdrawal from IWS as a call to retreat from organizing, but rather, an investment in the Black political consciousness and power.

Withdrawing Black women’s labor within movements that fail to enact intersectional praxis while claiming to prioritize their issues has been used as a tactic to pressure more privileged subgroups throughout negotiations of power differences. In doing so, multiply marginalized groups can withdraw consent to be represented by a movement’s leadership and erode the public standing that anti-oppressive struggles seek in efforts to bring about social change. This withdrawal and rupture, however, have important implications for the public standing of the movement and its prospects for political influence and social change.

Intersectional solidarity is not a linear process that inevitably leads to progress, whereby there is a problem, theory is applied, intersectional consciousness becomes commonly accepted, praxis is adjusted accordingly, and movements achieve unity in diversity. Because intersectional solidarity is rooted in a commitment to critiquing interlocking systems of power (Collins 2015), intersectional solidarity must act as a kind of synthesis whereby intersectional consciousness continuously informs and is informed by the praxis of a movement. There are instances in which calls to unity, even when issued in good faith, can still result in exclusions. The experiences of multiply marginalized groups with IWS’s praxis informed a kind of oppositional consciousness over the limited and essentialist notion of the subject of “woman” in the movement. This oppositional consciousness, in turn, informs a distinct praxis.

Afroféminas’s praxis of intersectional solidarity meant negotiating unequal power through generating rupture. The rupture informs the continuity and deepening of intersectional consciousness but limits the magnitude of the IWS’s praxis (i.e., Afroféminas no longer informs the broader praxis that generates disruptive tactics and mobilizes larger masses). In doing so, this rupture also has consequences for the praxis that persists among those whose limited notion of subjectivity persists. For instance, the absence of Afroféminas and the public critique raises questions about the representativeness (authority that a movement has to make claims on behalf of various groups) of the broader movement, the IWS. What could have been a broad intersectional struggle turns into an intersectional consciousness without praxis and a praxis without intersectional consciousness.

Acknowledgement

APC charges for this article were fully paid by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Fernando Tormos-Aponte

Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh with specializations in social movements, environmental and ethnoracial justice, the politics of social groups, and social change.

Shariana Ferrer-Núñez

Shariana Ferrer-Núñez is a young Black queer feminist Puerto Rican activist and scholar. She is the co-founder of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, a grassroots radical feminist organization in Puerto Rico. Ms. Ferrer-Núñez is one of the prominent figures in the feminist movement in Puerto Rico; she was one of the organizers of the Women’s Strike, May Day, and other radical movements. Ms. Ferrer-Núñez has seized opportunities to speak to wide audiences about political practices and insights concerning intersectionality, social justice, and social movements as an invited speaker and organizer at international conferences in Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, México, and Ecuador.

Carolina Hernandez

Carolina Hernandez is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh with a back ground in labor and immigration activism. Her research is at the intersections of race and labor. She is specifically interested in how anti-racist ideologies and interracial solidarities influence social movement unionism within the United States. More broadly, she interested in researching transnational labor struggles organized by people of color.

Notes

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/02/07/this-is-what-we-learned-by-counting-the-womens-marches/

2. The other two guiding principles that Çağatay (2023) identifies are an acknowledgment of the systemic dynamics of oppression that lead to the deterioration of women’s lives globally and a broad definition of labor that highlights the value of women’s work in all spheres of life.

3. Arruzza (2016), Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser (2019), and Bhattacharya (2017) are among the best known articulations of this perspective.

4. https://www.facebook.com/profile/100068253660802/search/?q=platform

5. https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article/1/1/268/139321/Call-to-the-International-Women-s-Strike-March-8

6. https://afrofeminas.com/2017/03/08/paro-internacional-de-mujeres/

7. https://themis.org.br/red-afro-nicaragua-se-pronuncia-ante-femicidios-y-violencia-de-genero/

8. https://viacampesina.org/es/honduras-las-mujeres-hondurenas-tambien-paramos/

9. https://www.stabroeknews.com/2017/03/13/features/in-the-diaspora/international-womens-day-caribbean-marching-solidarity-lifeinleggings-end-violence-women-girls/;

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/10/jamaica-caribbean-tambourine-army-sexual-violence

https://lifeinleggings.org/about-us/origin-story/

10. https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/08/inenglish/1520498047_423763.html

11. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Cq-9bGjHBkoaqkLr9IwxKD8O8gtOcorlTdRkRThRl6o/edit#gid=1527464273

12. https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2017/mar/08/international-womens-day-2017-protests-activism-strike-live

13. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/09/argentinas-anticapitalist-feminism

14. Interview with author 5/6/23.

15. Interview with author 5/6/23.

16. Interview with author 5/6/23.

17. https://www.eldiario.es/desalambre/feminismo-mujer-racializada-afrofeminas_1_2236855.html

18. https://www.pikaramagazine.com/2018/05/del-espejismo-de-la-igualdad-al-desbordamiento-de-la-huelga-feminista/

19. See Fraser (1992) and Young (2000) on the importance of counter publics.

20. https://www.eldiario.es/desalambre/feminismo-mujer-racializada-afrofeminas_1_2236855.html

21. https://www.briega.org/es/entrevistas/entrevista-a-yania-concepcion-feminismo-blanco-lo-ha-centralizado-como-si-todo-hubiera