G&S306383 by Juan Pardo

Gender & Society http://gas.sagepub.com

Quotidian Disruption and Women's Activism in Times of Crisis, Argentina 2002-2003 Elizabeth Borland and Barbara Sutton Gender Society 2007; 21; 700 DOI: 10.1177/0891243207306383 The online version of this article can be found at: http://gas.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/5/700

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QUOTIDIAN DISRUPTION AND WOMEN’S ACTIVISM IN TIMES OF CRISIS, ARGENTINA 2002-2003 ELIZABETH BORLAND The College of New Jersey BARBARA SUTTON University at Albany–SUNY

Argentina recently underwent a period of economic crisis that shook societal foundations. People turned to collective action for social and political change, and women were at the forefront of many protests. This crisis offers an opportunity to study a moment of “quotidian disruption”—when routine practices and ingrained assumptions are threatened—as an impetus for mobilization. The authors draw on ethnographic observations and analyze 44 in-depth interviews with activist women in Argentina to explore their responses to quotidian disruption. The authors show that the Argentine crisis challenged everyday practices and expectations that were often gendered, fostering activism that drew on previous social frameworks while also creating new ones. Activism became a new quotidian for many women and transformed their identities and experiences with politics and gender relations. Keywords: activism; Argentina; economic crisis; social movements; women

n December 2001, the economy of Argentina collapsed. Citizens took to the streets to demand social change, marking a period of heightened protest in which women’s participation stood out. Observers suggested that women were the majority in many protests, and some estimated that

AUTHORS’ NOTE: The authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally to this article. We thank activists in Argentina who generously shared their insights and stories with us and the following scholars for their suggestions: Gender & Society anonymous reviewers and editors Dana Britton and Christine Williams, Mary Nell Trautner, Michael Mulcahy, Leslie Gates, David Snow, and members of the Columbia University Contentious Politics Workshop, the University of Oregon Sociology Department Research Colloquium, and DaDNYRG. Barbara Sutton is also grateful to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Tokyo Foundation, the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society, and the Stephen L. Wasby Research Grant for funding her research. GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 21 No. 5, October 2007 700-722 DOI: 10.1177/0891243207306383 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society 700 Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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the largest movements were composed of as much as 75 percent women (Hauser 2002). Women blocked roads to demand jobs and state subsidies, joined neighborhood assemblies, occupied factories, and banged on pots and pans as part of widespread street protests. We explore the meaning of these actions for women activists. How did the disruption of everyday practices and expectations affect women’s activism? How was activism incorporated into daily routines during the crisis? How were women’s lives, subjectivities, and perspectives transformed as a result? Answering these questions can help us learn how periods of crisis can interrupt and transform gender relations. What commonly came to be called “the crisis” was a period of economic and political turmoil that shook the foundations of Argentine society. Years of neoliberal “structural adjustment” policies enacted by presidents Carlos Menem (1989-1999) and Fernando de la Rúa (19992001) drastically reduced social expenditures. Unemployment reached a high of 21.5 percent in May 2002, with higher rates in some regions (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos 2007). The policy pegging the peso to the dollar became untenable in late 2001, and to prevent a rush on banks, de la Rúa put a freeze on accounts. This action and economic hardship sparked widespread protests, with looting in several regions. When de la Rúa declared a state of emergency on December 19, cacerolazo protests erupted as city dwellers banged on pans and pots (cacerolas) and rallied around the slogan “Que se vayan todos” (They all must go!). The president resigned, leading to uncertainty. A few weeks later, the peso was allowed to float and its value plummeted, reducing many Argentines’ savings. Inflation rose, employment became more precarious, and by 2002, more than half of the population was living below the poverty line (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos 2002). During this period, a growing number of citizens questioned their leaders’ abilities and integrity, as well as the wisdom of policies advocated by international lenders. Shouting “Que se vayan todos” they blamed neoliberal reformers for letting elites plunder national resources at a time when many were losing their jobs and sinking into poverty. It was the climax of protests started years before by victims of the economic model, most notably unemployed piqueteros/piqueteras (picketers) who blocked major roads to protest neoliberalism and demand their right to work. This time of contention offers an opportunity to explore collective action arising from crises that disrupt or strain social systems. Since women were increasingly visible in the protests and many came to question the gender-differentiated effects of policies, the crisis provides a window to examine activism through a gendered lens and from a feminist Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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perspective. We discuss how the crisis challenged the gendered practices and taken-for-granted assumptions of everyday life, acting as a catalyst for many women to engage in collective action. Activism became a new quotidian that shaped the lives of women involved in movements and transformed women’s experiences and perspectives about politics, gender relations, and themselves more generally. The crisis signifies a moment of both rupture and continuity, as many women drew on previous social frameworks (e.g., motherhood, activist experiences) while creating new ones, including new visions of women’s roles in society. In the following sections, we situate the theory and methods that inform our project and then develop these points. EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Argentina’s crisis and the resulting political tumult captured the attention of activists, media pundits, and social scientists alike. Many describe the neoliberal model implemented during the 1990s as a phenomenon that radically transformed Argentine society while recognizing its continuity with policies adopted by the military dictators who ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 (Argumedo and Quintar 2003; Ferradás 2003; Svampa 2005). Many scholarly works describe and analyze the rising wave of protest and the emergence of new forms of contentious politics in Argentina. Some examine activism in the context of class politics, unionism, and the dramatic labor market changes that were part of neoliberal policies (Dinerstein 2001; Olmedo and Murray 2002; Patroni 2002; Petras 2003). Others examine the role of political parties and the crisis of representation (Galafassi 2003; Pírez 2002), how protesters understood democracy (Sautu et al. 2004), the role of culture during this period (Armony and Armony 2005; Vezzetti 2002), how participation in piquetes and cacerolazos transformed protesters’ identities (Barbetta and Bidaseca 2004), and how the crisis affected struggles over ethnicity and immigration (Grimson 2003, 2005). Yet the gendered dimensions of the crisis and women’s prominent participation have been understudied. When we think of Argentine women’s activism, the image that comes to mind is that of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, mothers of those who “disappeared” during the last military dictatorship. While the Mothers continue to be significant in politics—active symbols of memory, truth, and justice (Borland 2006; Bouvard 1994)—many other women have surfaced as significant political subjects (e.g., Auyero 2003). During the past decade, and particularly during the crisis, women participated in street Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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protests and a wide range of mixed-gender groups, including the piqueteros/piqueteras, popular assemblies, bartering clubs, and “recuperated” factories and other businesses after the owners went bankrupt or threatened to shut down operations (these are known as “empresas recuperadas”—recuperated businesses taken over by the workers). Women formed groups such as Mujeres Agropecuarias en Lucha (Agricultural Women in Struggle, which mobilized against the forced sale of family farms) (Giarracca and Teubal 2001) and subgroups within mixed-gender organizations such as Mujeres de Pie (Women Standing), part of the piquetero/piquetera group Barrios de Pie (Neighborhoods Standing). Yet despite the salience of women’s participation—so important that activists labeled it the “feminization of resistance”—scholars often ignore women and the gendered nature of protest in Argentina. Much work on the recent mobilization barely mentions women’s resistance, using the generic masculine to refer to both men and women activists (e.g., piqueteros), which tends to make women invisible and implicitly suggests that activists are men. Accounts of worker and piquetero/piquetera mobilization usually gloss over gender and overlook neoliberalism’s disparate effects on men and women. Some studies mention women’s activism as an aside, while others acknowledge it but do not elaborate on gender. Notable exceptions are works of some feminists and other scholars (e.g., Basco and Foti Laxalde 2003; Chejter 2003; Di Marco et al. 2003), including edited volumes with activist women’s testimonies (Chejter 2002; Red Internacional de Género y Comercio 2003). Thus, we build on insights from this relatively small body of literature to highlight women’s activism in times of crisis and as part of a longer tradition of women’s movement participation. To do so, we apply “quotidian disruption,” a concept that is well suited for understanding activism in a crisis like the recent one in Argentina. Proposed by Snow et al. (1998), the concept is a modern variant of breakdown theory, which dominated the early literature on social movements. The authors posit that threats to the quotidian, that is, the “taken-forgranted routines and attitudes of everyday life,” heighten prospects for activism (Snow et al. 1998, 1). The quotidian has two dimensions: (1) daily practices and routines and (2) a cognitive component they term “natural attitude”—that which is taken for granted. When quotidian disruption occurs, both natural attitude and routine practices become problematic and confusing, and this is an impetus for mobilization. One of the conditions that Snow et al. (1998, 11) identify as likely to cause quotidian disruption is particularly applicable to Argentina: “alteration in taken-for-granted subsistence routines and expectancies due to a declining resource base.” Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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We maintain that Snow and his coauthors’ (1998) arguments about subsistence routines and quotidian disruption provide a window through which we can examine the heightened mobilization in Argentina, particularly women’s participation. The disruption of everyday expectations and routines led to diverse attempts by civil society to reform and repair Argentina’s social fabric. Responses to the crisis were multilayered and sometimes overlapping, ranging from individual strategies (e.g., cutting consumption, emigrating, suing to recover savings, sending more family members into the workforce) to collective action.1 Our focus is on women’s activism within the diverse social movements that emerged or continued in the crisis: from neighborhood assemblies to feminist and lesbian groups, from piquetero/piquetera movements to human rights organizations, from labor unionism to the movement of occupied factories, and from consumer movements to activism around ethno-racial and immigrant demands. We follow the lead of international work on women and politics (Basu 1995; Fisher 1993; Naples and Desai 2002), moving beyond the causes of mobilization to look at how activism transforms women’s lives. The project contributes to dialogues in the literature on women in Latin America, including the politicization of gender identities, maternalism, and feminist and women’s activism (Alvarez 1990; Bayard de Volo 2001; Kirkwood 1988; Lind 2005; Molyneux 1985; Power 2002; Rodríguez 1994; Vargas 1995). This case brings into clear view the role of women as subjects contending with and challenging neoliberal globalization. Even though some responses to disruption may be conservative attempts to reestablish the preexisting status quo (including the previous gender order), we highlight how activist women seize the transformative potential of moments of crisis. DATA AND METHOD This study is based on qualitative data collected for two separate studies about women in Argentina—on the politics of women’s bodies (Sutton) and the trajectories of women’s movement groups in Buenos Aires (Borland). Drawing from these projects is an indirect approach, since in neither case was the exclusive focus women’s activism in the crisis. Yet our research yielded rich and consistent data on this topic. Both studies combine in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations: Borland conducted field research for 15 months between December 2001 and July 2003, Sutton for 14 months during 2002 and 2003. Both authors participated in protests, meetings, and other movement events and traveled to the Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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National Women’s Meeting in Salta and the National Feminist Meeting in Tandil. Our observations informed the analysis of the interview data, which is the central focus of this project. Each study included tape-recorded, semistructured interviews with women participating in movement activity. In her study, Sutton relied on a combination of snowballing and convenience sampling to recruit interviewees. Her goal was to interview a diverse pool of women along categories of occupation, education, income, sexual identity, race/ethnicity, religion, age, and activism. The latter category was especially significant given the context of heightened collective action—about half of Sutton’s 50 interviewees were activists and were incorporated in the sample for this shared project. Borland’s study was focused on middle-class women’s movement organizations in Buenos Aires, so she contacted representatives of such groups and ultimately interviewed at least one activist from a total of 47 organizations that operated during a 20-year period. The interviewees who are included in the shared project are the ones who spoke about their activism during the recent crisis. For the purposes of this article, we merged data from the transcripts of 44 interviews lasting from 45 minutes to five hours. Our sample includes women who identify as piqueteras, feminists, labor activists, sex workers’ union members, and popular assembly participants as well as women in human rights organizations and groups defending the rights of lesbians, consumers, and racial/ethnic minorities. We call these women “activists” because they dedicated significant time and efforts toward social change as part of diverse social movements (see McAdam and Snow 1997). In interviews conducted in Spanish, they spoke of their activist experiences, goals, and strategies. In this article, we use pseudonyms to protect the identity of our interviewees and other movement participants. Although we each had close contact with many activists and were involved in women’s movement activities (in fact, this is how we met), our structural locations differed in ways that affected the research. Both of us were trained as sociologists in U.S. universities, but Sutton was born and raised in Argentina, and Borland in the United States. While Borland’s research was focused on movement organizations, activism was not the main or original focus of Sutton’s work. She included activists in her study on women’s bodily experiences precisely because of the crisis and the prevailing climate of protest, which prompted her to join the women’s movement and attend protests. While Borland has 12 years of scholarly experience in Argentina and her research led her to support many activist efforts, Sutton’s Argentine citizenship meant that she had a distinct personal investment in Argentina that inspired her activism. Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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For this project, each of us excerpted data from our interview transcripts, selecting all sections related to activism during the crisis. Then we merged both sets of excerpts into one collection. Each of us read this material, making marginal notes on patterns we noticed and contextualizing it with references to our ethnographic observations, media reports, and other texts. Then, we went through our marginal notes together, comparing themes and agreeing on a set of coding categories (e.g., “identity,” “conflict,” “solidarity,” “strategy,” “transformation,” “quotidian disruption/ activism,” “redefining politics,” “content of struggles,” “significance of the crisis,” “activism as pleasure/need/sacrifice,” “consciousness changes,” “feminist thought,” and “multiple roles”). We each read through the collection again independently, coding the transcripts with these categories. Finally, we compared the coded text and discussed coding differences until agreement was reached. The subsequent three parts of the article are based on the central themes that we identified and developed inductively with this collaborative process. ARGENTINA’S CRISIS AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE GENDERED QUOTIDIAN As in other societies, patterns of daily life are gendered in Argentina. Women are expected to be primary caregivers for children and households, and this is compounded by gender inequality in the paid workforce (Birgin 2000; Wainerman 2003). The workforce is gender segregated; women are overrepresented in the lower echelons of many jobs, including teaching and health care fields targeted by government cutbacks, and in the informal sector, where many are domestic workers and vendors (Federico 1997). Years of neoliberal policies brought on unemployment and underemployment that particularly affected women. In fact, 46 percent of women in this project were unemployed or underemployed when interviewed. The crisis affected women’s household labor, most dramatically by decreasing poor women’s access to resources and making household and care work more labor intensive. Everyday subsistence became an enormous and often impossible challenge as poor women were unable to feed their children and less able to rely on help from extended family and friends who were also struggling to survive. Lucía, a piquetera who lives with her five children in a shantytown, said she was “pushed into the movement” by her “anger about living what [she] was living.”2 The desperation of being unable to meet her family’s basic needs, something she Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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had barely been able to do before the crisis, led Lucía to consider drastic measures: “I got to a point that I wanted to kill myself, that I wanted to go out and steal, that I wanted to get high [on drugs]. To not have anything to feed my kids—that was what changed my thinking.” Later in the interview, Lucía repeated the phrase “to not have anything to feed my kids” to describe the disruption to subsistence routines that sparked her mobilization. In Argentina, which historically had a large middle class, the unprecedented levels of poverty brought on by the crisis disrupted everyday life both for women like Lucía who were affected by poverty in the flesh and for more privileged women who were confronted by it every day. In Buenos Aires, this meant coming face to face with poor people in subways, plazas, and streets. Jesusa, an employed middle-class woman, explained how she wanted to mobilize because of the anguish that she felt when she saw poverty as she drove home late at night: “To see women scrambling the garbage, with lots of children, is terribly painful at a psychic [level], and I think that it is also physical . . . visceral!” (see Sutton forthcoming). While Jesusa’s access to basic subsistence was not at risk, her everyday practices (e.g., commuting) were marred by the visceral pain she felt when she saw the violent reality of poverty. The crisis also affected Jesusa by challenging taken-for-granted middle-class expectations, including the assumption that educated people, especially men, can count on holding good jobs. Like many other professionals, Jesusa’s husband lost his management-level position. Thus, she had to take on heightened responsibilities and postpone her own career plans. For other middle-class women, the crisis meant a difficult and often impossible battle to cling to their status. Victoria, an impoverished middle-class woman and intermittent women’s movement activist, addressed this multifold challenge, saying, “The economic crisis cuts through life.” The crisis altered her routines, from where she lived to her medical care: Victoria lost her home and had to live with a relative; she had no insurance, so she had to go to a public hospital, where “they always mistreat you, and there’s always a lack of attention, and there begins to be a whole lot of tyrannies.” Others spoke about changing routines to accommodate lower wages by resorting to cheaper or more cumbersome options (cloth diapers, natural remedies) and giving up gendered body rituals (salon treatments, gym memberships, cosmetics, etc.). For many, the effects of the crisis reached a moment when they became insufferable. Susana was a worker in one of the hundreds of factories and businesses occupied and recuperated by workers in the context of the crisis. Before the workers’ occupation of the factory, Susana’s standard of living Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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had steadily declined. She said there was a point when she could not “take any more”: “Even if we were middle-class at one point—because when my husband had a job and everything, we were middle-class—then we got worse and worse, and there comes a moment when you do not have enough to pay for things, you don’t have enough to eat, and well, it makes you rebellious. . . . In one way or another you have to fight and make yourself heard, that things have to change and that they can’t be like that. We can’t keep complying any more now, conforming to less and less and less.” The disruption of daily routines (the factory closure) and breaking of assumptions long taken for granted (feeding the kids and paying for things, being middle or working class) was what made women who were never politically active “rebellious” and pushed them toward activism. Quotidian disruption that triggered activism in the crisis, sometimes as a first experience of political participation, also created conditions that fueled the work of women who already had a history of activism. Experienced activists we interviewed found their work revitalized and used words such as “hinge” (bisagra) and “opening” (apertura) to indicate that the crisis made change possible. Many feminists strived to connect to women from other groups, using the crisis as a catalyst. A pamphlet handed out by the Mujeres de Socialismo Libertario (Women of Libertarian Socialism) commented on late 2001 and early 2002, saying that this was a moment to “completely change our lives, transforming society together” and that “women have and can have a central and decisive role” in this change. ACTIVISM AS A NEW QUOTIDIAN As the crisis disrupted the lives of Argentines, it generated a new milieu of protest, and activism became enmeshed in the lives of more people, either as protesters or witnesses. While the level of protest was extraordinary, at the same time, it became a part of daily life, even becoming expected and routine. This was evidenced by calendar-day protests (every Thursday at the Court, every Friday in the Plaza, etc.) and daily media reports to help drivers negotiate traffic caused by protests. In Weapons of the Weak, Scott (1985) argues that everyday, but relatively covert, actions are significant resistance strategies for marginalized people. We show that visible protest can also become a routine form of resistance. The new activist quotidian fed into earlier regular activism such as weekly marches by Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Protest repertoires common during the crisis (e.g., road blockades) are still routinely used to address all sorts of Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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conflicts in Argentina. The activist quotidian during the crisis can be charted in three dimensions: (1) a new urban landscape of protest, (2) activism as additional work, and (3) new sets of relationships and conflicts. The Activist Quotidian as a New Urban Landscape of Protest During the crisis, roadblocks, marches, cacerolazos, public shaming of politicians, popular assemblies, building occupations, and political graffiti and murals became part of the landscape in the Buenos Aires area, where about one-third of Argentina’s population lives. Images of mass protests were also broadcast by the media with a magnifying effect, contributing to a generalized sense of upheaval and activism. According to 2002 news estimates, 12,766 street protests were staged all over the country during the eight-month period between January and August (Gallo 2002). Women shaped the city’s landscape as they marched with baby strollers, played drums and chanted protest songs outside the cathedral, put their bodies on the line in roadblocks, rallied demonstrators with megaphones, and distributed bread and roses to pedestrians as a symbolic act. Graffiti not only denounced corruption and the freezing of bank accounts but also inscribed walls and streets in the centers of power with messages such as “Take Your Rosaries out of Our Ovaries” and “Women Building Popular Power.” Even so, their presence was not noticed by some in the public (such as conservative media commentators and ordinary people we met) who seemed to be blinded by assumptions that make it hard to imagine women in risky political actions. For example, although many piqueteras were in road blockades, some wearing masks, many critics of the movement consistently portrayed its members as dangerous men. The climate of generalized protest infused women’s activism. Paula, a factory worker and organizer, evoked this context’s power when she recalled what she told her employers after they fired her: “I don’t know if you know, if you read the papers, if you watch TV, [but] today the workers are fighting for their jobs, and that is what I plan to do.” This atmosphere nourished and validated Paula’s political struggle. She and her coworkers tied gender-specific claims (e.g., denouncing a division of labor that made women “slaves of their work stations”) to demands for social and economic justice. Many felt encouraged to take actions they might not have taken earlier. Sofía, a young feminist activist, invoked this atmosphere to explain her group’s escrache (literally, “scratch-out,” this is a protest that shames the target and usually involves painting graffiti): “We painted the Cathedral on March 8th [International Women’s Day] because Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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in this moment—when all the institutions are being put in play—the Church can’t be left untouched.” The graffiti was a critique of patriarchy and other systems of oppression, with slogans such as “God is a woman, black, Jewish and lesbian,” “Freedom to the clitoris—jailed for pleasure,” and “Revolution in the home, in the plaza, and in bed.” This climate brought greater legitimacy to gender-based claims, and there were new routines and opportunities for activists to connect with each other in public spaces. Fostered by the many social movement organizations that flourished at this time, women were encouraged to tie the widespread critique of the economic and political system to concerns about gender violence and reproductive and sexual rights. Delfina recalled starting a new lesbian group during the daily cacerolazos, saying, “We would get together to go cacerolear [bang on pots and pans] and in a lot of the mobilization at the beginning of 2002.” Delfina’s recollection that they “would get together to go cacerolear” implies the incorporation of protest as part of normal life. Her phrasing, similar to how people might say “we would get together to drink coffee” or “we would get together to study” referred to cacerolazo protests as a routine. At the same time, they used the protests as a platform to launch an initiative that framed their grievances comprehensively: “We said, ‘Well, why don’t we get started. Let’s see if we can generate something . . . a political group of lesbians . . . on the Left.’ . . . We made up a banner and we went out to the march.” As women joined movements, created organizations, and engaged in new roles, their everyday lives incorporated new routines, relationships, conflicts, and frames for understanding reality tied to this participation. In this way, activism itself disrupted the old quotidian, creating a new one. The Activist Quotidian as Work Work—be it formal or informal, paid or unpaid—is a significant dimension of everyday life for many people, something disrupted by Argentina’s economic breakdown. Many women found themselves unemployed and underemployed, unable to feed their children, and struggling to care for themselves and their families. As feminist scholars have noted elsewhere (Benería and Feldman 1992; Moser 1993), women in Argentina tried to address mounting problems with another kind of labor: activist work. Women’s activism during the crisis was hard, unpaid work in the face of joblessness, which supplemented or even replaced other jobs. It ranged from collective survival strategies (communal kitchens or used clothing sales), assemblies evaluating solutions to the crisis, research (e.g., neighborhood health surveys), creation of documents such as flyers Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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and petitions, and participation in workshops. Women’s activist work also addressed so-called women’s issues such as gender violence, access to contraception, and abortion—problems they often had to fight to get noticed by men, even in progressive groups. The visible face of activism that was seen on television, in road blockades, and at marches is intimately linked with its less visible face. It helped build community and generate hope at a time when many people’s lives and dreams for the future were shattered. Activism is a socially necessary and often unrecognized community work that requires considerable energy, time, skills, and physical and mental labor (Barrig 1996; Townsend Gilkes 1994). As women got involved, their activism then became a new quotidian form of work. Even though they were not required to do activist work in the same way they were expected to do household work or (particularly for working-class women) paid labor to survive, many were compelled to engage in grassroots work to improve conditions in their lives and society. The survival and well-being of women and their families sometimes depends on activist work and solidarity. Neuhouser (1995, 1998) finds that women’s activism in Brazil was fueled by gender; emphasizing maternal identities made women less likely to demobilize because they needed to be activists to get housing, and houses to be homemakers. Thus, traditional roles can spur women to participate in movements that are not initially meant to challenge gender inequalities. Once the women we interviewed became political workers, their activism itself disrupted old routines and expectations and generated a new set of daily activities. Susana, recuperated factory worker, explained how her routines were dramatically altered by the workers’ takeover of the factory: “Even though it has been a year, it still is hard for me to adjust, because I lived all my life in a system, in one form, that I went to work, I came home, I let myself not worry about everything.” To be able to keep the factory, Susana and her coworkers had to not only do their regular production jobs but also sustain the movement and its ties to other groups: Sometimes we have to stay because they say, “Hay que [we have to] go support [workers at] a factory because they are going to evict them,” or “Hay que go to a march,” or “Hay que go to the headquarters of the Mothers [of the Plaza de Mayo]—there’s a meeting and they are supporting us.” Or we have to stay because an assembly has run over. . . . Or people come, and they ask for [our factory] space to do different activities. Well, we have to stay around then. And, well, those are hours that we dedicate to that, too.

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Susana’s litany of activities prefixed by hay que expressed that these things must be done. It evokes routine aspects of political participation and connotes that like other forms of labor, activism is not always pleasurable or a choice but can even have a sacrificial aspect. Since activist work was added to women’s other responsibilities, it could contribute to feeling overworked. Luz, a seasoned activist in multiple movement spaces, listed the many tasks for women: “We have to work because our husbands are unemployed, go to the roadblock [protest] because we are also unemployed, work in the communal kitchen, take care of the kids.” She questioned the price of this for women: “Gee! We have erupted into political life, but at too high a cost.” Some even secured their families’ livelihood through collective action. In this way, women’s activist work satisfied essential needs and helped transform the meaning of politics. The Activist Quotidian as a Locus for New Relationships of Solidarity and Conflict The quotidian is shaped by a web of relationships with people one sees regularly (e.g., coworkers, friends, relatives). In Argentina, the new activist quotidian generated relationships that provided camaraderie, emotional support, and sometimes conflict. The word compañero/compañera used in movement circles to refer to fellow activists is a label that denotes solidarity. Activists came into contact with compañeros/compañeras they would have otherwise been unlikely to meet. Flor, a middle-class member of a popular assembly who had been an activist before the crisis, expressed this: “I’d never been in activities with gente humilde [poor people], so now when I see them they say hello. With a few we even kiss. It is like I always said: there is a fear of the poor. And it seems that I also had it.” Activism helped Flor chip away deeply ingrained social hierarchies and to establish solidarity with people she would have been unlikely to befriend before. Middle-class women in Argentina often relate with poor women through clearly demarcated hierarchies, such as with women who clean their homes, but Flor came to have regular contact with poor people in a common struggle, even if the interactions were still permeated by class inequalities. In a social environment shaped by sexism, one that encourages women’s competition, especially for men’s attention, meeting compañeras in the context of activism also provided opportunities for women’s solidarity. In mixed-gender movement organizations, they formed women’s groups, and this led to new opportunities for camaraderie and support. For example, a Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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piquetera named Estela spoke about how the women’s group in her communal kitchen helped her “rise up” after suffering emotional distress due to lack of work, health problems, and abuse. Although the activist quotidian fostered positive connections, there were also new conflicts. Interviewees recounted disputes with relatives who did not support their activism, including male partners who tried to settle disagreements with violence (sharing this with other women in movement settings, in turn, led to greater awareness of gender violence). They also recalled difficult debates between activists, especially involving those active before 2001. The crisis brought people with diverse agendas and backgrounds together and meant that activists had to handle tensions and negotiate their visions, political histories, and social locations. Clashes between activists were also shaped by the crisis. While it fostered certain kinds of activism, the climate also led some to challenge claims perceived as unrelated to economics. Sofía, a young feminist, complained that the crisis eclipsed some gender-based demands: “The crisis, what it always does to us is that one always winds up chasing after the crisis, so all the debates that we want to have wind up left in second place.” A long-term lesbian activist, Paulina, made a similar complaint: “It’s a great dilemma because what do I have to fight for? For hunger of the people, yes, and once again my lesbianism is left by the wayside.” In our fieldwork, we witnessed heated debates about the inclusion of claims about gender and sexuality, many unresolved. TRANSFORMATIVE EFFECTS OF THE ACTIVIST QUOTIDIAN While quotidian disruption could lead to mobilization to restore a previous status quo, we see it as a potential catalyst for change. Argentina has long been riddled by gender inequality and other problems, so painting a rosy picture of life before the crisis would be misleading. Yet protest contributed to concrete changes: prompting President de la Rúa’s resignation, the repeal of laws that shielded dictators from prosecution, the creation of a large household subsidy program, laws in Buenos Aires to permit civil unions for gays and lesbians and the interruption of pregnancies with unviable fetuses, the appointment of the first women to the Supreme Court during democracy, the expansion of reproductive and sexual health laws, and growing criticism of neoliberalism and the U.S. influence in Argentine and world politics.3

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Activism changes the way people interpret the world and raises possibilities for a new kind of society. As it fostered momentum for reforms, the new activist quotidian changed many women’s views about their lives, gender relations, and politics. Our interviews reveal activism’s transformative nature as women spoke about the “triple shift”4 and how they were empowered by working with other women as political subjects and leaders. These changes have individual, interpersonal, and collective dimensions involving women’s subjectivities and individual practices, their social networks, and the shape, reach, and vitality of the women’s movement. The activist quotidian changed and politicized the mundane and created new spaces to challenge the status quo, even as certain traditions continued despite economic disruption. The climate of protest, and women’s role in it, seeped into everyday experiences and transformed the meanings of mundane places. While the primary goal of most communal kitchens was to satisfy children’s nutritional needs, some also became political hubs in movements challenging neoliberalism and places where women met and began to question their subordination collectively.5 Paula, a factory worker, said women did labor organizing in the cafeteria or even the bathroom, where they could avoid management surveillance. Dorothy Smith (1987) argues that a key to social change is to problematize everyday life, something Paula’s words illustrate: “I started to dialogue more with my compañeras and to see things from another perspective. From chatting about everyday things, what a woman does, to even [discussing] problems . . . because many times when you start trying to change perhaps little things in everyday life, what happens is that little by little you start having another consciousness, right? You go changing your form of thinking about things.” By using quotidian spaces to reflect about “everyday things,” women like Paula got engaged in activism that changed their worldviews. The idea that women should be in political struggle was a perspective prevalent in the activist quotidian. It can be seen in new meanings for traditional events such as Mother’s Day. In Argentina, this holiday glorifies traditional expectations about motherhood and is celebrated by giving mothers flowers and other gifts. Diana, a neighborhood assembly activist, described how her assembly celebrated a different kind of Mother’s Day, infusing it with an activist meaning by calling it the day of the “mother luchadora” (fighter, in struggle). While this new label still celebrates motherhood, it transforms the meaning of an apolitical and individualized holiday to evoke collective resistance. Similarly, Lucía, a piquetera, redefined the meaning of womanhood when she was asked what it meant to Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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her to be a woman. She responded, “In what sense? [To be a] worker? Fighter?” Although the dominant imagery often equates womanhood with motherhood, Lucía associated it with terms more often linked to masculinity: “To me to be a woman . . . I feel pride, to be a woman worker, to be a woman fighter.” As a piquetera, Lucía’s everyday practices shifted. She joined a communal kitchen, participated in road blockades, and gained new support networks. She found courage in her activism and was no longer “afraid of [her own] shadow.” She spoke with pride about being “able to move forward,” and to “fight for what [she] want[s].” While Lucía said motherhood motivated her, she came to question norms that subordinate women, expecting them to “wait, holding a mate [a tea-like beverage], for their husband to come home from work.” Her new quotidian was an activist one, and so she claimed a threefold identity as mother, worker, and fighter. In fact, many of the women we interviewed spoke about changing social consciousness and how this affected women’s gendered identities. Angelina, leader of a housewives’ group, spoke at length about the transformative power of activism in the crisis: I ask myself about all of this experience, one that goes back many years now of hunger in Argentina, and whether women who return to their houses can really go back to what they were [before]. Because women shut inside their four walls had to go out to the streets to fight, they learned what it was to confront the state apparatus, and if they return to their houses they’ll return to be the same. . . . The act of leaving home and collectively making a struggle, shoulder to shoulder with others, it helps you to make great leaps and to not feel that your troubles are uniquely your own.

As a leader, Angelina recognized the potential impact of women’s changed consciousness and hoped that new activists’ experiences would result in long-term mobilization and social change. Collective action pushed women to recognize the shared nature of problems; this led to other changes. Susana, recuperated factory worker, explained how her views changed: And yes, you go changing [your] mentality because if you’d asked me [about activism] a year and a half ago, I would have said, “Noo. . . .” Not even when I used to see the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, it was kind of like I didn’t understand them. I said, “These people, they don’t have anything else to do.” You see? And now I understand not only that they lost their children, right? And that they fight because of that, but they’re also supporting different [occupied] factories. . . . So I understand there are things you must do! Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Susana’s activism helped her to appreciate the struggles of other women, and to engage in acts of activist solidarity. From living a private life—even at work before the factory takeover, when she did not have time to talk with coworkers—Susana went on to develop a political consciousness beyond the factory walls. This type of change was not unusual, and biographical outcomes have long been regarded as important effects of social movements (see Giugni 2004 for a review). The interviewees perceived the important role that women played as leaders for social change. Ursula, a lesbian feminist activist, underscored this responsibility: The ones who are producing changes here are the minas [slang for “women”], you know? Heading up rebellions and resistance. It is really something to be proud about in one sense, and in another it is plenty logical and obvious that it would be the women. [Sutton: Why?] Because we women are the ones who have responsibility for la cría [rearing or fostering children]. And that is not just having children, but also the large number of minas who do not have children but work just the same for others. Healthcare and education are in high proportion in the hands of women. This comes [to us] culturally. They put us in that place because we attend to the other. But that is what is being used to drive the changes that are being produced at the level of society. The presence, resistance, the organization in solidarity, [all] is headed by minas.

Proud that women are “heading up rebellions and resistance,” Ursula recognized how gender norms can be reworked as tools for social change. Her words highlight the crisis as a point of both continuity and disruption. Indeed, gendered practices and identities were challenged, but at the same time, the experiences and knowledge derived from some practices, such as caring labor, were funneled into protest. Conversely, activism can also turn gender norms into objects of scrutiny and change. CONCLUSION Argentina’s recent economic and political crisis aggravated a range of problems that were latent or were apparent to many but were harder to challenge before the 2001 economic collapse. While Argentine history tends to repeat itself with waves of crises and persistent inequalities, the economic collapse changed many aspects of society and exposed problems—growing poverty, rising inequality, the grip of international capitalism—that often went unrecognized during the neoliberal boom Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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and official propaganda of the nineties. Many women started to identify the specific burdens they bore due to the intersection of neoliberal globalization with entrenched gender subordination. The crisis challenged gendered daily practices and taken-for-granted assumptions. Our research shows that women’s unpaid domestic and caring labor became more difficult and that economic decline hurt poor, working-class, and middle-class women. These disruptions often became unbearable and triggered many women’s activism in a political climate that facilitated their participation. Many women’s consciousness about their place in society changed, and efforts to dismantle gender inequalities gained momentum in movements and other arenas.6 Mobilization reshaped women’s individual and collective consciousness and practices. Even long-term activists reframed old grievances and found their work revitalized as they connected with novice activists, as new movements emerged, and as the population called for profound change. As women mobilized, their everyday experiences were altered by a new activist quotidian, one characterized by widespread protest, new relationships and conflicts, and the experience of activism as another form of work. Thinking of activism as a kind of everyday (gendered) labor helps to account for the very necessary activities that many men and women perform in Argentina and elsewhere. In times of social crisis, activism is one possibility among many responses, a collective practice that can address the systemic nature of problems. It is often seen as something that individuals do out of conviction, but not as needed work. But activist work can contribute to more responsive and democratic societies in the long run, and it can also help to ensure people’s material survival or the satisfaction of immediate needs in the short run. This case also raises questions about how moments of personal or social crisis contribute to unveil the socially constructed character of inequalities previously perceived as natural. People often do not have time to think about daily practices; yet when these are interrupted, the interruption can reveal how sets of relationships depend on an individual and social context that can be changed. How do crises, systemic or personal, challenge gender relations? Are there efforts to return to the precrisis order, or do crises—although painful—lead to change? Women’s crisisdriven activism in Argentina cannot be said to try to restore the previous gendered quotidian: Once a social breakdown like this has occurred— with all of its accompanying lessons—many will be less likely to want to return to the same old routines. Women saw the wave of protest as a chance to make demands about gender equity and social justice. As Paula, a factory worker-activist said, Downloaded from http://gas.sagepub.com by Juan Pardo on November 14, 2007 © 2007 Sociologists for Women in Society. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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“the crisis entered everybody’s home. In my case, the crisis affected me by leaving me without a job, but it also opened the way for many things for me.” We end with her words: “The crisis, along with things that you start to observe and do in your life, makes you . . . want to do other things, to open your mind to see things in a different way.” The experience of women’s movements in Latin America—a region that experienced all sorts of quotidian disruptions in the form of military coups, revolutions, and economic crises—suggests that the transformative potential of moments of rupture, including the new consciousness of women like Paula, needs to be sustained by concerted long-term efforts and activism. NOTES 1. Some people were involved in charities or governmental efforts to help those affected by the crisis. These activities are not usually considered to be part of social movement activism because they rely on institutionalized channels. Therefore, they are not included in this project. 2. This and all subsequent quotes from interviewees were translated from Spanish by the authors. 3. These changes cannot be understood as disconnected from a longer history of social struggles by human rights organizations; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and feminist groups; and other activists working for social justice. The crisis operated as a political opportunity for these changes, and the experience of the crisis itself radicalized many people, but previous activism was crucial to these transformations. 4. Moser (1993) argues that in addition to women’s roles in production and reproduction, they also take on the responsibility of “community management” to deal with the strains of structural adjustment. Also see Stephen (1997) for accounts of activist women’s triple workload as members of social movements, wageworkers, and unpaid domestic laborers in Latin America. 5. Women’s organizations in communal kitchens and the links between neighborhood organizing and politics have been observed in other contexts in Latin America (Barrig 1996; Jelin 1990). 6. An example of this is the campaign to legalize abortion, which not only has been endorsed by middle-class feminist activists but also has gained support among both men and women in working-class and poor peoples’ movements.

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Elizabeth Borland is an assistant professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Arizona and is interested in social movements, nonprofit organizations, leadership and decision making, intergenerational dynamics, and gender. Barbara Sutton is assistant professor of women’s studies at the University at Albany–SUNY. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Oregon and a law degree from the National University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is interested in globalization, body politics, human rights, women’s and global justice movements, and Latin America.