Feminist Solidarities and Coalitional Identity: The Popular Feminism of the Marcha das Margaridas

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211017896
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211017896

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 240, Vol. 48 No. 5, September 2021, 25–41

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211017896

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

25

Feminist Solidarities and Coalitional Identity

The Popular Feminism of the Marcha das Margaridas

by

Renata Motta

The Marcha das Margaridas is a mass mobilization in Brazil led by women’s organiza-

tions within rural unions in alliance with other social movements and nongovernmental

organizations, including transnational partners such as the World March of Women. The

main political subjects are rural working women, a political identity that articulates gen-

der, class, and urban-rural inequalities. These are foundational for the popular feminism

of the Marcha. An examination of the Marcha das Margaridas guided by a theoretical

discussion of poststructural feminism and postcolonial feminism on the role of political

identities in building coalitions reveals that it expands the agenda of popular feminism in

its relationship to historical feminist agendas and intersectional feminisms and in its

coalition politics with men and the left.

A Marcha das Margaridas é uma mobilização de massa no Brasil liderada por organis-

mos de mulheres dentro de sindicatos rurais em aliança com outros movimentos sociais e

organizações não governamentais (ONGs), incluindo parceiros transnacionais como a

Marcha Mundial das Mulheres. Os principais sujeitos políticos são as mulheres trabalha-

doras rurais, uma identidade política que articula as desigualdades de gênero, classe e

urbano-rurais. Estes são fundamentais para o feminismo popular da Marcha. Um estudo

da Marcha das Margaridas guiado por uma discussão teórica do feminismo pós-estrutural

e do feminismo pós-colonial sobre o papel das identidades políticas na construção de coa-

lizões revela que ela expande a agenda do feminismo popular em sua relação com agendas

feministas históricas e feminismos intersetoriais, como também em sua coalizão política

com os homens e a esquerda.

Keywords: Women’s movements, Rural unions, Identity politics, Coalitions, Popular

feminism

Black feminist activists and scholars in the United States have proposed

intersectional analysis as a method that avoids erasing difference in the strug-

gles against simultaneous forms of oppression based on gender, race, class,

ethnicity, sexuality, and citizenship. The recognition that “women”1 is not a

universal category brings to the fore the political challenge of building solidar-

ity across differences. Thus, the problem of coalitions becomes politically and

theoretically relevant for feminism. An important aspect of this debate con-

cerns political subjectivities in feminist coalitions, with poststructural femi-

nists challenging identity as a basis for common political action whereas

Renata Motta is an assistant professor of sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin and project

leader of Food for Justice: Power, Politics, and Inequalities in a Bioeconomy.

1017896LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211017896Latin American PerspectivesMotta / POPULAR FEMINISM AND THE MARCHA DAS MARGARIDAS

research-article2021

26 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

postcolonial, black, and indigenous activists and scholars emphasize the polit-

ical strength and urgency of identity politics for the mobilization of marginal-

ized social groups. The postcolonial feminist Chandra Mohanty (2003)

criticizes the “ ‘postmodernist scepticism about identity,’ its narrowing of the

scope of feminist politics and theory and the gap it has widened between

women’s movements and academic feminists” (Conway, 2017: 209).

However, this debate has often been overstated and misrepresented. The

most influential gender theories, such as those put forward by the poststructur-

alist Judith Butler (1999 [1990]), do not deny the importance of affirming iden-

tities to engage in political struggles. However, they disclaim the political

process of constructing political identities in relation to specific struggles, in

which the category as such is also open to political definition (Villa, 2012 [2003]).

At the same time, prominent postcolonial scholars like Mohanty, while defend-

ing standpoint epistemologies such as that of “women of color,” are also careful

not to essentialize such categories as biological or socially constructed but

rather to advocate them as coalitional identities based on a political praxis of

solidarity building across women situated in different contexts (Conway, 2017;

Mohanty, 2003). Indeed, poststructuralist and postcolonial feminists are not

homogeneously coherent and wholly distinct categories. It is thus possible to

inquire from a poststructural deconstructive perspective about the processes of

subject formation in coalitions, in which the affirmation of political identities

informed by class, antiracist, indigenous, and decolonial as well as LGBTQ+

feminisms is key to the mobilization’s process.

Recent mass mobilizations in Latin America have brought to the fore the role

of feminist solidarities and leadership in what has been called a “feminism of

the masses,” in its “popular” character different from the common identifica-

tion of feminism with middle-class white academic activists (Souza, 2019).

Who is the political subject of these mass feminist movements, and how do they

relate to the tradition of popular feminism in Latin America? In a historical

reconstruction of the analytic category of popular feminism, Conway (in this

issue) traces its emergence to Latin American gendered struggles against neo-

liberal reforms and dictatorships in the 1980s. Although the proliferation of

neighborhood organizations and collective actions by the popular sectors has

been widely documented in Latin American scholarship (Svampa, 2008), the

key role of women in such initiatives called for a gendered analysis of working-

class struggles (Schild, 1994). Popular feminism thus emerged as an analytic

category for describing the struggles that articulated gender and class inequal-

ities and called attention to the role of feminism in opening women’s move-

ments to more emancipatory possibilities (Conway in this issue).

Since the 1990s, popular feminisms have receded because of a constellation

of factors. Nevertheless, the gendered class struggles that are characteristic of

popular feminism were certainly not absent during the 1990s, though perhaps

they were less visible in terms of the collective action by which social struggles

are usually recognized (Teixeira, 2018). Within unions, urban and rural, the

1990s were a period of strong feminist organizing and important victories such

as quotas and the opening of political space that created the conditions for a

new wave of social-oriented popular feminism in the twenty-first century. In

the first decades of this century, while Brazilian mainstream and historical