Keywords

Ruins and Risings

In her poem “And Still I Rise”, Maya Angelou (1978) shows how racialized subjects who are subject to all sorts of obstacles, hatred and racism nonetheless kept poetically and politically rising—and, I would add, uprising. I propose to analyse uprisings not only as the factual and organized gathering of people under a specific objective but also as a broader and more contextualized sensibility to what is common. I am tackling uprisings in the context of considering citizenship also as a form of exclusion of Others from the polis. Intimacy as part of the political, as feminists before us have so emphatically declared, is a very important part of what is excluded and banished and in fact disappears from view. Thus, a sociology of haunting (Gordon, 1997) is much needed as it provokes us to think about the silenced, the repressed, and the non-visible that still produce effects: those that are hidden from the public eye, racialized Others, women and queers/trans and the ones that rise in Angelou’s poem. Therefore, I will take some examples of uprisings, referring to assemblies, changes in traditional forms of political representation and protest marches.

This meditation on a very ample idea of uprisings does not report a specific research nor does it try to create any theory of its own regarding these issues. Actually in this text, I am trying to make sense of politics in action, namely, at the level of feminist activism and organizing. The text is organized as a reflection as part of the political/feminist practices I describe and to some extent have participated in. Like Donna Haraway (1997, p. 24) I refuse the position of the modest witness:

(…) one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity. This is the virtue that guarantees that the modest witness is the legitimate and authorized ventriloquist for the object world, adding nothing from his mere opinions, from his biasing embodiment. And so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts. He bears witness: he is objective; he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects. His subjectivity is his objectivity. His narratives have a magical power — they lose all trace of their history as stories, as products of partisan projects, as contestable representations, or as constructed documents in their potent capacity to define the facts.

This specific reflection is actually based on a subject position opposed to the modest witness. Rather, this reflection is much more anchored on my experience as a militant in Left Bloc, as a participant in “Orgullo Crítico” and an enthusiastic observer of the “#elenão” movement in Brazil. Therefore, I analyse them as practices that are not external to me. To understand such effects, my participation outside of a position of mere observer was important, even to access the political grammars being used and their effects. In addition, Brazil was included as way of understanding the dynamics between global and local points of observation, making a reference to other Portuguese-speaking countries, not only Southern Europe, and showing how common and shared some of the issues raised here are.

In the case of Left Bloc, I am a member of that party and had the opportunity to participate in the construction of this party, especially concerning politics of gender and intersectionality. As for “#elenão”, I am currently a visiting professor in Brazil and had an opportunity to bear witness to the efforts developed by this multitude in the presidential election in 2018. In the case of Madrid’s Critical Pride, I started to participate in this event in 2015. Therefore, my point of departure here is not participant observation or ethnography but rather my own political engagement with these different ways of producing and making feminist/queer/trans politics. In this text, I revisit some events I witnessed and participated in, and I will therefore try to produce an engaged reading of these movements. This text is more of a practice of reading (Spivak, 2014), instead of proposing conclusions based on empirical observations.

In this chapter, examples coming from political practices are offered in order to show some of the possibilities of resistance that tackle relevant issues for intimate and sexual citizenship. These include the right to protest and to organize and mobilize others in matters that concern sexual rights but also, in a broader sense, the right to live in a democracy, the right to have a public sphere and the right to be represented and to represent. The performative right to appear is exercised in uprisings and other forms of gathering in the streets or other public spaces (Butler, 2015a). The right to appear affirms and situates the body in the centre of political claims for economic, social, juridical and political viability of such bodies (Pérez Navarro, 2017).

My aim in this chapter is to analyse the shape, conditions of possibility and effects of feminist uprisings within a context of neoliberal politics, austerity measures and contempt for rights. In pursuing such concerns, we consider both a global setting for this topic (using Brazil as an example of resistance) and a local context—Portugal and Spain. These uprisings have occurred around the globe claiming for democracy, social justice, equality and freedom of expression. Starting with a general cycle of protest that was initiated by the Arab Spring, these marches and gatherings have also occurred in Southern Europe in 2011 and subsequent years (Pérez Navarro, 2014).

Part of the European strategy to tackle the so-called Euro debt crisis was the implementation of a neoliberal programme of austerity measures (Bibow, 2012). The immediate result was lower wages and increased unemployment (Castro Caldas, 2012) among youngsters who were encouraged to immigrate. These measures were backed by states with the stronger economic positions (Armingeon & Cranmer, 2018). Education, arts, research and health were the areas which were most subject to cuts. Unemployment funds, pensions and other forms of social support and care were mitigated and in fact lowered. The neoliberal rationality that organizes these policies and the politics behind them generates an ever-reducing version of the state (Brown, 2015). This reaction to the crisis in fact greatly contributed to the erosion of public policies of social protection, typical of neoliberal rationalities.

To further complicate these matters, in several countries (the United States, Brazil and Hungary, among others), political articulations have given way to right and far-right politics that are fuelled by hatred against social movements, immigrants and racialized populations (Brown, 2019). In Southern Europe, the creation and increasing political impact of extreme right parties and movements is changing the political landscape. In fact a mixture of hard-right populism and neoliberal policies has created an environment-based White male supremacy. This antidemocratic turn includes fundamentalist Christian values, extremely conservative views on gender and nationalism and racism (Brown, 2019). I give here a quick example. In his usually vitriolic tweets, Donald Trump (Suspended account, 2019), president of the United States, declared:

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly (…) and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how (…) it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

Despite the violent tone of this tweet, the radical way in which American exceptionalism (Puar, 2007) is being aggressively put forward needs to be understood as central in this imperialist discourse. Note the intersections of race, gender and geographical origin of the targets of this form of xenophobic hate speech: Trump is addressing congresswomen of colour and targeting them as outsiders (despite their US citizenship). These outsiders are positioned as people that should be sent away, to a far and distant home elsewhere outside the United States that does not count as home, even if one is an American citizen. Racialization and racism speak louder than citizenship in these tweets. An imperialist view of the United States as primus inter pares, first among equals, making them “the greatest and most powerful” people on earth—US exceptionalism—is positioned vis-à-vis “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”. These countries are described as corrupt countries, a widely used marker for lack of “civilization” and development. In a sense, this “Make America Great” statement is built upon a colonial understanding of the world, using racialization as its political grammar. These far-right patronizing offensives target members of congress that are women of colour, with non-European/US origins, and show the need to organize intersectionally, across differences in order to establish alliances to fight back. This trope of corruption is not far from Frantz Fanon’s (2004) description of the colonized as represented by the colonizer in the famous chapter “Concerning Violence”:

The “native” is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He [sic] is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil. A corrosive element, destroying everything within his reach, a corrupting element, distorting everything which involves aesthetics or morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and in curable instrument of blind forces. (p. 6)

This continuity of underdevelopment and corruption, in fact coloniality in Quijano’s (2000) sense, is actually much used by the far right to characterize the political situation before they arrive in power or to attack democratic forces, which they inevitably construe as corrupt. This can be seen in the case of Brazil with the attacks on the Workers’ Party (PT—Partido dos Trabalhadores) and on former President Lula (Davis & Straubhaar, 2020).

The theme of corruption is also used by politicians such as Trump to refer to other countries and to adversaries. The adversaries are described antagonistically as political enemies—rather than adversarial confrontation, that is, democratic agonism, to use Chantal Mouffe’s (2005) terms. This is a display of animosity and, in fact, of severe confrontation with the Other who is viewed as someone who should be punished, or even physically eliminated. See, for example, Trump’s call for the arrest of presidential candidate Hilary Clinton (BBC News, 2016) or an even more extreme version of this, when then candidate Bolsonaro declared in a political rally that members of the Workers’ Party in the state of Acre should be shot by a firing squad (Ribeiro, 2018). I tackle these examples together because some of their rationales are in fact being used globally to articulate far-right government projects.

For Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018), these depictions show not only a decay in Western democracies but for some the possibility of direct risks for the continuity of democracies: the death of democracy. Wendy Brown (2015) made a very strong case on how neoliberalism is eroding liberal democracies, in fact making the state redundant with austerity politics and the dismantling of public services through privatization. The economization of the political and the idea of governance replace the political rationality with a market lexicon. These are very effective ways of replacing democracy, an expensive and time-consuming practice. Therefore, sovereignty and the demos are being replaced by management, making the rule of the common increasingly impossible. The racist rhetoric of White male supremacy and centrality of the angry White male as a political figure are very important for the populist hard right, as described by Brown (2019). In this dystopic ethos, the perceived loss of privileges generates a political nihilism where apocalypse seems to be preferable to losing this supremacy, even if this radical destruction of the common destroys everyone, a sort of a “Capitalocene” (Moore, 2015) horror story.

A similar remark was introduced by Silvia Federici (2004) when analysing the primitive accumulation of capital, which happens at all times in capitalism and is based on the separation of the producer from the means of production. This entailed a process of privatizing the common, of an enclosing force that through economic crises, wars and expropriation was able to produce the right-less working force, dependant on salary. These moves of enclosing the communal are ways of producing and constituting precaritization:

Usually induced and reproduced by governmental and economic institutions, this process acclimatizes populations over time to insecurity and hopelessness; it is structured into the institutions of temporary labor and decimated social services and the general attrition of the active remnants of social democracy in favor of entrepreneurial modalities supported by fierce ideologies of individual responsibility and the obligation to maximize one's own market value as the ultimate aim in life. (Butler, 2015a, p. 15)

Precaritization could be a synonym for neoliberalism. This process of changing from a logic of common rights to a logic of an extreme mode of individualism where there are no protections and responses in fact creates a society based on precarity, which

(…) designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death (. …) Populations that are differentially exposed suffer heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and vulnerability to violence without adequate protection or redress. (Butler, 2015a, p. 33)

This unequal distribution of vulnerability exposes our sociality and interdependency: social relations either prevent or reinforce such precarious lives. Neoliberal rationality is exploiting precarity and trying to turn it into a problem of individuals: individuals that lack merit and achievements in order to resist such precarity. This in fact induces the population not only to develop a sense of increased expendability as Judith Butler (2015a) points out but to live inside a certain panoptic of self-vigilance and control (Foucault, 1977) in biopolitical terms. Neoliberalism seems to get rid of democracy and some of its guarantees, as it continues its long march (Hall, 2011). But how can these politics be counteracted? The task of this chapter is to point out some possibilities of resistance.

I am thinking with Lynne Segal’s (2017) notion of radical happiness as moments of collective struggle where social relations and bonds are reaffirmed, by acting in concert. This joy of the common, of the collective, is crucial as an antidote to neoliberal reason. Ideological formations of individualism and meritocracy, alongside the sacred importance of commodification, can be very demanding and psychologically impossible to tackle with the norm of compulsory happiness (Ahmed, 2010) within this neoliberal political formation. Taking into account that the infrastructure and social conditions for thriving are being threatened by neoliberalism, Segal (2017) makes a case for the importance of collective movements to claim such common ground, even in psychic terms. This means that the struggle itself is a way in which these bodies in alliance (Butler, 2015a), taking to the streets, in fact expand and express a collective joy.

This undoubtedly resonates with the Spinozist idea of affect as an effect of a bodies on other bodies, an ethics of pressure as Butler (2015b) describes it, expanding or diminishing potency. Such joy in Spinoza’s philosophy is an affect that increases the conatus, “each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being” (Spinoza, 1994, p. 159). Conatus is expanded or diminished by the contacts with others, showing how central interdependency and sociality can be for the subject. A radical notion of interdependency (Care Collective, 2020) can be used against the neoliberal self-contained individual (Sampson, 1988).

Brazil, Ele Não

#elenao [“ele não”, not him] was a hashtag used in the context of the presidential election campaign to form a platform against Bolsonaro, then a candidate of the far right. The Facebook page Women United against Bolsonaro that started that hashtag at the end of August 2018 reached more than 3 million members. Its goal was to create a women’s front against the candidate (Carranca, 2018). Jair Bolsonaro is known for his racist, sexist and homophobic declarations, including a statement that took him to court, claiming that a woman MP Maria do Rosário from the Workers’ Party was too ugly to be raped by him. He was declared guilty and forced to publicly apologize and pay damages to MP Maria do Rosário (Galvani, 2019). Other political declarations that Bolsonaro made throughout his career included very sexist views and very opposed to women’s rights. Therefore, it was not surprising that groups of women would organize a movement showing their indignation against this candidate.

The context where “#elenao” occurs is a very polarized presidential election campaign, with anti-left (especially anti-Workers’ Party) hatred being explored by the media and by the hard-right Bolsonaro campaign. This exploration of “anti-petismo” [anti-Workers’ Party, PT] had started during the cycle of protests of 2013 that were initially against the rise in the price of tickets for collective transports (Delcourt, 2016). Fully explored by a right that could not access government democratically through elections, with four successive presidential mandates by the Workers’ Party, an anti-petismo feeling entered the political arena. As congress and the senate are highly divided and divisive given the sheer number of parties in Congress in Brazil (30), any government has to negotiate with several parties in order to pass laws. The senate follows suit with 21 parties.

The trope of corruption was present through operation “Car Wash”, a very mediatic corruption investigation, led by the Federal Police of Brazil and initially by Judge Sérgio Moro, then Minister of Justice in Bolsonaro’s government. This operation started with money laundering, then bribery and corruption involving billions of dollars around Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company. Part of this investigation used plea bargains to get the information with convicts or suspects (Souza, 2017).

This police investigation led to charges being pressed and later the incarceration of former President Lula. However, Lula was a candidate in the 2019 elections and, according to polls, possibly the candidate with the most votes. His defence attorneys accused the prosecutors and the judge of not having enough evidence of such crimes and of political persecution. This claim is based on the idea of lawfare, using the judicial system to impact the other powers (Carvalho & Fonseca, 2019). The whole operation has a certain resonance with the Italian operation “Mani Pulite” and the mediatization of the whole process. President Dilma Rousseff was the target of an impeachment process opened by former allies, and Vice President Michel Temer replaced her, in what she claimed to be an act of treason. A long campaign against her presidency had already started in 2013 and reached its peaked when Congress agreed to investigate her for account manipulation to hide the deficit. President Rousseff was tried and found guilty of the charges and impeached in 2016Footnote 1 (Nunes & Melo, 2017). Temer’s presidency was an opportunity to put several laws into practice that were not in the electoral programme of Rousseff-Temer’s ticket, opening the social democratic legacy of PT to neoliberalism. During the elections in 2018, Bolsonaro quickly became a favourite. Winning the first round, he was positioned as the possible winner of the second round with candidate Fernando Haddad (PT).

Months before, in 2018, the execution of Marielle Franco in Rio de Janeiro at the hands of organized crime galvanized the attention of the world and of social movements in Brazil. “Elenão” was an attempt to unite women (and allies) against this specific sexist, racist and homophobic candidate (Slattery & Stargardter, 2018). Based on this track record, they started online and were able to gather millions of women protesting against the candidate all over Brazil. This call for women against Bolsonaro was a surprising outcome in a campaign marked by incidents, strong polarization and fake news. Considered to be the biggest demonstration of women in the history of Brazil (Rossi et al., 2018), this demonstration united women and other groups against a candidate that used a logic of attacking women, queers and trans, Blacks and indigenous people to get votes. This repudiation was very important to show a way of organizing in an electoral period that was not based only on political parties. As it was seen to be effective, this action was emulated by the supporters of Bolsonaro using an “elesim” copycat movement. Usage, however, is of capital importance in this type of action using a very ample idea of women as a marker of resistance against the very conservative declarations and politics of Bolsonaro. I like to think that there is a feminist logic in this very wide use of the idea of women: organizing through differences, finding a common threat and creating action that unites all these groups fighting together under the figure of women.

Media coverage was very detrimental to this action, hiding the real numbers of people protesting, due to the alignment of most media against the Workers’ Party candidate. This anti-Workers’ Party discourse (“anti-petismo”) was determinant in understanding these elections and intoxicated public opinion. But the most relevant fact was that this movement was able to restore some sense of agency in elections whose result seemed inevitable, some perspective of a possible change in the outcome. In fact Bolsonaro did not win the first round and was elected in the second round with 55% of the votes, which was not a landslide win as expected. But this was the biggest, most massive demonstration against his views led by women and feminists and other social movements in Brazil. This possibility of organizing a political campaign against a candidate whose views are detrimental to human rights and of sustaining a social uprising against such views seems to be a very useful way of contesting dominant values. In addition, it provided the political space for opposition to the hard right.

Madrid, Orgullo Crítico

“Orgullo Crítico” [Critical Pride] is a yearly demonstration/march that is alternative and critical of the official LGBT pride, “Orgullo Madrid”. Each year members of political movements, groups and collectives gather in area of Lavapies, Madrid, and start a march that takes them through the most emblematic gay neighbourhood in Madrid, Chueca. This march is, however, very distinct from the LGBT pride march in Madrid, with sponsors, advertising and commercial appeal. A queer liberalism in David Eng’s (2010) terms, it shows a possibility of social mobility for some gays and lesbians economically through consumption and legally through the concession of rights and legal protections. However, these are only possible for some groups, in terms of class and race.

Racialized groups are often outside these possibilities of social ascension. In gatherings such as “Orgullo Crítico”, the common ground between anti-racist, migrants, queers, trans*, feminists, sudaca–Latin Americans, “okupas”, polyamory and other groups is most often anti-capitalist activism and an idea of a coalitional march against several forms of oppression that are interconnected. “Orgullo Crítico” (https://orgullocritico.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/historia) has a story of different names and collectives associated with it, but this is marked by a strong preoccupation with migrants and racism and a dissatisfaction with the way in which “Orgullo Madrid” was representing the LGBT population. The critique of these neoliberal forms of homonormativity (Duggan, 2003; Lasio et al., 2019; Oliveira et al., 2013) based a depoliticization through consumption and commodification of identities in order to be assimilated was present from its beginnings in 2008.

During the years 2015–2017, I participated in Critical Pride, interviewed/talked to some of the people who organized and marched in the event and tried to make sense of the political practice they were putting forth. Closely connected with the 15-M movement (Pérez Navarro, 2014) operating since 2011, it even got called “Orgullo Indignado” during a period, showing its allegiance with the cycle of protest occurring in Southern Europe. Using 15-M methodologies, they resort to assemblies in order to take decisions and make the event happen. This gathering was instrumental in showing other forms of resistance that tackle queer and trans* oppression that do not need to be complicit with capitalism or neoliberalism. “Orgullo es protesta” [Pride is protest] is one of their mottos and an important political slogan that denounces pride which is commercial and that lacks political consciousness of looking at how that oppression is integrated into the wider picture of geopolitics and global markets. Linking LGBT pride to a concern over wider politics that nonetheless affect queers and trans* in their multiple assemblages of belongings and disidentifications, class, race, migrant status, relationship status and so on seems to be a very effective way of tackling all of these issues together. This idea of pride as a coalition is promising as it enlarges strict identity politics into a much wider and encompassing form of claiming common ground. Such forms of coalitional politics tackling economic injustice, state violence and ecological catastrophe seem very promising in creation of the common as everyone will be affected in one way or another.

Left Bloc, Portugal

This movement of citizens organized as a political party (https://www.bloco.org/o-bloco/estatutos.htm) was founded in 1999 as a platform combining three political parties: Partido Socialista Revolucionário [Socialist Revolutionary Party], Trotskyist oriented; the União Democrática Popular [Popular Democratic Union], Marxist Leninist; and Política XXI [Politics 21], ranging from Marxists to social democrats. These parties were reorganized later as political collectives and their principles are expressed within the tendencies inside Left Bloc. So from the start, Left Bloc was based on the idea of a coalition of the several different lefts in Portugal. From its foundational manifesto, “Começar de Novo” [Starting Over] (de Esquerda, n.d.):

The (Left) Bloc will take on the great tradition of popular struggle in the country and will learn from other experiences and challenges; renewing the legacy of socialism and including the convergent contributions of diverse citizens, forces and movements, that through the years have been committed to a search for alternatives to capitalism. It is from here that we want to construct a popular, plural, combative and influent Left, able to reconstruct hope.

This manifesto shows the type of a broad coalitional platform that was being created, bringing together diverse political ideologies on the left and feminists, anti-racists, anti-capitalists, environmentalists, LGBT and queers, trade unionists and activists against poverty, among others.

José Soeiro (2019), a Left Bloc MP, analyses the idea of what it means to be a party in a socialist framework. He argues that in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a (communist) party means a group of people thinking in a common way, a party in a conflict; that is they are the working class in a dynamics of class struggle. With social democratic parties, the modern shape of political parties starts to take shape. Coming out of a union (like the Labour Party in the UK), or out of ruptures in other parties and recompositions, parties were different from social movements and from other collectives. However, parties such as Left Bloc could be seen as platforms that combine several dimensions: party, social movement and collective. These platforms aim at politics of representation in the state while acknowledging and acting upon the different political subjects. Therefore they work with party politics and with social movements activism, such as trade union and feminist, anti-racist, ecological, queer and trans movements.

At the same time, Left Bloc was trying to get political representation and started with two parliamentary seats (1999–2004). In the last legislative elections in 2015, Left Bloc had a result of 550,892 votes and a parliamentary representation of 19 members of parliament (MP).Footnote 2 Fundamental to that result was a systematic refusal of austerity measures and of the neoliberal logic of the sanctions imposed on Portugal by the Troika. Alongside the Communist Party, Left Bloc decided to support the second most voted party, the Socialist Party, to overthrow the neoliberal right Social Democratic Party. It was the decision of both Left Bloc and the Communist Party that allowed political change. The agreement that Left Bloc made with the Socialists implied a refusal to continue austerity policies that attacked working classes.

From 2014 onwards, Left Bloc has had a female coordinator, Catarina Martins. That is just a part of gender equality policies in this party. Equal lists of members of parliament, a very visible EuroMP, Marisa Matias, later the candidate for the presidency who garnered 10% of the votes, alongside very affluent MPs like Mariana Mortágua in male-dominated areas like economy and finances, they were very visible in terms of media attention. Starting with a renovation of leading figures in Left Bloc, all male, women are now the most visible faces in the party. This is not only related to Portugal’s effort to introduce gender equality policies but related to an explicit concern with feminism and gender equality in terms of political representation. This was instrumental in bringing forward as action what most radical left parties use as discourse on principles, but nonetheless continue with mostly male representatives. This issue of representation seems almost to be a matter of representative democracy, but I would argue that this is a most relevant step in order to bring more women and feminist activists to the political scene, thus enhancing political participation not only as male privilege but a way of democratizing democracy (Santos, 1998).

As feminist activist Andrea Peniche (2019), in a magazine of Left Bloc, puts it: gender equality is the minimum condition for democracy, and anti-capitalist feminism is the political commitment that can actually shape and produce social change. This engagement in feminism is based on the idea that Left Bloc is a platform of social movements not only a political party. The party includes feminism as one of its political commitments, and usually feminist concerns are present in Left Bloc’s publications, projects of law and media discourse. Left Bloc offers training in anti-capitalist feminism, anti-racism, ecology, class struggles and social transformation as a whole, not only focusing on single-issue policies such as narrowing it down to class struggle, as other forces on the left usually do. Left Bloc is an interesting case of a party that does not abdicate from using social movement tactics, strategies and activism while keeping and trying to increase its political representation in the state. In this case, it is not a specific uprising but an effort to create spaces where these actions are possible, even if this means finding a place in representative democracy and then creating several forms of uprising. On the other hand, this political space is continuously pollenated by the claims and efforts from social movements, informing and acting upon political and legislative production. In a sense, being in a radical left political party is itself a form of uprising in these times.

The Common

In this chapter, some uprisings have been presented as feminist ways of organizing and rethinking the political (Mouffe, 2005) and the common through collective actions. Along with Lynne Segal (2017), I claim that these actions of promoting a different sharing of the common also impact on a sense of collective joy, in Spinoza’s sense, a way of enhancing the conatus, affecting other bodies and making pressure on them to thrive. These concerns seem to be of vital importance in the bleak scenario of the Capitalocene (Moore, 2015), with the added pressure of the resentment politics of White male supremacy (Brown, 2019). In fact, thinking about other possibilities, rebuilding and re-enacting movements that counteract the nihilist politics of the hard right are fundamental to resist in order to create alliances for caring and interdependency (Care Collective, 2020) and to produce political change that reverts this scenario.

Referring to “Orgullo Critico”, the effects of presenting these open and assembleary forms of thinking and collective work lead to an alternative queer and trans* pride which is capable of encompassing the differences within these groups and their allies. I am interested in showing how these political loci offer a “training of imagination that can change our epistemological performance” (Spivak, 2014, p. 4). Following Spivak’s reasoning, in a time where borders continue to occupy such an important space in political imagination, the belief in a borderless world with unconditional hospitality is utopic and revolutionary, but nonetheless, engagement with it offers horizons of possibility for social change. In a sense, the idea of broad coalitions, with left parties and social movements, of gatherings of people that are questioning the effects of neoliberalism and their damaging practices, is akin to this idea of a borderless world, finding commonalities between different struggles, joining forces to fight for an infrastructure and social networks that support everyone: a sense of and for the common.

This way of creating common ground for political struggle seems to be very promising to impact on the effects of fragmentation of identity politics. The reason why such political projects thrive is precisely because they tend to go beyond the fragments (Rowbotham et al., 2013) of single-issue policies and try to tackle several interconnected issues in their complexity. The issue with anti-capitalist feminism can be a good example by linking the structuring effects of capitalism and commodification with a structural gender inequality in order to exploit women as the basis for workforce reproduction. This sort of critique is only possible when political and social movements are able to discuss and generate what I call hyphenated knowledges (de Oliveira, 2014), meaning bodies of knowledge/praxis coming from different sources and backgrounds, able to come together to create hybrid forms such as queer feminism and anti-capitalist feminism. The constitution of these knowledges as a political practice is only viable in an ecology of knowledge that does not seek single-issue policies focused only on one axis of oppression but rather engages in complex political solutions aimed at the several constituencies, in an increasingly intersectional world. Also in terms of participatory forms of citizenship, these struggles for the common create moments of integration and of possibility of coming together, appearing together as bodies in alliance (Butler, 2015a), claiming the conditions that allow such bodies to thrive and resisting the precaritization that neoliberal rationality imposes as vulnerability.

The example focused on the “#elenão” movement brought to the fore the possibility of deconstructing a political campaign of a far-right candidate with a response from social movements and citizens. Such a response articulated in the digital social networks leads to a reaction against bigotry, sexism, racism and homo-/transphobia. This is another way of constructing a common ground, that of addressing our concerns of being governed by a far-right racist, sexist and homo- and transphobic president. These women, and women were the political subject being nominated for this process, organized the biggest demonstrations led by civil society and social movements in recent years in Brazil against a presidential candidate supported by the media and the religious conservatives. Nonetheless, he got elected, but the idea of “ele não” [not him] is still very much used in the opposition to the conservative far-right policies he is implementing—a resonance of a political struggle finding echo as political opposition. In addition, the memory of Marielle Franco and the homages to her worldwide have been having multiple effects in raising consciousness for this political moment in Brazil. The inclusion of the Brazilian case here is intended to mark how women can be turned into political figures that oppose the angry White male figure and its supremacy and symbolize resistance and the struggle for the common, against the hard-right focus on property and privatization of public goods.

In the case of Left Bloc, the idea of a political force that can make temporary agreements in order to take back power from neoliberal right seems very relevant and able to give to the radical left a space to influence public policies that help overcome the effects of neoliberalism. However, as Catarina Príncipe (2019) writes, this support of centre-left parties is sometimes accompanied by the impossibility of totally erasing austerity policies due to commitments with the European Union. The “geringonça” [contraption], as this unanticipated parliamentary coalition became known, also seemed successful by complying with EU rules while maintaining some of the marks of austerity as a legacy of the previous government agreement with the Troika. Politically, nonetheless, that strategy had at least a mitigating effect for the population that was severely affected by the austerity politics of the right. And that was attained by the “geringonça”. The renewal of the party with these women in positions of visibility also seems important in feminist terms, as it opens and enlarges the scope of possibilities for women in politics. If we are to dispute a common ground against capitalism and privatization, we need to dispute hegemony (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001), and to that end, a politics of protest is very useful but not enough. Therefore, disputing political power, having seats in Parliament and affecting public policies are also important.

This idea of the common, of public spaces and goods, which is inevitably disappearing within neoliberal political economies, seems a powerful antidote to the privatization of the public in times of a hard-right cycle. This reclaiming of the common and of the collective can be an interesting point for thinking about intimate and sexual rights in a way that is not linked with individual rights as liberal feminism often does, but more as social and societal rights based on economic justice, democracy for all and the fight against discrimination, not only to safeguard the target populations but also as a public good. As we can learn for “Orgullo Crítico”, this idea of a collective that is not focused on only one form of oppression but rather as a matrix of several oppressions seems to be a prolific way of keeping and enlarging this common ground.