The promises and pitfalls of feminist local politics

A growing literature suggests that local politics is a ‘strategic entry point’ for developing feminist agendas premised on local institutions’ capacity to politicize and ‘engender’ spaces of democratic governance and to develop feminist policies with an everyday impact on the citizenry (Cruells and Alfama 2019, Roth et al. 2023). Scholars also stress the strength of feminist community organizing to tackle intersectional discrimination and improve women’s and marginalized communities’ life conditions (Swanger 2007). Yet, other scholars challenge the notion that politics ‘close to home’ enables intersectional feminist politics since decentralized structures might hinder feminist politics (Ortbals et al. 2011, Vickers et al. 2013), and exclusionary structures pervade feminist community organizing (Emejulu 2011). The debate over the intersectional feminist potential of local politics becomes particularly relevant in the current climate of anti-gender, anti-feminist politics (Verloo and Paternotte 2018; Lombardo et al. 2021). Is the local a ‘strategic entry point’ for building transformative feminist change in the current anti-gender oppositional climate? Through the analysis of the feminist municipalist movement, I identify and examine three dimensions of the promise of intersectional feminist politics at the local level: redistribution of time uses, reconfiguration of public spaces, and democratization of care. I argue that these dimensions reflect feminist ‘visions of an alternative’ and actions to redress intersectional forms of injustice (Dean and Maiguashca 2018). However, some of the narratives, strategies, and instruments to develop these feminist interventions are not specific to local politics and risk idealizing the quotidian as always progressive and even radical. By engaging with the feminist puzzle of the ‘local’, this paper contributes to the literature on feminist politics, multilevel governance, and the reflection on feminist responses to anti-gender and anti-feminist politics.