Feminist Strikes in Barcelona: An Ongoing Dispute of Contentious Discursive Practices

In March 8, 2018, at least 400,000 people took to the streets in more than a hundred cities in Spain, with massive mobilizations in Madrid and Barcelona. The country was one of the epicenters of a transnational campaign calling for feminist/women’s strikes and protests in at least 170 countries. For March 8, 2019, activists have called for a strike in Spain, Germany, Peru, Argentina, Portugal, Chile, Belgium, France among others. Over the last years women's and feminists groups have often striked to denounce multiple oppressions and violence against women, but also to challenge the political and economic status quo. In 2018, for instance, the Catalonian feminist strike committee stated: 'without us there is no production or reproduction'. The targets they aim at are not only patriarchy and machismo, but racism, capitalism, heteronormativity and multiple institutions that reproduce such logics. Their demands include not only guaranteed public services and social protection, but also an alternative economic model of production and use of resources, a different approach to migration and State frontiers, and radically changing the justice and educational systems. The strike in Spain was divided into four fronts: a labor strike, a student strike, a care strike and a consumption strike. Women’s and feminist groups and activists combined their presence in multiple arenas, online and offline, as they engaged in contentious discursive practices to dispute and (re)define what their strike is, why they stop and what for. This paper will, then, analyze how the 2018 and 2019 feminist strikes unfolded in Barcelona, one of the most relevant mobilization sites in Spain. What contentious discursive practices did activists enact as they prepared for the strike? How do activists perceive opportunities and challenges to advance their political views through the strikes? Which contradictions, dilemmas or conflicts emerge from these disputes among different ways to understand feminism and women’s activism? To answer these questions, I will perform textual and network analysis on a sample of more than a million tweets containing hashtags related to the strikes, collected from Twitter’s API over the months preceding both 2018 and 2019 strikes. In addition, I will conduct qualitative analysis of participant observation notes (after following dozens of meetings in Barcelona and other parts of Spain) and semi-structured interviews with activists involved in Barcelona’s strikes and protests.